 The services we design and put into the world often focus on one specific type of user and does exclude others. Can we do better? Well, in this episode, we're going to explore what designing better futures for everyone means. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, my name is Leslie and this is the service design show episode 162. Hi, my name is Mark Fontaine and welcome back to the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design. What are those hidden and invisible things that make the difference between success and failure all to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people, business and our planet? Our guest in this episode is Leslie and Noel. Leslie and is currently the assistant professor at the College of Design at the North Carolina State University. Her interest is research centered around the perspectives of those who would traditionally be excluded from research. She practices primarily in the areas of social innovation, education, futures workshops and public health. We are always taught that we should be designing with a user in mind. This is in general good advice because it helps you to empathize with the needs and desires of the person you're designing for. But it becomes a problem when the user is always the average type of person or just the person who is financially the most interesting. It's not just true for public services, but especially relevant there. So can you design great services that don't exclude people? Leslie Ann thinks so and she's done a lot of experiments to figure out how. Her passion is to help us design better futures for everyone and in this episode we're going to discover what better looks like and unravel who everyone actually is. So at the end of this episode you'll know why it's essential to be mindful of the people you're not designing for and how bringing your full self into the design process helps you to create better outcomes. If you enjoy conversations like this that help you to grow as a service design professional, make sure you subscribe to the channel and click that bell icon to be notified when new episodes come out. That about wraps it up for this introduction. Now it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with Leslie Ann Noelle. Welcome to the show Leslie. Hi, thank you Mark. Good to have you on. We're going to talk about a topic that is definitely dear to your heart that has been addressed more often on the show lately and I think that's super important and very good to create awareness and share some practical ideas. Before we jump into that topic Leslie, we want to get to know you a little bit better and we'd like to start off with a short introduction. So maybe could you share with the listener who are you and what do you do these days? Well, we don't have a lot of time but when I talk about who I am I tend to start with where I was born. So I'm from Trinidad and Tobago. A long time ago, way back in the last century, I went to Brazil to study industrial design and then I mean my design journey has taken me pretty much all over the world. So I've worked in East Africa, worked all around the Caribbean. I am now in Raleigh, North Carolina in the United States where I'm an assistant professor in a program called Design Studies which is a program where we're looking maybe at meta issues related to design rather than design studio issues. So we're talking about like what is design, why do we design, who designs, things like that in this program. And I think that I have a bit of a tangential relationship with service design. All right, we'll get to that for sure. Thank you for sharing this and I like that you sort of gave a bit more context than most guests do. We also have a lightning round with five questions to get to know you a little bit, even a little bit better. Your goal is to answer them as briefly and as quickly as possible. Just the first thing that comes to your mind. Are you ready? Yes, yes, I am. What was your first job? Oh, so my first job, I worked as a copywriter in an advertising agency when I was very young, kind of too young to really know about life. But somehow I ended up there. I I like words and I was interested in graphic design. So I thought, well, OK, I'll start as a copyright and somehow move into the design department and that never happened. But yeah, I was a first job. Now I'm curious, which book or books are you reading at this moment? If any. All right. So I have a book next to me called the Activist Academic Engaged Scholarship for Resistance, Hope and Social Change. And that's because during my I have a PhD in design. And during that PhD, a professor said to me, well, you can't actually be an activist and a researcher. And I've kind of carried that around with me for the last maybe eight years. And I was happy to find this book that says, yes, you can be an activist and a researcher. So that's that's what I'm reading these days. Oh, all right. Exciting. And Leslie, what's always in your fridge? What's always in my fridge? OK, I'm thinking of something exciting or interesting. Jake Seasoning, because my mother's Jamaican and we cook a lot of Caribbean food, Jamaican food, Trinidadian food in my house. So regardless of whether I'm cooking or not, we have Jake Seasoning in the fridge. All right. I don't think I'm familiar with that. Need to Google Google after that episode. And the final question and that maybe relates to what you just previously said, not to the food thing, but the service design thing is I'm curious if you recall the moment you sort of first learned about service design. So I I know that design language to me started to change in the mid 2000s. You know, and I was thinking about so I did industrial design, as I said, and I was thinking about studying again. And I found that I couldn't find my profession anymore. You know, it was like everything had changed and they were all of these new words and acronyms and, you know, UX and UI. And, you know, when I studied, it was just graphic design and industrial design and we really talked about an architecture. And I think in the mid 2000s is when I started to see all of these other variations of design. And I think that service design probably was one of them. I don't know if that's a specific moment, but I know that that's the moment that I noticed that the language had started to change around design. Yes, it did, for sure. Thank you. Thank you for sharing this brief introduction that always helps and sets the stage for the rest of the conversation. Now, Leslie, when we were preparing more sort of exploring which area we would like to talk about and sort of exploring different directions. And then we hit upon a phrase, which I really liked. And you sort of happily adopted, I think, in this conversation. And you mentioned designing better futures for everyone, correct? Yes. Yes. That's something that I'm really passionate about, you know, I'm very passionate about the idea of using the future, you know, getting people to be a little bit more creative in what they imagine is possible through this idea of using the future. You know, because I think that sometimes when people think about making change in the present, they get a little bit bogged down by what they think is possible in the present. But I think, and I could be a little bit naive in this way of thinking, I think if we push people a little bit further, they don't think about the constraints of today and they can start to see equitable futures for everyone. Or they can start to figure out, well, what do we need to get there? And you already, again, gave a great sort of leeway into the next question that I had. Because there are two things that I would like to unpack with you around this phrase, and that is what does better mean in better futures? And who is everyone? I always learned in our design profession that designing for everybody is something you shouldn't try to do. So let's start with, maybe let's start with the last thing. Who are we designing for? OK, so that's a good question. And I guess where I want to start with that question is that I think, you know what, I'll talk from my perspective, right? I'll use iLanguage, right? So I learned about designing for specific people. But often that specific person would be related to maybe an average in the population related to the group that has the most money or, you know, there were specific constraints or ways that we identified who these people were that we designed for, right? And over time, I have, and I'm not the only person, of course, right? I've become more and more interested in designing for the people who are least served by the population. And so when we address the needs of these groups of people, who are least served, I think that actually we do get to that kind of idea of designing for everyone, rather than if we are thinking of maybe a population average or people with money or, you know, if we if we think about people who have the most barriers, you know, in design, sometimes we talk about pain points. If we if we're looking at the people with the most pain points and making life better, easier, simpler, whatever, you know, for these people, then actually we then started to reach that thing of addressing everyone, right? So another way of looking at it, I suppose, is I am looking at the people. Well, in my courses, I talk a lot about oppression. So I'm looking at the people who face the most oppressions and then saying in to my students or to the partners who I work with, these are the people that we are going to design for. So we're not just going to design for, for example, the one area of work that I do is with cities. We're not just going to design for the people who call the city the most often to complain. We're going to design for the people who have the most barriers in getting the services that they need to get. Yeah, all right. And again, this is something we'll dive into in a in a second. So the people who are being designed least for it. Let's let's start with that. And let's let's dig into the first part, like better futures. What is better? Yeah, what is better in your perspective? Yeah, better is a difficult one to define. Um, so to see how we get to the better, we have to learn to see what is not good enough, right? And so a lot of the work that I do that I'm talking about in the classes is and why I focus on on these different oppressions is for us to see things that are not good enough, you know, because in some places, I think that we have just become accustomed to certain things, you know, and we'll say, well, that's just the way it is. But if we look at certain scenarios through very specific lenses, sometimes I say it's oppositional lenses. You know, if we if we look through these lenses, then we will see what's not good enough. And then once we establish, well, this is not good enough, then we could figure out what better is. So I hope that that's a little bit of a yeah, maybe we can exemplify that. Do you have some what kind of stories do you talk about with your students and what does, for instance, good look like? And you mentioned the word oppression a few times already. I'm curious about that as well. Right. OK, so one one story that I have sometimes used in in some of the classes is that, OK, we might be designing a bus stop, for example, right? Or or maybe we're designing the bus routes, something with buses, right? We could be looking at, you know, this specific person that we designed for could be a mother, right? So therefore might be facing some issues related to gender, might be facing economic issues, you know, because then immediately this mother is probably thinking about these, you know, different children and different schools that they have to go to. Maybe the mother has to go to the supermarket on the way home and all that. But if we think about the oppressions that this woman is facing, when I say oppressions related to gender, maybe economic oppression, and therefore she has to work a couple of jobs, maybe also related to economic oppression. She doesn't have a car, so she's travelling with these groceries in her hand. You know, if we start to think about all of these things that could be that she could be facing, that starts to raise some issues that we might not have considered if we just thought of a person who is 28 years old, you know, 28 years old with no children. And, you know, so if we focus on this person who is facing different barriers in life, then we will reach to different questions that should be asked about the things that we're designing, right? Sometimes I intentionally bring in, not sometimes very often, I intentionally bring in questions about race. If we if we're still thinking about this bus stop and the person waiting at the bus stop is black, for example, a black male, what types of additional security issues does that create for this person? Or, you know, well, obviously, I talked about gender before, but, you know, so if we if we think about all of these different kinds of questions, they are these lenses, they raise different questions as we design the product or service that we're designing. And you could ask me a little bit more if that's unclear. No, I think that's at least there's a lot to explore. But this example was it was clear. And better is very situational and context dependent, obviously, as in many cases. And then you sort of have to figure out first, like you said, what's the what's the problem? Yeah. Now, I would also like to understand how did you get interested in this? How has your journey from industrial design all the way into this? How did that go? Yeah, I guess the journey, the change in focus happened over time. You know, I started off as an industrial designer, really just interested in designing another chair. Then I started working in international development with people who were making handicrafts for export and started to become maybe much more interested in them and their lives than actually in the products that they were making, you know, and became more and more dissatisfied actually with the type of development work that I was being hired to do. And then eventually I did a PhD in design where I really did a lot of critical reading. I was introduced to the work of Paulo Freire and Pedagogy of the Oppressed. And I think that that really made me there were many points in my PhD that made me focus on groups that are marginalized and different forms of marginalization. So, for example, in the PhD, I worked with children in Trinidad from a very rural context, and that's, you know, that urban, rural thing. That's a different kind of marginalization that we don't think about the fact that I worked with children instead of adults. Again, that's another kind of marginalization. And, you know, so I've been very interested in groups that are typically not seen or heard. So you can say that that's really, that has been the journey. Well, after the PhD, I started doing some work with cities. You know, when I was in New Orleans here in Raleigh, you know, I started working with cities, but actually then I suppose another point in this journey is there was a specific work experience where I really, really was an outsider and then was very, very close to these marginalized perspectives that I had been maybe looking at a little bit more from a distance, you know, like, okay, I'm not rural, but I was working with rural children, right? Or I'm not from East Africa, but I was working with people in East Africa, but in then this particular work situation, I was the minority. I was the person who was being kind of excluded ideologically and things like that. And that, I suppose, really also was something that really pushed me to work harder and really situate myself in this world of equity. I don't know if you, is it relevant to share that example? Do you think that would help us to better understand the context? Well, so there's one thing that I've designed, that I've created, called the designer's critical alphabet, and that the questions that are in the designer's critical alphabet really come out of my experience of being an outsider in that context. So, you know, when the students went off, I was teaching, right? When the students went off to interview people and came back, as an outsider, you know, I was a black woman, foreigner, you know, I'm not American. And so, through all of these outsider lenses, I looked or thought about who the students had interviewed, they were trying to understand sustainability issues within the population. And to me, it seems like they had only interviewed fairly well off white people, right? And actually, it's not really surprising that they would have done that because actually of the way we set up the assignment, you know, where we set, we send them off to interview some people. And obviously they're going to interview people who they have access to, right? But that made me think about, it made me think very deeply about how we only design for people that we have access to, or how we design for people that we know. And then I, you know, I've been, I've spent a few years since that work experience, thinking about how do we get to understand people that we don't know? I've been asking a lot of questions of myself, of my students, who are the people that we should be designing for or with, you know? You know, is it wrong for us to do that kind of thing of just interviewing people that we know? And you know, on one level, we could say, well, that's who we had access to. You know, that's a kind of convenient sampling. But on the other level, we have to kind of see that if we only design for the people we have access to, or if we only design for the people who talk a lot or, you know, then actually inequity will just continue, right? Forever, you know? Because the people who might need the most support, I'll go back to the city example, the people who might need the most services from the city might just be too busy to call and complain, might not know that they can call and complain, might, you know, and so I think it's up to us as designers to really figure out where is the support most needed and then focus on these people, whether or not we typically have access to. So we have to dig a little bit harder in finding the clients that we serve. This is a great example. And the question that I had when you were sharing this is like, so was it always like, like, like this was designed always like this? Or what has caused design to mainly focus on groups that we have easy access to, or the fact that design, the design process is excluding certain groups that is that an inherent nature of the current design process? Like, what's your take on this? How did we get here? How did we get here? In a few different ways, right? So, you know, if we think about where design education started and then I'll think about my industrial design background, which might be different to people in service design, right? I was educated to think about form and color and materials. And so, you know, me and a lot of people like me, we have moved into more social situations, but actually, some of us, our methods have not changed, right? So, you know, we were trained to think about aesthetics, right? We were trained to really look at a problem in a specific way. But now we are moving into more complex problem spaces and a lot of us don't actually have the, I don't want to say the training because I don't want to make it only about formal education. But, you know, a lot of us then don't have the intellectual, I don't want, well, I'll say it like that, but you know, we haven't also been trained to think about the social problems in a deeper way, right? So, I think so we are getting more and more drawn into complex spaces, but we don't actually have the, we have to do a little bit more work to understand these complex pieces. So it has to do definitely for a certain extent with education, how people are trained and which level of awareness they bring to this type of problem. Like this might be the unknown, unknown space, and then it's really hard to design for this if you aren't even aware that these challenges exist, yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think that in some cases, we can acquire the tools of analysing society and people and problems in a much more complex way, right? So in a lot of cases, the old ways that we might have analysed a problem may not be relevant. You know, the old types of conversations or design processes that we used to use might not be so relevant. But the good thing is that I think that really things are changing in the profession. You know, so like, and when I say the profession, I just mean design in general, you know, I think that there are much more critical conversations that exist today. There, you know, there are many people who are interested in equity in social justice, you know, in design for good. So I think it's excellent that these conversations are happening and the more that they happen, the deeper that they will become, you know. And in some cases, I talked about design for good, I actually think that that can be a problematic space, you know, because sometimes people go into design for good work and, you know, think of it in a more patronizing or charitable kind of way. And that doesn't always lead to results that are sustainable or satisfactory for the people that we're working with. But as people have more and more conversations, then it will become clearer to use what we talked about earlier. It'll become clearer what's not good enough, right? And where we need to make some additional changes in methods and processes, etc. It adds just another thing on the what is good design spectrum. It adds a standard that you should adhere to or a level that you should strive to when you're designing solutions, whether it's a chair or a service or a system. I'm how this must have impacted the way you practice design as well. And can you share a little bit about that? How has your craft changed? Well, yeah, it has radically impacted the way that I think and do think about design and do design, you know, so like 20 years ago, I wanted to make the most beautiful chair, right? And I was really just interested in, for example, materials, you know, I say laughingly to people sometimes when I graduated, we didn't care about people, right? You know, people, people were part of the problem. You know, we were designing beautiful things and we were concerned about manufacturing processes and maybe the cost of materials and how many things could we fit into a container? And, you know, there were other questions that that we were very interested in. And today, those issues never come into my work, you know? So I am no longer as interested in materials and form and beautiful things. And I'm really asking much many more questions about what do people actually need? And are we sure that what we're making ties back to what they need, regardless of whether it's it's beautiful, it will win prizes, you know, you know, things like that? You know, so I think today I ask the people at the center of the issue many more questions than I used to 20 years ago, because 20 years ago, in my design world, people were not at the center of the issue, right? But today, people are definitely at the center of the issue, and then that affects the way that I ask questions, the methods that I'll choose to collect information from people, the design processes that I use. So I am very often designing with people or having them design, and then I may be refining, well, not really refining, but, you know, I will use my design background after they've already done the core design work. So it's a different kind of design work that I do. And I know that there are other people in the field who are still interested in form and, you know, stuff like that. And I'm happy that those people are, you know, because when I want a beautiful house, I'll probably go to one of them, right? But, you know, I am no longer doing that kind of work. So what if, what do you tell your, no, the question I have is around who is this for? So the reason I'm asking this is it may sound like this is primarily a thing aimed at organizations in the public space, like cities or nonprofits. Do you also see interests from the commercial sector? How do you see that balance? So I guess before one step before answering that, right, is that I'm I work primarily in academia. So, you know, I'm a professor. And what that means is that the way I do the design work that I do, I can try to set up my work around best practices. And then so that's one one thing that I do. I'll set up a project and I'll set up this project around the principles that I think are important, and then disseminate this work, right? Then the next area that I do is I do this work with cities, for example, I can draw on what I've done in the fictional design project that we might have worked on, and then try to bring these best practices into real life through the cities. And then because the cities are trying to do good, then they will replicate some of the stuff that we're doing in school. And then the ripple effect, if you want to use that kind of term, is that yes, there are industries that are looking at that kind of design practice, you know, because I talk a lot, I write a lot, so people started to know what I'm doing. And I have gotten a lot of calls from the corporate world to come and talk about principles or to come and share the work that I'm doing. And then I don't know exactly how they're incorporating these ideas into their work. But I know that they are interested in the kind of experiments that I'm doing in my academic work and the work with these cities. And so I think that there will be an effect long term, you know, if we have a company like, I don't know, I don't know what name to call, but company X that does apps and has to, you know, because I talk about equity all the time, maybe they now have to think, OK, how are we designing this app for the person with the phone that is broken, or for the person with the slowest band with possible or, you know, so I can be a little bit disruptive in the way that I do things in the space that I'm in and share my job as an academic is to share that process. And then hopefully that disruptiveness affects people in other spaces. Yeah, yeah, you're creating awareness, you're creating, well, like you said, potentially best practices, you're showing what's potentially possible and pushing the boundaries of the field. And then it's up to the actual practitioners to put it into practice. When you share and you mentioned you write a lot, you talk a lot, you share this a lot. What is the most common question you get when you share this story? The question, sometimes I get a question about, OK, how do we put this into practice? You know, like, so like one thing in my work, for example, is to talk about positionality a lot, you know, and so I have a tool where I, I will ask the design teams that I work with or the class that I work with. I will ask people to intentionally talk about their identities before we start the design process. So that might be why my introduction was detailed like that, because we talk about this all the time. But it is because I want people to see complexity and bring that into the work that they do. I don't want everyone to feel like they have to fit in. Right. And so that's something that people in industry have asked me to come and talk about a lot, you know, how do we get our design teams to talk about who they are? Why is it important? Right. And now I don't actually know where they're going with that. But my intention when I do that in my class classes is to get people to not hide their identities, because we actually need those diverse identities in the design process. You know, so if people could really dig into themselves and we could find the oppressions, actually, you know, because most of us are facing some form of oppression everywhere. Right. And every day. And we have to learn to bring those to the design process. And I'll also make us, you know, we talk about empathy all the time. That will also make us empathize more closely with the people that we're working with. You know, if we could identify in our identities where we're facing problems. So the question that I often get is, hey, how do we put some things into practice? And then the good thing is that because I have been experimenting with stuff, I often have examples of, OK, well, you could try this activity and that will get it into practice. And is I like that a lot of putting it into practice by starting with yourself. And like it seems that being a designer a long time meant like fitting into a specific set of standards and making reproducible, like reproducible, tough work, reproducible work. And I guess that that's what universities do, they're like, and that's how do you get graded on tests and seeing how you adhere to certain standards. But that doesn't like it eliminates the human who you are and the personality, like you said, the identity you bring into the design craft. And it's a shame and it's a big loss. And you're saying step one is to bring that to the center stage again. Yes, yes, yes. I've worked as a designer in spaces where people have seemed under a lot of pressure to hide who they are. And then I a lot of the work that I've been doing over the last couple of years is about making sure that people talk about who they are and how that affects the design process. So I don't actually think that we should be talking about like things like universality and stuff like that. I think that we have to be really ensuring that people bring their identities into the design process. I'll actually give you a little story. One design team that I was in, I recall one of my colleagues said something about, oh, and yeah, we're all the same. Or he might have said, oh, yeah, and we're all American. And I looked at him kind of horrified, you know, because I'm not American. And if anything is that he was named American either, right? So, you know, like, with that just one statement, the social pressure of having to fit in made him erase his cultural identity. It made him erase his ethnic identity, his, you know, even gender identity, you know, because because we just felt that's the pressure that you sometimes feel as an outsider. You're like, okay, let me try to fit in so that people don't realize I'm the outsider. You know, I'll go back again to my stories about designing chairs. I remember I was trying to design chairs to look very, very slick and Italian and whatnot. And I and we were making these chairs in Guyana. So like in the middle of the rainforest in South America, right? But trying to make these chairs that look very, very Italian. And, you know, and that has been how design training has gone. You know, if you're if you're coming from these fields of like graphic design and industrial design, you were trying to fit in rather than making work that was very specific to an identity or context. And I think that we're in a place where, fortunately, people are much more interested in these diverse identities that we have and people have more and more space to bring them into the group that we that's really awesome and encouraging, I hope, because again, it allows you to just be more human, to just be more you and celebrate that, make that bigger and see that as a benefit rather than something that you need to push away. Like separating work and private life in a certain aspect, that good, but you're still the same person when you're doing research or ideating or prototyping something and like, why not? Why why leave so many things at the door when you start work? Yeah, yeah, I like that expression. Why leave them at the door? You know, people have to know about you and your life. And and if we come back to what we say about empathy all the time, us bringing ourselves into the process allows us to empathize with real people and their issues much more deeply than if we try to keep everything at arm's length. It's almost like we're getting into mindfulness and that kind of space where you have to know yourself as a designer, as a professional before you can. Yeah, in order to achieve the next level of your profession, maybe. Yes, yes, that's it. I like that. Yeah. Before you design. Well, even design for is a complicated word right now, but I'll say that before we design for other people, we have to understand who we are, you know, and who is the team? Who are we working for? Things like that. We have to understand all of that before we move into the next phase. And maybe this ties into the next question I had was you mentioned something about that even people with good intentions want to do good design things that can go wrong. Can you share a bit more about that? Like is that does that buy into not knowing who you're bringing into the equation? Like what are the pitfalls? So the one of the major pitfalls is trying to think that you can save the world, right? If we go back to that question, you asked me a little bit about how my profession, how my professional practice has changed. I definitely think I had a little bit more hubris earlier on where I thought, yes, I'm a designer, we will save the world what not. And I'd go into every design and challenge or problem like that, thinking that I could save the world and I had all of the solutions, right? And so, you know, this is one way that people in the design for good space sometimes get it wrong. I'll say it like that. Clearly they get it wrong, you know, just going in with that amount of hubris and maybe in a patronizing way, you know, just saying, well, okay, this is the solution, you know, we have the solution for you. And very often it is not as clear as that, you know, people who we are trying to serve are often already kind of hacking out their own solutions. And so we have to figure out sometimes what are the solutions that they are creating for the issues that we're seeing and how can we support that, you know? That's not the only way of working, but it is that we have to be a little bit more self-aware in the work that we are doing, give up some of our savior complexes and, yeah, be a little bit more humble in the way that we do the work that we do to get to solutions that are more sustainable, that include the people who are in a problem space a little bit more. So the old idea of this designer who worked alone to save everybody or to come out with this fantastic design, I think that that has to kind of go away a little bit and we have to adopt a different kind of position as we move forward so that we are working with people, we're listening to people, we're really seeing what the issues are better and then hopefully we'll be able to get to better design that way. When this happens and I'm very optimistic that it is happening, I'm seeing the wave and the interest and I think a lot of people in the service design space, I want to embrace this and adopt this and are doing their best. They are already starting, they are seeing episodes like this that sort of just strengthen them on their mission. I'm curious, which question do you feel people should be asking more around this topic that they aren't maybe yet? So I asked you, like, what are the common questions you get? But this is like the flip side. Which questions aren't you getting that you feel should be asked more often? I find that I mean, just the simple question of what is hardest for you or something like that? Where are you? You know, I mean, if we're asking the people who we are designing for, where are you struggling the most? Right. But then actually, OK, so there is a question that I think that we don't ask. I don't know sometimes how this question affects the design process, right? But one thing that I think that we don't ask enough is kind of like just a little esoterical, but, you know, like, what brings people joy? You know. So there was a semester like during the pandemic where I asked students to really intentionally ask that question as we did our research with people. You know, they had to intentionally ask people what made them happy within the same problem space that we were working in, you know, because as designers, we're trained to look at people's problems, I think that we could kind of over-problematize people and their lives and what not. And I found that that semester when we asked people about the things that made them happy and we asked that question because of the sadness of the pandemic. I found that the student solutions were much more engaging because they designed around what the people said already made them happy. So, for example, we were interested in good health. They then designed ways of making sure that people got good health around the things that already made them happy, whether they were parties or socializing with family or, you know, and I think that now that was just a tiny, you know, that was a 10 semester, a 10 week semester kind of thing. But I think that that could be something that we could ask people more about what are the things that make them happy and then maybe try to deliver some of the services around around the things that bring people joy. What does bring you joy? What brings me joy? It's very basic and ordinary. I like gardening. So, you know, my days sometimes are very, very long, but I will look across like literally on my table right now. There's a little thing of seeds and bulbs that I'm like, OK, I have to find 30 minutes today to stick this stuff into the ground so that I will have flowers in the spring. I like gardening. I like spending time with people. I like food, you know. So if people have to people have to deliver services to me, they I mean, and they use food and gardening and people I'd be very happy. I'll I already see you smiling when you talk about this topic. So I need to I need to find a way to incorporate it in the future interviews. Let's we're sort of heading towards the end of this conversation. I've got two more questions left. One is if you look back at the last five years of your career, what is it that you wish somebody would have told you five years ago that you know now? I wish five years ago people told someone had told me that I don't need to fit in, right? So I think that I kind of wasted, you know, I could think of like two years in particular that I really tried to fit in to different situations that I was in, you know, because I'm coming from another country. I, you know, I if people had told me that I don't need to fit in. I think I might have been able to do work that was more impactful even earlier. Right. That was the question or you had two questions. Well, the other one I think, yeah, you don't have to fit in even better, like exaggerate how you're not fitting in that use that to your advantage. I think that's a good thing. Now, maybe that's that again, this is we are having a lot of bridges into different questions today because the final question I had for you is what do you hope people will remember if they remember one thing from our conversation? What do you hope it is? Yeah, it's that don't try to fit in, right? Bring the different lenses that you have to the design process. You said one thing, but I'm going to say a few things, right? Understand where you might have some blind spots, you know, and try to figure out how are you going to get closer to the understanding that you, you know, that you're not close to. So it's really just about people opening up their frames of how they consider how we consider issues. So opening up this frame either through their own identities or through greater curiosity about the way other people might frame these issues that we're looking at. I hope people will take away those messages because they are super important. Let's see. This is almost all that we had time for today. Thank you for shining a light on this blind spot, which is still there, but luckily is sort of becoming coming out into the light more and more. I don't know if that's the right saying. But yeah, thank you again for for sharing this. Thank you, Mark, for this invitation. And I mean, you're doing great work. So I look forward to seeing this and just following your podcast in the future. Awesome that you made it all the way till the end of this conversation. I really hope that you enjoyed it and would love to hear from you. What was your biggest takeaway? Make sure to leave a comment down below. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Serbs Design Show, and I look forward to see you in the next video.