We Can Build In Different Ways

Designing solutions to social challenges must involve those affected on the personal scale — and design education needs to incorporate the lived experiences of those from marginalized groups. Sheila Sampath’s moments of awareness led her to focusing on accessibility and co-creation in her design practice.

Jacquie Comrie, Light Vortex, 2019. PHOTO: Lera Kotsyuba

“Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.” — Audre Lorde

In April 2000, on a whim, I got on a pay-what-you-can anarchist-filled bus and went to Washington, D.C., to join the IMF/World Bank protests. It was my first time attending a major demonstration — I was a naive teenager who, at the time, only had a surface-level understanding of what I was protesting against. I went because I knew, even though I didn’t fully understand how or why, that something was wrong with the world. I wanted to be part of the movement of people trying to fix it.

On the streets, I chanted along: “Whose streets? Our streets!” “This is what democracy looks like!” and “The people! United! Can never be defeated!”

But the protest slogan that stuck with me the most was “The system isn’t broken, it was built this way.”

These words were transformative; they reminded me that much of what we experience in the world is constructed to serve very specific values and ideologies and very specific people. In a 2014 talk called Changing the Narratives, social justice activist Favianna Rodriguez says that “in the space of ‘ideas’ is where we can radically change systems.” She then asks, “How do we completely re-envision our society?”

What was a revelation to my teenage self maybe feels trite and too obvious 20 years later, but it’s a concept that I keep returning to in my personal and professional life as a designer.

Every time designers are pushed to adapt, troubleshoot, work around or suffer under systems and structures the processes of adaptation — processes of design thinking — are downloaded from the political to the personal. And I sometimes find myself getting so caught up in it that I need a reminder that we can and should co-design a better way.

This feels particularly pertinent right now, when so many of us are collectively struggling to survive a global pandemic, police brutality, climate change, civil unrest, etc. that is so blatantly pitting our economy against our well-being. The system was built to fail, so why can’t we just redesign it?

In a 2015 interview in Upping the Anti, activist Grace Lee Boggs said, “I’ve come to believe that you cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it” (emphasis mine).[1]

My formal education in graphic design centred on very specific core competencies: working with clients, designing “effective” (clear? compelling?) communications, facilitating processes that positioned the designer as a neutral or objective expert. I was taught to value and mimic Western European form and aesthetics. The processes I was taught simultaneously positioned me as an expert in design and erased the influence of my lived experience in my work. For example, in my advertising and copywriting classes, we would talk about connecting our tone to our audiences, but we never honoured or named that most people of colour already do this in our day-to-day, also known as code-switching. When we talked about building out audience-specific visual systems to communicate a message, we didn’t name flagging as a community-generated queer visual language. Workshops on systems design don’t name autonomous care collectives as a form of advanced systems thinking to support the dignity and agency of disabled folks.

I could go on.

This erasure takes the expansive, embodied and far-reaching practice of design, and narrows it to a professional skill that can be certified, regulated, bought and sold. It limits who can see themselves within these processes. In her 2013 book Kindling: Writings on the Body, Aurora Levins Morales points out that “we are led by those who most know these systems.” This deliberate erasure rebrands and makes inaccessible to us the practice of world-building — building visual culture, systems, environments, objects and language, or in other words, the practice of design — that has been core to the survival of so many communities facing oppression as something patented, new or innovative. Not ours.

I started doing co-creation work when I was invited to design for communities with which I don’t identify. Maybe it was part imposter syndrome, part being raised (politically) in the peak of identity politics or part desire to return to political organizing. The question became less “How can I apply my design expertise to social movements?” and more “How can I create safer and more accessible spaces so others can tap into their own design expertise?”

There is no cookie-cutter approach to this work, as every project has looked and functioned differently, but it does involve shifting the role of designer from creator, maker, messenger, builder to facilitator, validator, connector, ally. It involves shifting power, building spaces that are trauma-informed and flexible and coming into a project with a spirit of trust and openness, not always sure where it’s going to lead, and being ok with that. It means developing accessible spaces that focus on access to the design process.

In 2018, I was invited by Mercedes Sharpe Zayas from the Parkdale People’s Economy to collaborate on building a framework for the Parkdale Leadership Training Series. This was a set of workshops specifically for Black and Indigenous women and women of colour in Parkdale, with a special focus on recruiting older women who often experience multiple barriers to access in these kinds of spaces. The idea wasn’t to teach them leadership skills but to provide them with spaces to name and honour the leadership skills that contributed to theirs to date, and to connect those skills to existing structures from which they are often excluded. We offered the workshops as a paid opportunity to practically support the women with gaining job experience and to politically name and acknowledge that by participating in the series they were sharing knowledge and expertise. In the workshops, the women were the experts, while the facilitators were the note-takers, active listeners and connectors.

The series featured speakers and conversations with BIPOC Womxn who organize in grassroots spaces, non-profit organizations and electoral politics (municipal and provincial). Afterwards, we would debrief, talk about what inspired us, where we saw connections to the skills we already have and what it meant to connect our own experiences to something bigger.

Together, we also made life maps, brainstormed, and held open conversations about surviving in Parkdale with dignity and respect. As a co-facilitator in the space, I wasn’t sure where it was going to lead, but I did have trust in the process and in the women we were working with.

The women delivered. Themes of mental health and safer spaces kept coming up, and they decided that they wanted to start a mental health drop-in space in Parkdale. With Mercedes’ support, they co-wrote a successful grant application to receive specific training in harm reduction, conflict resolution, and feminist peer counselling and to program and run the space. While I had hired them to be participants in the initial leadership project, they hired me back to facilitate the feminist peer counselling workshop, and a series of zine co-creation workshops to produce a free harm-reduction resource in the community. They built their own world, and it was radical and beautiful and nuanced and brilliant. With my 20+ years of organizing, design and facilitation experience, I couldn’t have created something so beautiful because it was never mine to create.

I lovingly called this group of women the Parkdale Aunties, because in the process of working together, we became close. I began to think about them in my non-work time, started inviting them to drop by the studio any time they felt like it. They saw me through my pregnancy, giving me loving advice (“Don’t sit like that, it’s not good for the baby!”) along the way.

I keep coming back to this idea of building a better system, one that isn’t broken. I keep coming back to the role of art and design in that world-building, and I keep coming back to the Parkdale Leadership Training Series.

Before we can engage in radical world-building or design better systems, we need to have spaces where we can acknowledge and honour the ways many communities are already doing that. We need to create spaces and process that reclaim our practices as survival and specifically name and value them as art and design.

Access on a basic level can mean that we make sure our stopgap is in place, but in very real ways, access is about working together to create a space built on genuine care and love, where collaborators can go from strangers to family. It is about honouring different knowledges and experiences — and, beyond that, meaningfully incorporating them into the worlds we were designing together. It was about shifting power, moving towards the obsolescence of the “professional designer” and towards an embodied and collaborative practice where we could build our own future together.

It is collectively holding space so we could each bring our full selves to the table.

[1]. “ ‘Revolution as a New Beginning’: an Interview with Grace Lee Boggs,” Upping the Anti 1 (March 31, 2005): 28, http://web.archive.org/web/20070415072944/http://oat.tao.ca/~tom/journal/uta1_sequential.pdf

This article was published in the Fall/Winter 2020 issue of Studio Magazine