Design Social Change: Take Action, Work toward Equity, and Challenge the Status Quo

by Lesley-Ann Noel, Stanford d.school

Discover design strategies for using your own unique social identities and experiences as inspiration to challenge the status quo and create the kind of lasting change that leads to greater equity and social justice, from Stanford University's d.school.

Who are you? What motivates you as a changemaker? What forces are preventing you (and others) from thriving? These questions are essential to the work of creating social change, and they are exactly what Design Social Change asks you to explore.

Designer and design educator Lesley-Ann Noel shares the essential design strategies for making a lasting impact. This work starts with knowing yourself and builds outward into making change in your community and the larger world. Design Social Change gives you tools to tailor your approach to design, taking into account your history, personality, ethics, and goals for a better future.

The strategies for change are based on equity and fairness, understanding your own role in these systems of both justice and inequity. These strategies demonstrate how to use anger, joy, and empathy as inspiration for understanding what people need to thrive. Using the tools of design, these new approaches will help you craft projects that are relevant to you and create more just, equitable futures. The time is always right to work toward a fair and just society.

Genres: Design, Business, Nonfiction

142 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 28, 2023

Reviews

[Donna · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I found some good inspiration in this Stanford d.school guide, I did not enjoy the actual print choices made for this book. I find black type on colored background and white type on medium shade background colors to be difficult to read. I know I’m not the only one. I just don’t understand why a design book would design out readers who cannot easily see these color choices for print on paper. Inaccessible is a design choice. I hope future offerings from the d.school consider the accessibility factor when making print design choices.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was looking forward to this book. I share the belief that we still have a long way to go to get to a world of fairness where everyone gets a chance. There is much work to be done. And I see the failure of many current attempts to deal with the problem. DEI training as it is practiced today is a waste of time. Don’t send me (or anyone else) to another seminar. Efforts in the academic community to address the problem also mostly fail or, even worse, create a backlash that makes the problem worse, so we get debacles like the recent testimony of three Ivy League presidents before Congress that has resulted in two of them resigning. Everyone seems to take the position that everything the other side says only proves their point and doesn’t merit a reasoned response. There’s no solution there.

So I had high hopes for this book. What if we could build in fairness and equal opportunity as key design principles in all of our products, services and processes? Wouldn’t that do more to give us a better society than all of this endless polarizing yammering? And who could point the way to do this better than the Stanford d.school? Sadly, this book did not deliver for me. At a few points along the way it seems to be going in the right direction, but too much of it is rehashing of tired ideas that may have seemed smart at one point but that have failed to deliver and that have proved to be more polarizing than problem solving. The book is filled with jargon that seems designed to function as a political badge of honor and, contrary to the values it claims to embrace, to squelch and diminish anyone daring to have a different perspective.

Ms. Noel wants us to develop a “critical consciousness,” so that we learn to seek out and identify oppression in the world around us. Anybody who doesn’t do this is either “naïve” or is burying their head in the sand so that their consciousness is “magical.” Then she encourages people to be angry about the problems that they find. True, she then says that they should channel the anger to productive ends, but the anger is something to be sought out and nurtured. Then she encourages us to think of blowing up existing systems, to have an “abolitionist” mindset where we aren’t afraid to nuke things that are not working. And while telling us that we have to have empathy, she also says that we cannot know things that we have not personally experienced so that any project that does not reflect the direct input and active involvement of people who may be adversely impacted cannot serve the purpose of social justice.

Ugh. I feel strongly that all of this is wrong and will only make problems worse. When we set our minds on seeking out problems, we will always find them and amplify them whether or not they exist or are truly serious. If we find a problem and then train ourselves to be angry about it, that will just destroy our empathy and make it harder to get the broad consensus that is needed for social progress. And many of us, myself sometimes included resort too easily to the idea that we just need to blow up everything. Get rid of this mess and start from scratch. Plus, it’s so much fun to set a fire, so that we can watch it burn.

There are other ways to approach these problems that are positive and constructive and that don’t involve name calling. I acknowledge that sometimes a sneer lurks under a surface smile. We do have to be alert to problems that are not always immediately obvious. Sometimes anger is inevitable and on rare occasions it can be constructive, but 98% of the time it’s better to acknowledge anger and calm it before trying to move toward a solution. And sometimes you have to get past the sunk cost fallacy and be prepared to start from scratch, but more often than not, the “burn it down” approach causes suffering in the short run and leads to something worse than you started with on the other side after the embers have cooled. Consider, for example, the 1917 Revolution in Russia.

So, I’d go about this whole program in a totally different way. First ask about what the role of DEI is in a given project. It may be huge, but for some projects it is properly treated as secondary. Then look at how the project can be shaped to serve commonly held social justice values that are compatible with its other goals. Look at the interests of different constituencies, paying particular attention to constituencies that may have been oppressed or silenced. Talk to a broad range of people. Build a broadly based team. Then go back to the beginning and reconsider whether you have done these things in the best way. Rinse and repeat as the project progresses through its different stages. Focus always on consensus, fairness and teamwork. To be fair, a lot of these ideas are embedded in what Ms. Noel suggests, but her vocabulary and her emphasis on problem over solution felt counterproductive to me.

[Jill · Rating 1 out of 5]

I picked up Design Social Change because of the Stanford d.school affiliation and found the prospect of a book discussing the application of design methodologies to the work of driving social change intriguing. But the book was problematic for me on multiple levels.

Design Social Change is, I suspect, likely to appeal to the converted, in that the reader must already see inequality and racism as having structural causes that cannot be tackled solely at the individual and community level, but at the systems and policy level as well. And that they want to be an ally in this work. But if you aren't already persuaded of this ("I'm definitely not racist because...."), this slim tome of sweeping statements - End White Supremacy and Racism; End Patriarchy; Queer Everything! End Ableism - will not persuade you. Far better to read Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, Jennifer Eberhardt's Biased, Layla F Saab's Me and White Supremacy (there are many such books) that paint a compelling case on the need for social change.

But even if you were to see this as a how-to guide for a particular issue/concern (Design Social Change! Design Sustainability! Design for Happiness!), there are books out there that do a better job explaining and breaking down design methodologies.

Also, when reading books by some of the d.school faculty such as Tom Kelley and Robert Sutton, I've always appreciated how they could communicate their work and ideas in simple, clear terms. No jargon, no fancy intellectual speak. This trait is, alas, absent in Design Social Change which urges the reader to "declar[e] your positionality", to recognise the pluriverse, among other things.

There were some interesting points and reminders made. Like Noel's suggestion when interviewing people to intentionally focus on their joy; by focussing on joy, proposals "lost much of the patronising usage to fix everything that can sometimes be found in design for social innovation, which involves the use of design to promote new solutions to social issues". Instead, might we look at how solutions can not only address some of the problems people face, but also "ensure and perpetuate [people's] joy?" Focussing on joy can lead to "much livelier and richer ideas than simply solving for the problems", like proposals for food trucks, block parties and community gardens as a means to tackle food insecurity. Or using a Feelings Wheel to explore emotions. And taking an "oppositional lens" (there's a big phrase again) that deliberately rejects the dominant view and looks at the issues from an alternative lens. This can reveal "unintended consequences and harm that might affect people outside the dominant group". For instance, taking an oppositional lens on sustainability can challenge the "dominant reading of sustainability [that] seems to cater to the middle and upper classes". Taking an "emancipatory approach to design [which] insists that people impacted by the issue speak for themselves".

On a side note, one of my personal bugbears is the [over]use of the word "empowered". Staff are empowered to take charge of their career development. Students are empowered to drive their own learning. And so on. Noel advises that when we hear of people being empowered, to ask how the power moved in the cases and where the power shift happened. I'll make sure to ask that next time I hear claims of empowerment.

[Jacquelin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good ideas for group design. One complaint is that the artistry, although beautiful, makes it VERY difficult to read. This makes it feel in accessible for those with any sort of vision impairment. I had to read this under intense light and sometimes magnify.

[Monique Chevalier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easy read! Great examples and tools. Will definitively apply what I learned.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

A simple book by Lesley-Ann Noel that summarises really important concepts and ideas about social change. As a curriculum designer, it was incredibly useful to frame certain ideas and activities about social change as part of the curriculum for students. It's a beautifully designed book that is also easy to read and makes for a perfect 101 introduction to design and social change. It has inspired me to revisit works by Paulo Freire, bell hooks and Arturo Escobar which Noel draws from.