How to redesign a world shaped by prejudice

Designer and educator Omari Souza conceived of his new book Design Against Racism: Creating Work That Transforms Communities, well before the The President administration began its campaign to demonize diversity, equity, and inclusion. But the ideas the book wrestles with aren’t a reaction to a single moment in time; they’re deeper, and go to the heart of design’s pitfalls—and potential. 

Souza, a first-generation American of Jamaican heritage, born and raised in the Bronx, now teaches at the University of North Texas in Denton. In September 2020, his online event “The State of Black Design” drew more than 2,000 live viewers. Souza’s book challenges design students and professionals alike to rethink consequences, collaboration, and context, and offers fresh insights and arguments about what design is really for. We spoke in September. 

The book is propelled by the idea of “restorative design,” which I think we can say descends, or is evolved, from the idea of restorative justice. Can you, for those unfamiliar, say a little bit about what restorative justice is?

Restorative justice is a social science practice that focuses less on punitive punishment and more on communal healing. So it is asking questions about who’s been harmed, what their needs are, whose responsibility it is to meet those needs, and how can relationships and trust be built and repaired in order to move forward. It also believes that punitive measures actually perpetuate harm rather than resolve the issue at hand.

Restorative design is really this idea of: How do we survey whether or not the products, services, or artifacts we create cause harm to folks? And if they do, how, as designers, do we attempt to repair the harm that’s been done and reestablish trust with the audiences that have been harmed?

With that in mind, how did the book come to be? Why did you feel the need to do this?

I have not been in academia as long as some of my contemporaries, but one of the things that I have noticed with the field of design is that it treats the practice as a trade. There’s a handful of skills they want you to learn, not a lot of conceptual thought, or of teaching students how to quantify or even think about some of the harm that the designs that they make may have. So I’ve been thinking for years about, “How do I introduce to students frameworks to consider people that happen to fall on the fringes, who may be harmed by particular practices?”

And I came across a book by Zora Neale Hurston, whose primary focus was African and African-diasporic folklore. So she would travel from Harlem, New York, before the end of the Jim Crow South, before women had the right to vote or own a bank account without their husband’s permission. She would drive through the South as a Black woman on her own, to capture and tell these stories. And her efforts were rehumanizing these audiences and capturing details about them that were otherwise omitted. Her entire process was around humanizing and giving the same respect and gravitas that she would give to anyone. 

The book arrives in a moment that has become hostile toward formal efforts to increase and implement diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and we’ve seen a lot of companies backing away from those programs and that kind of branding. I wonder if you see the current cultural-political climate making the book’s message more challenging? More urgent? Both?

I think both, for a number of reasons. When I started writing this book, it was a few years shy of the George Floyd incident. So there were a number of companies and organizations and political officials that were making pledges to assist in rectifying harm that was already being caused. I assumed the book might not be as important to people by the time it came out, just because there seemed to be so much momentum around acknowledging these issues. But I still felt that it was important to have a book like this that can be a part of the design dialogue.

With the current administration, it has felt like there’s a ton of rollbacks to progress that was being made, and it has felt that a lot of work like this is being targeted. I’m a professor currently in the state of Texas, and with Senate Bill 17, there are certain words that we can’t even say in a classroom. As a UX designer and a research professor, it’s really hard to teach people how to design experiences for folks without talking about the different needs of different audience groups. I think it makes it extremely important for professors to find a way to still teach those skill sets.

Listening, particularly to overlooked or unheard voices, seems like a big theme of restorative design, and the book. If you’re designing a school, you write at one point, talk to the janitors, not just the principal.

A lot of creative practices have traditionally been top-down. So you have this figure who happens to be charismatic and extremely talented, who will create this philosophical approach that other people buy into. And then once they buy into it, they begin to distribute it. So it’s kind of built from the top of the hill and then rolls its way down as the accepted approach.

But if you spoke to the janitor and designed the school for the janitor, the students, as well as the principals, you might find some innovations in the school experience that you otherwise may not have had if you only spoke to the principal.

At one point in the book, you write, “everyone designs; it’s an innate human ability.” It struck me because I feel like the profession spent the last 20 or 30 years arguing that designers are a unique problem-solving species. But in the book, you write a lot about “co-designing” and why it’s so important to the restorative design practice.

I think designers sometimes elevate themselves above the people that they’re designing for, versus designing alongside them. And that’s kind of what I mean by co-design. It’s very hard to design something effectively for an audience that you have no connection to.

An exercise that I do for my students is to have them map their experience attempting to go to the bathroom at a concert or a sporting event. I just ask them to list the steps. And for the men, the steps are always three to four. For the women, the steps range from eight to 30.

I’ll ask the women to explain to the men the complexity of the factors shaping those steps. It ranges from the length of the line, the size of the stall, whether there’s a place to hang their purse, the complexity of the outfit, whether they’re with a child, on their cycle, yada, yada, yada. I ask the men to raise their hand if they felt that they would’ve been able to equitably design a bathroom experience for the women without their input. All of them put their hands down.

I ask the women: Do you feel that you can design an equitable experience for yourselves and the men in the room? They keep their hands up. But then I’ll add a caveat. What if the woman you’re designing for is trans, or what if she’s disabled? What if she’s from another section of the world where the bathroom toilet flushes with a different mechanism or the symbols are different? The hands begin to drop. 

So it’s my way of saying that yes, you’ve been trained as a designer, and yes, you might be intelligent. But without immersions into particular cultures, you don’t know the bottlenecks that they have.

There’s a lot in the book about understanding histories, but as you say in your conclusion, a big part of the idea is to imagine and frame a different future or different futures. Could you talk a little bit about that? Because one of the criticisms often used against DEI seems to be that it’s too backward-looking and negative, dwelling on past wrongs instead of looking ahead.

I find that whenever people say that something is too backward-looking, it’s really their way of saying that looking back is painful.

I think for me and for the book, the idea of restoration or healing is never comfortable. If you get a tattoo, if you break an arm and it’s healing in the cast, it’s wildly uncomfortable. The healing process is always something that is inconvenient. However, the question then becomes what do you want? If harm perpetuates, then it becomes hard to establish trust and it becomes hard to move forward. So when envisioning a brighter future, we have to think about: What actions do we need to take in the meantime?

There are a few examples that I used in the book of companies that wanted to establish partnerships in particular communities, and before beginning, they needed to emphasize the history of corporate relationships with particular communities. If you’re looking for an end to conversations around DEI, or around systemic oppression, then in many regards addressing systemic oppression and then helping to heal the harm that’s caused, that’s how you stop it. It’s how you stop it.

It feels like some want to step over the wound and hope that it heals on its own; like if people don’t pay attention to it, it won’t hurt anymore. But in reality, it’s more akin to a hunger or broken bone than it is to a scratch, and it’s not something that you can just ignore.

View the full article