Design Social Change: Take Action, Work toward Equity, and Challenge the Status Quo
Lesley-Ann Noel
144 pages, Ten Speed Press, 2023
In Design Social Change: Take Action, Work Toward Equity, and Challenge the Status Quo, I examine design strategies for creating social change that are based on equity, fairness, and understanding your own role in social systems. These strategies demonstrate how to use emotions like anger, joy, and empathy as cues to understand what people need to thrive. The work starts with knowing yourself and builds outward into making changes in your community and the larger world. I hope to motivate you by providing tools and examples so that you can tailor your approach to making social change, considering your history, personality, ethics, and particular goals.
To create real social change of any kind, we must always be designing for the future. A simple yet critical question we must ask when thinking about social change is how we change existing situations into preferred and more equitable ones where everyone can and will thrive. I adapted a method to make discussions about social change more effective, called Critical Utopian Action Research (CUAR), which begins with participants being critical of a current situation. This process is useful, not only because it gives oppressed people a voice, but also because it provides a foundation for thinking about how to design a better future that is grounded in real personal experiences and feedback.
I hope that processes like these will inspire designers and non-designers alike to help make the world a better place, using the tools of design.—Lesley-Ann Noel
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Design is an act of world creation. And the world-building quality of design is one reason why design can lead change. The Nobel laureate and computer scientist Herbert Simon defined design as changing existing situations to preferred ones. If we are designing for the future, shouldn’t we also seek to change it simultaneously? Your interest in making futures is exactly why you need to see what is wrong with the present as you build. You can focus every design question on equity and social justice by asking: How might we change existing situations into preferred and more equitable ones where everyone will enjoy full and healthy lives in the future?
For several years, I adapted a method called Critical Utopian Action Research (CUAR) to spark critical conversations about social change. This method begins with participants being critical of a current situation. To start, we talk about everything that is wrong with the issue and freely critique the problem. Next, we dream of where we want to go and the future we want to see. Finally, the design question turns to how we will get to the future that we want. These are the questions that designers ask all the time. This is a codesign process about building new futures where participants can dream together of the desired state and create action to get there.
This process is useful because it gives oppressed people space to dream where they might otherwise not have been able to—because they weren’t focused at the time, because they have to hustle, or because they have to battle with other people’s preconceived notions of them. This process allows people to bring their own expertise and lived experience to discussions on change and their own cultural experiences to the actual design activities. It gives people the space to be critical of their circumstances and to start thinking about a better way. This opens everyone up to move to action through design.
I’ve used this simple method in many workshops and with different audiences. From the children in rural Trinidad who critiqued their school and their village to students in Puerto Rico (with Dr. Maria de Mater O’Neill) imagining a post–Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico, from teenage boys in Oakland imagining how they could change their worlds with superpowers and technology to residents of New Orleans trying to imagine a different public health experience, given what they had experienced in the pandemic.
Changing the world must start with recognizing that something is not right, then allowing space to dream of what the “right” thing could be, and finally making a plan for achieving it. All oppressed people are dreaming, plotting, scheming, designing, and imagining the change they want. This process embraces that.
Since I started my work with CUAR, I’ve become very interested in utopia, Afrofuturism, and other themes related to speculation and futures and have started combining these with my equity-focused work. For me, combining equity and a focus on the future creates a more visionary and liberatory way of framing equity, because it creates space for discussion and dreaming about radical change. Sometimes equity work can focus too much on the people who are doing the oppressing and supporting them on their journey toward change, or it can focus too much on the victimhood of people who face oppression. Bringing in the future lens creates more agency, as people can collaborate to build the futures they want.
A focus on utopia opens up the frame for people to dream and imagine without the constraints of the current times. People from underrepresented minorities and oppressed groups—such as Black and indigenous people, women, and LGBTQ+ communities—need imaginative frames to envision futures where they are not oppressed and constrained in the ways they are in the present. Part of the act of liberation is recognizing that one’s oppression is not a perpetual state and transformation is possible.
People can sometimes be unimaginative about closing equity gaps when we design for the present or the near future. As we imagine our futures, I like to push people into the far future. I’ve set design briefs in 2054, 2072, even the year 2100. Forcing people into the far-distant future helps them imagine futures without barriers. People can easily think change is too radical, but considering much further out makes the radical seem less extreme.
Others have done this before me. I want to believe that antislavery abolitionists, for example, were futurists who knew that slavery was wrong, knew where they wanted to go, and figured out how to get there. The abolitionist painter William Blake exemplified this critical utopian futurism. In the 1790s, Blake created a radical vision for a post-slavery world through his art. Antislavery abolitionists must have imagined a radical future that led to change. We did it before, and we can do it again.
When dreaming about the future, it’s also valuable to dream with others. We don’t make change by ourselves.
The Pluriverse: One World, Many Worlds
In creating and imagining new worlds, we must not forget that, as decolonial theorists Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser say, we live in a world of many worlds. Even though the dominant worldview is male, Euro-American, and cis-gendered straight, a helpful exercise is to imagine many different points of view in the future. Straight white men need not dominate the future. How would the future change if we focused on dominance by different groups? What are the many worlds and futures that we can create in the future?
The concept of a pluriverse was created by the Zapatistas, a group of mainly indigenous activists from southern Mexico. It refers to a world in which many worlds fit.
I first heard Arturo Escobar use the term pluriverse in 2018. He was articulating what I had been thinking. He showed the radical difference in the kinds of questions that interested the designers of the Global North and the Global South. Though we were part of the same profession, we occupied different worlds. The word pluriverse resonated with me and the work that I was doing.
Universe means “the whole world, cosmos, the totality of existing things”; it’s from Latin universum, meaning “all things, everybody, all people, the whole world.” The pluriverse conjures up an image of many worlds turning at the same time. Some of these worlds will connect and some won’t, but they all exist simultaneously.
My interest in the pluriverse has been about recognizing that there are many worlds and different ways of being, knowing, and doing. My interest in pluriversal design is about sharing stories and practices from the many worlds or universes of design and learning together with people from other worlds. My interest was always more about what I could learn from Indian design practice, Colombian design practice, Kenyan design practice, and so on, and what I could bring back to my teaching in Trinidad and later on to my teaching and practice in North America. How could I use experiences from the pluriverse to create change?
What is going on in other worlds regarding the change you want to see? What are other questions, approaches, strategies, practices? Different questions will be central in different worlds. You need the skill of listening to these different points of view and understanding how these new questions can make life better across all the worlds. How can you recognize and celebrate the change-making practices of people around the world? What does that change mean in different parts of the pluriverse? What do the many worlds or universes of change look like?
Freire said that “we did not come into this world to keep it as it is. Our challenge is to remake the world. We have to change it.” So, my challenge for you is to make the change that is needed in the worlds in which you live.
Prototyping and Reflecting on New Futures
What do you want to change? What idea can you prototype and share to push your movement forward? In stirring up change, there should be some urgency— share your ideas and prototypes early and often for feedback. You can use this approach for physical objects, for essays, for policies, programs, relationships, classes, food— in short, for anything. Will you write an article to share your solution? A letter to the editor? Will you approach your mayor or your school to ask them to try out your solution? Whatever you create does not have to be perfect when sharing it. Don’t wait until the idea is perfect. Yours might be the spark to get things going.
Wearing one of my many hats, I have worked with organizations that support cities and agencies like police departments and public utility companies. In this work we focus on social innovation and have explored many themes, including public safety, violence, litter, public utilities like water, and the relationship between the residents and the police. Our prototypes have looked different for each project.
In the work between the police and residents, residents wanted to see the police as less threatening and adopting more caretaking and relationship-building roles in society, such as being more involved in afterschool programs and youth development. The prototypes included rough hand-built models and role-play that demonstrated what improved relationships could look like. They even prototyped fun ideas like police-led community fitness classes for the elderly, a movie night, and an ice cream truck. Sometimes the ideas in the prototypes may border on the absurd or the ridiculous, but they help people express themselves and move toward ideas that are more concrete. The models helped people start to think about how to operationalize ideas, while the role play depicted the emotions that people wanted in the new experiences.
Your prototype about social change can do and be many things. It can help you galvanize support for your cause. It can provide proof of concept and be a mini-test for others. It can help you work out the logistics of your idea.
Both design and creating change are based in action—through connecting with people, trying things out, and iterative prototyping. And while all this doing is important, it is only by reflecting that you can see the value of your actions. You must also pause and learn from what you have done. Stopping to reflect will help to make you aware of what you might have missed and think of who else should have been involved in the conversation.
Sociologist Jack Mezirow, inspired by Paulo Freire, believed that critical reflection was an essential component of transformation, specifically Transformative Learning for adults, a learning theory where meaning is created through reflection and dialogue, which leads to radical shifts in perspective. According to Mezirow, we can change our perspective and transform our worldview, we can change some of our assumptions and beliefs, and we can gain a new understanding of the world—all through critical reflection. Combining critical reflection with the action and agency of design can improve your outcomes.
Reflecting on change (or on prototypes for ideas that we want to implement to cause change) can also help us see how we can create more significant impact. When reflecting, you can have two points of view reflecting on both what went wrong and what went well—and use both to grow.
By intentionally taking the time to stop and think about the people you collaborate with, even your adversaries, you’ll be able to understand the viewpoint of others and even to change your own perspective. In this way, critical reflection on ourselves, our relationships, and our interactions with others humanizes us and is part of our collective liberation.