Fireside Chat: How Design Addresses a World on Fire

Key Insights

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  Designers have significant power to influence who is heard and included in design processes, impacting social equity.

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  The Designers Critical Alphabet helps designers critically engage with social justice issues, especially in less diverse environments.

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  The Good Vibes deck offers positive, Global South-inspired design principles like gratitude and optimism to balance critical work.

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  Disrupting traditional power hierarchies in organizations can encourage more open and equal participation in design.

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  Positionality tools enable clearer awareness of identities present in a space and highlight systemic homogeneity.

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  Framing accessibility and equity in terms of business goals or measurable outcomes can help overcome resistance in conservative workplaces.

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  Academia serves as an experimental space for developing and sharing best practices that can influence industry over time.

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  Marginalized designers often carry extra emotional and cultural labor not recognized by their workplaces.

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  True inclusion means co-creating new narratives and spaces rather than simply inviting marginalized people into existing frameworks.

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  Global South design perspectives and international collaboration are crucial to decolonizing dominant Western design narratives.

Notable Quotes