Staying Connected When Designing

What I love about designing is how it makes us connect with our universal humanity. Those that don’t design may not understand what I mean so I’ll say a bit more.

This week I’ve been asked to co-design a program to help build stability among low income families of Colorado. Yesterday I got a call to co-design a high-level meeting about executive function. Next week I’ll co- pilot a program for busy managers of community credit/ health centers in Latin America. Earlier this year I co-designed an assessment of newborn health issues among the poorest of the poor in northern India. 

The range of “learners” is enormous. So different, in many ways from each other – and from me.

What do I—an Italian-American, middle-aged woman from New York city who has travelled the world and enjoyed a surprise pregnancy at the age of 44—have in common with these learners?  So much – and so little.

Here’s the deal: we are all human. And, the more I let myself feel what each group of learners might feel in the situations they are in, the better I design. This may sound obvious (of course we do that!). But, I find that it is not the tendency in our stratified society.

Sometimes I step out of our design process conversations and listen to us. We talk about the learners in descriptive “us and them” terms – as though we need to do complex research to know how a mom of a newborn would feel in Northern India, or how an unemployed man would feel in Colorado. A lot of what they’d feel is purely human. The mom would opt for the quickest, best service for their baby (even if it meant paying more) because that’s what most moms would do. The man would be motivated by small successes, and would resist anything that felt like a waste of his time because that’s what most of us would do.

I hope I don’t sound preachy here when I say: It is our job to stay connected to ourselves when we design. It is our job to ask our clients to pause and put themselves in the place of the learner, connecting with the endless similarities we have as humans.

Question:

How do you stay connected to yourself when you’re designing?

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