A conversation with Lesley Ann Noel, Asst. Professor of Design at North Carolina State University and Culture-Changing Design Trailblazer
“Because there is this law or that law, or people started giving us all the reasons that things don’t have to change or all of the things that are preventing change, [it] prevents people from dreaming about something different. How do we create these just, equitable, and diverse futures moving forward?” -Lesley Ann Noel
Lesley is the NC State University Asst. Professor of Design and Author & Creator of the Designers Critical Alphabet, a tool created to spark reflection and introduce designers & design students to critical theory. She inspires her students & established designers alike to lead with empathy in design and build a greater social impact. With her leading research in equity-centered design thinking through diverse audiences and public health, Leslie represents the significance of a non-specialist approach in design and a larger need for industry-led social responsibility through design.
In this episode of Control the Room, Lesley and I discuss the greater social impact in design, the journey of her career through design thinking, a detailed look into the designer’s Critical Alphabet, the ideas behind critical race theory, and the necessary reminder of an empathetic approach in design. Listen in to hear how Lesley is expanding her design education footprint for future designers of our generation.
Show Highlights
[01:06] Lesley’s Journey in Design
[10:50] Social Impact in Design
[21:27] The 2072 Thinking Shift
[25:16] A Look Into the Designer’s Critical Alphabet
[35:14] Critical Race Theory
[38:42] Leading with Empathy & Lesley’s Final Thoughts
Links | Resources
Lesley’s LinkedIn
Critical Alphabet
Lesley’s Twitter
About the Guest
Lesley Ann Noel is the North Carolina State University Asst. Professor of Design and Author & Creator of the Designer’s Critical Alphabet, a tool created to spark reflection and introduce designers & design students to critical theory. Leslie’s passion in offering design education to under-represented audiences has inspired her to lead the conversation through her class development, projects, and research. Lesley’s current research centers around civic and social innovation, critical design, pedagogy, equity centered design thinking, and design thinking in public health. With a previous background as the Associate Director for Design Thinking for Social Impact and Professor of Practice at Tulane University, Leslie continues her non-specialist approach in design as a blueprint for design students to expand inspiration from non-traditional audiences and create a widespread social impact for the generations of our future.
About Voltage Control
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Full Transcript
Douglas:
Welcome to the Control The Room podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out all in the service of having a truly magical meeting. Today, I’m with Lesley-Ann Noel at NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she is the assistant professor of design. She’s also the author and creator of the Designer’s Critical Alphabet. Welcome to the show, Lesley-Ann.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Thank you, Douglas. How are you?
Douglas:
I am well. I’m excited to chat with you. We had such a lovely exchange in the pre-show chat. I’m really looking forward to having this conversation.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
I am too. I’m excited.
Douglas:
To kick things off, I’d like to hear a little bit about how you got started. How did you become a professor of design?
Lesley-Ann Noel:
We don’t have enough time for me to tell you where I got my start, because some people might say, “Oh, I’m migrated into this profession later on in my career,” or something like that. Well, I’ve actually been in design since middle school. I’m almost … I don’t know. Middle school was a long time ago, actually. Right? So, you could say I’ve been in this for most of my life. I’m from Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean, and in that education system we specialize really early. So, from middle school I said, “Okay, yes, I’m interested in art and design.” And I chose it then, at each age 13, as a subject area that I was interested in, and I just continued. And I’ve morphed through many different areas of design, graphic design, textile design, product design. And then even more unconventional things like designing sets for shows or designing costumes for carnival.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
So, it’s hard for me to say where I got my start. I am trained as an industrial designer. And that start is really, again, kind of … So, that one is really casual where I was looking through a magazine and I saw this glass vase. And I just thought, “Oh my gosh, this is so beautiful.” And the magazine that I was looking at was a prospectus for a university. This is how long ago this was. Where you had to write to a university and ask them for a magazine, and they’d send you this magazine. And you would then try to figure out what you wanted to study from the magazine that they sent you. And so, this glass vase in this magazine, glossy magazine from a university in New York, made me move from graphic design and textile design into industrial design. But I guess I’ve just been here in this space since for so long that’s it’s almost like what other space would I be in? You know? My entire life is about design.
Douglas:
You know, it struck me when you were talking about making that shift and into industrial design, that you were coming from a deep background with experience in other types of design. I wonder how these different perspectives, or approaching design from different disciplines, has impacted the way you think about design as a whole
Lesley-Ann Noel:
So, it has had a big impact, because since I’ve moved through so many different areas of design, I can really see where the process is the same across the different disciplines. So, actually today I work in a kind of non specialist area of design, and I have been in this kind of non specialist area of design for a while. Where people ask me, “Okay, what kind of designer are you?” And I no longer use an adjective, because I’m really just seeing it as a kind of process that we are applying to anything. And so, I guess with some hubris or overconfidence, I feel like I can design anything, which is probably not something I should say on a podcast. But because in industrial design, you change the materials that you’re working with on each project. So, it’s actually a different way that we have to think about things in industrial design. Because you learn about new materials and processes for the project that you’re working on.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
And then you discard that information, and you learn about something new that the next time around. So, it just means that I think about design possibly in an abstract way as this process that we’re then applying to many different things. So, I think about the process that we use, as well as the creative approaches that we start to use a little bit intuitively as designers. Through practice, we then become very comfortable with … I mean, to use some of the cliche stuff with getting with fast failure. And we get comfortable with knowing that we have to repeat an idea 50 times before we come up with something innovative. So, I think there are ways that designers think across all of the design disciplines, and that’s where I am today.
Douglas:
So, I found it really interesting because you referred to it as non specialist design, which I think is pretty descriptive of this territory. There’s certainly designers, and also entrepreneurs. That are like, “I need to hire a designer.” Clearly, they’re thinking graphic designer or product designer, or their specialties. And you learn that craft and you can do that thing, but there’s definitely this bigger umbrella of how you approach challenges and problems and how you solve things. And I love this idea of non specialist design. I haven’t had a great way of referring to it in the past, but the thing I would challenge … Don’t you have to deeply specialize or do a lot of specialization to get to that point where you’re like a non specialist?
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Probably. And maybe, I mean, I am saying I’m a non specialist, but maybe actually I’m a specialist in a field that’s unnamed, right?
Douglas:
Yeah, yeah.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Because I used to be attracted to the area of design that’s called design management. Because as designers, if you’re working with a lot of different people, there’s sometimes a lot of different moving parts to get a product made. And so, I used to find myself starting to gravitate. I’ve been in academia for a little while. So, I was starting to gravitate towards kind of design management conferences. Because I thought, “Well, okay, maybe that’s where I am. Because I do understand design as strategy and design as more of like a management kind of space.” And so currently, I guess today you could say I’m in design thinking, and it is a space that I inhabit fairly comfortably.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
And knowing that it’s also a space that a lot of people love and a lot of people hate, right? But what I like about this space of design thinking is that I can then focus on the area that I’m interested in, which is thinking. In my PhD work, I spent a lot of time writing about how we think as designers. Even before doing my PhD, I was kind of dabbling. When I was still teaching in Trinidad at The University of the West Indies, I was already looking at maybe creative cognition, which is about thinking. So, design thinking became a place where I could be, even though the way that I talk about design thinking is sometimes different to the way that people talk about design thinking in maybe more corporate spaces.
Douglas:
Mm. And how would you articulate that difference?
Lesley-Ann Noel:
So, there are like different bodies of literature around design thinking. And I’ve identified maybe about three, and actually I haven’t identified it. There’s a paper by somebody called Lucy Kimbell that talks about three bodies of literature around design thinking. And as someone coming from a design background, I then start in one area where I’m looking at the way we think as designers, the way we approach problems, the way we work together. The kinds of methods that we use as designers, and ways of thinking, and ways of being, right?
Lesley-Ann Noel:
And then the second body of literature is around wicked problems. And maybe this is a space … It’s like maybe using design to address complexity. And maybe it’s a space where more non-designers start to come in, because we might be looking at social problems in this body of literature. And then the third body of literature, which is where I think most of the people talking about design thinking are, is like design thinking as this organizational resource or organizational tool to transform maybe business processes, maybe the design of services. But it’s really then focused on kind of corporate innovation. And so, the difference is that whereas many people in design thinking might be really just looking at that third area. Because they are focused on that type of innovation. I’m coming from art and design. So, I’m using that original body of literature, and then I’m also working in social impact. And so, I’m also using the wicked problems literature. So, I’m conveniently using the term in a few different ways to support the work that I do.
Douglas:
I was about to bring up the social impact work that you were doing at Tulane. And really curious to hear how that’s continued and into the work you’re doing today. And I’m just really fascinated about using these tools to not only think about business value, but just think about social value as well.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yeah. So, being at Tulane was a really good experience, because I had accountability in my title. You know? I was associate director of design thinking for social impact. And our center name, Phyllis M Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking also had some accountability in the name. And so, it was a good space to be because it means then as I created programs, as a program director, as I created programs I had to think about, “Okay, where is the impact? Where is the social part of it? What social justice … Am I doing what I’m supposed to be doing as I made these programs?”
Lesley-Ann Noel:
And so I don’t want to say I created a course. I inherited a course called Design Thinking for Collective Impact, but how I created that course is, how I designed it, is we focus then on the sustainable development goals of the United Nations. And every semester, we selected one SDG, well generally, I selected one SDG, but actually, in the middle of the pandemic, in that summer of 2020, something interesting happened where two people from New Orleans reached out to me and said, “Okay, we know now what your class is about. And we are going to tell you what SDG you should focus on.” And I thought, okay, this is actually where we want to be, right? Because we’re talking about social impact. We’re talking about community engaged work. If the community is telling us what the class should be about, then yeah, this is a pretty good space.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
So what happened then is that the SDG that they were interested in was good health and wellbeing because they said, “Okay, with the pandemic, this is what we have to focus on.” And so that shifted then my class where my class really started to focus on good health and wellbeing. So for one semester, we interviewed people in New Orleans to understand good health and wellbeing, and then went through a typical design cycle, but only focused on what we were hearing people talking about that they needed related to good health and wellbeing. And then the semester after that, we focused on Feeding Louisiana, which is a food bank, the food bank program in Louisiana. They reached out to us and we were able to continue that work around good health and wellbeing, but now with a more specific or a more focused frame where we were thinking about people’s access to good food through Feeding Louisiana.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
And so the entire class became about, let’s say, designing better access based on what people were telling us that they needed, right? I’ll tell you a little bit more about some of the other programs from that time at Tulane, that I was really happy with. We used to do a program called Design Thinking Gumbo-
Douglas:
Mm-hmm.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
… which, it’s gumbo, so we able to bring in New Orleans local culture. And actually, maybe even before I describe it, as you say, the general philosophy around the programs that I was creating was about how to make this stuff accessible, okay? How to make this information about design or design thinking seem like people, to continue the food metaphor, seem like this was yummy stuff, right?
Douglas:
Mm-hmm.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
How to make it palatable to people. And so Design Thinking Gumbo became about getting people to broaden what they thought of as design thinking. And so we just introduced people and we were aiming to introduce people in New Orleans in general, but this happened during the pandemic, so we did it remotely, online. But we wanted to introduce people to different ways of doing design research and then show them well, okay, hey, you could use this kind of research tool in the public health researches that you’re doing, even though it’s a design tool, you can use it, right? And then actually, out of that, I started to collaborate with a professor at Tulane, [Alessandra Bassano 00:15:55], where we started to actually take design research tools and work with people in New Orleans to see, could we get public health researchers to understand how to do design research or to use the way that we think visually and creatively and design to collect data in their research that they were doing?
Lesley-Ann Noel:
And so all of this is, I was always interested in social justice. I’ve always been interested in social justice my entire life, right? And being in New Orleans and being at Tulane and changed my work because I was very responsive to people in New Orleans, even though I really didn’t spend a long time in New Orleans. And then because Tulane was so focused on public health, then I started to do a lot of work in public health. And so how that has impacted the work at NC State is that I’m now working on a course called, it doesn’t have a real name yet, but it’s designing equitable futures where I’m drawing on this other interest that I have, right? Which is the future. And so it’s designing equitable futures through a lens of gender accessibility and race.
Douglas:
I love this.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
So I’m able to take these three things that I’m very interested in, push people far out into the future, and say, “Well, okay, how do we design? How do we learn to see where there are problems in society?” So continuing the social impact work that I would have started at Tulane, how can we see where there are problems in society? And then maybe get a little creative with the solutions because sometimes we are not creative. Yeah. That’s the thing.
Douglas:
Yeah. So is it safe to say that this is specular to design focused on social justice?
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yes. That’s a good way of saying it. And I should acknowledge that I’m joining a tribe of other people who have been also doing this work before me. So, I’ll drop a few names. None of them know that I’m going to drop-
Douglas:
Yeah.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
… their name. So John Jennings, he’s a professor in California. There’s an illustrated version of Parable of the Sower, and he was involved in that project. But his class is about critical race theory-
Douglas:
Hmm.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
… and, oh my goodness, he might send me an email and say, “No, that’s not what the class is about.” But it’s critical race theory and futurism and design. And so I’ve been inspired by his class. [Roger Shaw 00:18:50], who’s at Drexel University, has a class about climate and utopia and designing these new futures. There’s another California professor, he’s from the North Bay area now, [Abbie Lonnie Brooks 00:19:07]. And he has a game called Afro Rhythms of the Future where he’s using Afrofuturism to have people co-design new futures. So you now that I have the space to create this new class, I’m like, okay, I want to build off what everybody has been doing and join this movement of people who are saying, “You know what? Let’s create these new futures that are much more diverse.” Because sometimes when people are talking about this, the future and speculative futures and stuff like that, they’re really not representing diverse issues.
Douglas:
Hmm.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
There’s one futurist whose name I won’t drop because I’m going to be a little critical of his work, right? So he’s really, really famous. And I went to his presentation once, and I was excited to go because I respect his work so much. And then during the workshop, I just thought, why is this future so white? Right?
Douglas:
Mm-hmm.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
And I mean, maybe it wasn’t, but I wasn’t comfortable with the content of his workshop. And I was really disappointed because, as I said, this is somebody who I had a lot of respect for. And the person who was sitting next to me was Mexican-American. And we spoke about that in the break. This content is actually not bad, but it’s one story, and it’s a story that excludes us. So yeah, I’m excited to look at that. How do we create these just, equitable, and diverse futures moving forward? And I do some of this type of work in planning workshops. I’ve been doing a Tulane, and at Stanford, I facilitated planning workshops for teams, for my team, where I would ask people to imagine a date in the future, and then we brainstorm around that through a lens of equity.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
And in one of those workshops, when I was planning the workshop with the person who was my supervisor, I think I had set a date of 2072. And the person asked me, “Well, why are you picking that year? It’s so far away.” Right? And she wanted me to choose a year that was 15 years away. I think she wanted 20, I don’t even know if she wanted 15 years. She wanted 2030 something. And I told her, “That’s too close.” And she’s like, “Why? Because none of us will be here in 2070. How are we going to get to the change that we want?” Or something like that. And I had to explain to her, look, if we choose a year, that’s too close, people are going to start to say, “Well, none of this stuff is possible.”
Douglas:
Mm-hmm.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Because there is this law or that law, or people started giving us all the reasons that things don’t have to change or all of the things that are preventing change, prevent people from dreaming about something different. And I found I have much more success in getting people to be visionary when we push them really far out into the future. And once, someone said to me, “Well, isn’t that just escapism?” Or the person was telling me that I need to get people into a more realistic space in the future. But I’ve found, with the social justice work, I found that I’ve gotten people to be much more visionary and much more creative when we push it further out because we just think, okay, by the time we’re in 2072, some things really should be unacceptable, and these things really should not exist anymore. And so then we could start to figure out, okay, how are we going to make sure that these problems don’t exist in this 2072?
Douglas:
As I was listening to that, it really struck me as, what you’re doing by pushing it out really far is just emancipating everyone from the shackles, right? And some of these are just biases that we’re not even taking into account. And even if we know about them, it’s hard to just shut them off with a switch. So you’re tricking us into shutting them off. But then you can couple that with, okay, now that we decided this, how do we make it happen in-
Douglas:
Okay, now that we decided this, how do we make it happen in 2037?
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Exactly.
Douglas:
That would be a fun shift, right? Because now we’re coming back into the realm of, wow, we got to figure this out. This is what we said we were going to do, how are we going to do it?
Lesley-Ann Noel:
You just crawled into my mind. Because actually, that’s what I did for another workshop where I pushed them out. And I like to create scenarios as well, when I’m doing this kind of work.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
So, I push them out. I didn’t go as far as 2072. I think I went to like, 2056 or something like that. I mean, sometimes easy is a significant, because it might be like somebody’s birthday or somebody’s hundredth birthday or something like that, right?
Douglas:
Mm-hmm.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
So I said that they were getting the Nobel Prize in 2056 or what. And then I said, “Actually, our work shifted tremendously,” and I gave them two years. And it was the years that the administrator really wanted me to focus on.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
So I said, “What did we do in 2030?” Actually, I might have even said, “What did we do in 2025, and what did we do in 2030 that really got us to that place?” So yeah, you crawled into my mind, and you saw what I did.
Douglas:
So, yeah, I love that. And I’m a huge fan of the Designer’s Critical Alphabet. And ever since I’ve gotten it, I love pulling it out from time to time when I’m working on anything. And I think that’s the beauty of what you’re referring to as non-specialist design, because it could be a presentation. It could be a template we’re building for a client. And I don’t know, it’s just fun to pull out, flip through the cards and go, “What’s going to help me think about things differently or consider something, some negative element of the world that’s kind of got me in it’s grips?”
Douglas:
And I think the emancipatory research is one that’s really, really fascinating to think about. But the one that I come to quite often, because it just resonates with me a ton, is values.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Oh.
Douglas:
And it aligns a little bit, too, with some of the conversation we had earlier and the pre-show chat around helping designers think beyond the problem. We often talk the problem statement, or what’s the pain point, or the problem people have.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Mm-hmm.
Douglas:
But I think understanding people’s values can be quite liberating, as far as if you’re creating stuff for them.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yeah. All right, you brought me to a card that I don’t look at very often. So let me see. But you know, the thing is, I guess, I’ve internalized a lot of the alphabet. And I actually do ask people about values very often when I do co-creation workshops. I say, “What is it we’re trying to create? And what are the values that we need to get to the thing?” Or, “What are the values that we need to foster co-creation?”
Lesley-Ann Noel:
So I think that values, I’m looking at my card right now. So do you and the people you are designing for have the same value system? And how does this affect your approach? That’s … I think I’ve been working with that question for a little bit in different ways. Because I’ve been starting to see the many different value systems that we have in play around us. You know, like I listened to a conversation this morning where this woman was talking actively about anti-racism work. And then she said … What did she say?
Lesley-Ann Noel:
She said, “Oh, I have an MBA from an elite university, and so I’m invested in capitalism. And then, when you tell me capitalism is racist, then this really challenges my value system.” Or you know, I mean, this is like, I’ve been thinking about that. People who have … Sometimes we have, within the same project, we have so many different value systems. Whether you are yes, that flag waving capitalist, whether you are the person who’s saying defund police, whether you are even not from the space. Like, if you’re not American, if you’re coming from a completely different world view. How do you balance all of these values in the same place?
Lesley-Ann Noel:
And so, a lot of people say that one of my favorite words is pluriversality.
Douglas:
Mm-hmm.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Because I think that we do have to acquire the skills of being able to allow people to bring their different value systems in. And then, for us to listen to these different points of view and different value systems. And then, facilitate conversations among people who thing differently. I think that that’s a real skill that some of us have to cultivate as designers, to do this work well.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
So you talked about values. But the card that I like, actually, is about self awareness, which is kind of tied to the values card. But I think that one is a really important one where again, we can’t see or hear the different values without the self awareness. To know that … Well, to be open enough to listen. And then maybe even ask some questions about ourselves and our values.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yeah, yeah, that’s a card that I like.
Douglas:
I love the quote at the bottom, “To become more self aware, you have to be self aware enough to know how self aware you are not.”
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yeah, somebody sent me something on Twitter and said, “Why is there a riddle at the end of that card?”
Douglas:
It’s great. You know, I want to come back to that kind of connection between self awareness and values. And I think there’s this interesting thing about values where, because they’re so personal and have so much emotion entrenched in them, a lot of times they’re deeply rooted.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Mm-hmm.
Douglas:
These values came up from our upbringing, or from sometimes, trauma. Or these very intense experiences we might have had. And sometimes, one value can overshadow other values that you have. And there can be opportunities to connect with people through values that you share.
Douglas:
But because of this one value kind of overshadows everything else, and we see that in politics, right? There’s the single voter issues.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Mm-hmm.
Douglas:
But that same phenomenon exists outside of politics as well. And I think if we’re being really great designers of experiences, we have to recognize that. So, I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on that.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yeah, understanding our own value systems, and understanding that our values are not the only values, this is part of our work. If you want to do this work well as designers, and you want to meet people’s needs, we have to know, okay, what are we bringing into this project? I’m going to shift you to another card again.
Douglas:
Yeah.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
So, this is a tight bias where we have to think about, okay, what are our biases when we come into this project? So I might be designing in New Orleans. I’m an outsider from New Orleans, so I’m bringing my outsider values. I might be bringing my own biases into the work that I’m doing. But I need the self awareness … bring you back to that one … to know that I’m bringing in my values. To understand what are the things that I believe? And then to see that, okay, everybody doesn’t have to believe these things that I believe. To understand that when I make a statement on something, when I make a design choice, bring in another card. And really, this is a challenge to see how many questions, how many sentences can I tie together with cards, right?
Lesley-Ann Noel:
But when I make a design choice, my positionality affects this. You know, my positionality affects my values. It creates the biases. So it’s like, we need to bring all of this into the work that we do as designers, not necessarily creating a hierarchy, saying that my values are better than someone else’s, or my world view is more important than someone else’s.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
But we have to understand that there are just many different ways of knowing and being. And we have to create spaces for these conversations to happen. And then, it’s tough to navigate all that. It’s not an easy process. Maybe I’m not getting to a resolution, but you know, because it is a long process. You know, this kind of work that’s around social impact is a long process work around aligning values, takes a lot of time, a lot of conversation, a lot of discussion to get us to a place that makes sense.
Douglas:
You know, as you brought up positionality, it reminded me when I was reading the cards for the first time that it brought to mind this notion of the observer phenomenon, which I thought … I was really delighted, any time someone can connect physics and design for me, it’s always an awesome moment.
Douglas:
Are you familiar with observer phenomenon?
Lesley-Ann Noel:
No.
Douglas:
Maybe our readers aren’t.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
I know … Well, I’m wondering if this is an ethnography kind of thing, because there’s a … Oh, actually I might be. Tell me what it is, and I’ll tell you if it’s what I think it is.
Douglas:
Yeah, so it’s a phenomenon in physics where if you, literally, the act of observing changes the behavior.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Mm-hmm, yes.
Douglas:
So, the fact that you set up an experiment to look at it means that it’s not the same as when you weren’t observing it.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yes.
Douglas:
And I was thinking, that’s really fascinating, this notion of positionality, because you observing it, you’re putting your position onto whatever you’re observing.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Mm-hmm, yes.
Douglas:
And so, I thought that was pretty fascinating.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yes, so I actually know that phenomenon from anthropology, where just you being … And it’s the same thing, you being inside of the group that’s being observed. You’ll change the behavior of the group. So yes, yeah.
Douglas:
That reminds me of the assimilation card.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yes.
Douglas:
These things are all kind of intertwined a bit, right? Because it’s like, interconnectedness.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yeah, and actually even as we think about it … So, my positionality would affect the way the cards were made, right?
Douglas:
Uh-huh, yes.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Because I chose, so that’s how some things end up being related, because yeah, I’m putting my lens on some stuff.
Douglas:
Yeah. And coming back, you mentioned that one class may or may not be about critical race theory, but let’s assume it is. And I love this prompt, and I think it’s such a powerful prompt on the Critical Race Theory Card, that talks about how would the design change if it was developed by someone of a different race?
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yes, so that’s an idea that I’ve been thinking about for about two years. Before then, I don’t know why I ever thought about it before, but it was about two years ago that I was in a design class, and I found that … I thought that the majority of students were choosing to design for white people. And I had never really noticed. I had never really thought about it before.
In that year, I was just trying to figure out, “Okay, how do we get the students to shift their perspective? How do we get the students to just consider other perspectives?” So I introduced this race card, no pun intended, right? This critical race theory card, where I was asking them, “Would the design change?” As I moved around the room, I remember listening to one student in particular kind of almost banging the table and said, “No, nothing will change.” Actually, I thought about it. I’m like, “Okay. Is that student right that nothing will change?” Sometimes I have to ask myself, “Okay, am I just kind of over-focusing on difference?”
Lesley-Ann Noel:
But I do think that this difference matters, and I think that we use products. Different groups might use products in different ways, and it’s not even that the white designer now has a design for Black people, right? Because the card kind of sends them in that direction, but it’s not quite like that. It’s really that the card is trying to help people see, “Oh, we actually should be doing wider research. We should have more diverse teams so that the people within own team who can respond to this better, we should have people from different groups within our different user groups, actually within our design process so that the user groups can help us work better.”
Lesley-Ann Noel:
So it’s like that race card is about getting people to see difference and not think that it doesn’t exist, because if you are from a dominant group, you sometimes don’t have the sensitivity to understand the challenges of the group that is not well-served. So it could be about race. It could be about gender. It could be about accessibility. It’s like the umbrella issue is the seam, right? How are you going to understand how a product is not well-served if you are not part of the dominant group? Does the product serve people who are not in the dominant group well? That’s really the question that we have to think about as designers.
Douglas:
I can’t help but point out that design is about empathy, and if we’re not willing to empathize with those that might be a little different than us and ones that we don’t think in the same way, there’s a spectrum. The further someone is away from you, the harder it is to even in your mind … Even if you want that empathy, you just aren’t aware of it. I’ve got a great example. I’d love to hear your reaction to this. I was at a conference about three years ago called Culturati. Well, after this airs, it will have happened, but I’m really excited, because we’re going to be attending again this year. It’s really focused on culture, diversity and inclusion, and how companies can show up better for their employees and create better opportunities.
Douglas:
The closing panel a couple years ago included Caroline Wanga, and she’s the head of diversity at Target. She was incredible. There’s a hotel here in Austin called South Congress Hotel, and apparently they have rain showers in this hotel with no extra handheld sprayer. So she came out, and they were talking about designing products for people. She’s like, “I’m in a hotel right now that has a racially insensitive shower.”
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yes. That’s immediately what I thought.
Douglas:
That was pretty amazing to … I was just so, “Hey, she is really awesome and just a firecracker.” So it was hilarious listening to her, but I was like, “Man, this inanimate object is racially insensitive?”
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yes.
Douglas:
It’s kind of a funny way to say it, but ultimately the designer didn’t consider these things, right?
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yeah. That’s a really good example, because, I mean, sometimes I’ve struggled with this example, but that’s a good example. Immediately as you talked about the rain shower, I just thought, “Oh, well, I wouldn’t use it,” right? Yeah, I wouldn’t use it, because, I mean, frankly, my hair takes three hours to dry. I mean, there’s some showers when, yes, I want all of my hair to get wet, but there are others where uh-uh. So yeah. Okay, good. You gave me an example for me to use about how the product would change.
Douglas:
Yeah. I mean, absolutely. The thing is, even if the product doesn’t change, it’s not about forcing change to a product. It’s about making sure we’re exercising empathy deeply.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Yes. Yeah, I’ve struggled with how people talk about empathy in this design thinking world, because I think that some of it is a bit superficial, and it’s actually kind of focused on, yeah, many different ways of trying to make the empathy deeper. So these cards are one thing. The positionality wheel that I’ve created, which is to force people to look at positionality and talk about positionality, that’s another thing. When I was teaching at Tulane, students had to go out. I brought a filmmaker in class to teach students more about storytelling, and the students had to present their initial empathy interviews to the filmmaker. The filmmaker, she was the one who said, “Look, you’re not going deep enough. You’re calling this an empathy interview, but it’s so transactional. It’s so superficial. How are you going to evoke some emotion from me?”, because I think that, yeah, people’s empathy muscle needs to be activated a little bit more. I think that we could do a lot more work in design and design thinking to get that, do it better.
Douglas:
I think that’s an excellent sentiment to end on. So with that, I want to just see if you have any final thoughts or anything you want to leave our listeners with.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
Well, I guess the thing to leave people with is where is their exclusion in your life? How are you excluding people? Then can you design that exclusion out, right? So is it that you’re running meetings and you’ve forgotten to turn on closed captioning, or where are you somehow keeping people out? There could be so many different ways, and it’s a muscle that we have to learn to exercise of recognizing exclusion. I wrote a paper with my good friend Marcello Piver, who’s a UX specialist in Miami, and we’ve been looking at that. How can we get people to recognize exclusion and then design that exclusion out? It’s not going to happen in a short space of time, but it’s a muscle that we can practice and work much harder on. People can reach out to me to continue the conversation. They can reach out on Twitter, on LinkedIn. Just look for me, and I’m responsive.
Douglas:
Excellent. Well, it’s been a pleasure having you today, Leslie, and thank you so much.
Lesley-Ann Noel:
All right. Thank you, Douglas.
Douglas:
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.
