 A lot of time and energy is wasted coming up with solutions that in the end no one really wants. Well, in this episode, you're going to learn about the radical approach to design that greatly increases the chance that the eventual outcomes will be fully embraced by the end users. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Victor and this is the service design show episode 154. Hi, my name is Mark Fontaine and welcome back to a brand new episode of 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 all 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 Victor Udoeva. Victor is the founder of Justice by Design and the chief experience officer and service design lead at NASA. I'm pretty sure that you've been practicing participatory design or at least know about it. Their approach to design where you involve members from the community into the design process. And depending on your challenge, these members can be customers, employees, but also patients, students and parents. The rationale of involving the community in the design process is that it will increase the chance that you'll end up with a relevant solution. As great as the idea of participatory design is, the reality shows that in practice, participation only happens in very selective parts of the process. According to Victor, we can and should take this a step further. We shouldn't be designing solutions for the community. No, not even with them. Solutions should be designed by the community. Victor calls this approach radical participatory design and in this episode you'll learn all the ins and outs. So if you stick around till the end of this episode, you'll know what are the benefits and challenges when involving the community from start to end from top to bottom and get an answer to the question, is there still a role for the design professional if the entire process is driven by the community? If you find conversations like this interesting and want to keep growing as a service design professional, I encourage you to click that subscribe button and that bell icon because we bring a new conversation like this every week or so. So that's about it for the introduction and now it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with Victor Uruweva. Welcome to the show, Victor. Hey, it's good to be here. Good to see you, Marc. Good to see you as well. Really looking forward to this episode and the topic that we're going to address again. A topic that I don't know a lot about and I want to learn and definitely you're one of the people who knows a lot more about this. So looking forward to this. But Victor, before we start and try to unravel what we're going to talk about today, could you give a brief introduction about who you are and what you do? Yes, I am the CXO, Customer Experience Officer, CTO, Customer or Chief, you could say Chief Technical Officer and Service Design League for a part of NASA. Two programs at NASA called the Small Business Innovation Research Program, SBIR and the Small Business Technology Transfer Research Program, STTR. Okay, thank you. If people want to know more details, they'll just look up your LinkedIn profile. But we're going to go into some personal details as we always have a lightning question round. I've got five questions for you and your task is to answer them as quickly and briefly as possible. The first thing that comes to your mind. You're ready? Okay, I'm ready. Let's do this. What did you want to become when you were a kid? Astronaut. You're on the way. What's the maybe number one thing on your bucket list? Number one thing on my bucket list is to live in Asia. Live meaning more than a year. Cool. Which book or books are you reading at this moment, if any? I'm reading too many books at this moment. One book I'm reading is Designs for the Pluriverse. Another book I'm reading is Soul of a Woman. Another book I'm reading is Stand Your Ground by Kelly Brown Douglas. I tend to read a lot of books at the same time because when they're nonfiction, I only do it a chapter at a time so I can absorb the information. Well, at the reading list to the show notes. Next question is related to your bucket list but I didn't know that up front. If you could work from anywhere in the world right now, where would you like to work from? I think if I could work anywhere in the world, I'd probably be working from Nigeria. That's where I have most of my family so it'd be nice to just be around them and be in that environment so I can spend time with them outside of work or during meals. Maybe it's possible with all that remote work and going on these days. Victor, fifth and final question is, do you recall the moment you sort of got in touch with service design? The moments. No, I feel like it was gradual. Especially because of the spectrum between the different types of design. So I think I would say probably the first big step in the gradual process was when I was working for Google, multinational tech company, and I was working on an educational service that had components of business design and org design and service design and product design all rolled up into one and it was an international educational service that we were offering. Cool, thank you for letting us know a bit more about who you are and what you read, where you want to live and work. That helps to set some context. Now, Victor, let's transition into the topic you suggested and proposed like that might be interesting to share with the service design community and the title that I took away from this and I think this is also a title that you sort of use, radical participatory design. This isn't going to be the only one I'm going to stumble upon that word. But that's correct, right? Yes, that's correct. So if we fast forward to the end of this episode, like what is it that you hope people will take away from our conversation that's going to unfold in the next, I don't know, 45 minutes? I'm really hoping that more and more designers especially specifically designers who are working within an organization, they're part of an organization, they're not just a freelance designer, are able to employ more of the participatory practices and specifically a radical participatory approach as opposed to what I might call a colonial participatory approach. And it's hard to do from within the context of an organization. I think that's the challenge. You know, it's easier. I've seen some people do it as, oh, I'm a professor in a university and I did some projects in a community. Great, easy. But can you do it if you work for a non-profit or work for a for-profit or work for the government, etc.? It's a lot harder and there are other challenges there. We'll talk about hopefully those challenges today. Now, I feel that there's a bit of a chicken and egg challenge here because I want to ask you about why you care so deeply about radical participatory design. But maybe first we need to understand a bit more about what the RPD is without going into all the details. Like, could you maybe mix up those two? Yeah, is it helpful first to just talk about what participatory design is before we talk about radical participatory design? Yeah, let's do that. So, yeah. And I think a lot of people have heard this term before, it goes by many different phrases. Collaborative design, code design, co-participatory design, etc., etc. And it just means that instead of the professional designers doing all of the work, at some point in the process they are designing with alongside the potential users of the system or the service or the product. In some places, some people use the term to refer to designing with not just the users but all stakeholders. So maybe if you work in an organization that includes your executives or other people that might be involved. Other people use it civically to talk about involving the users in the process of design. So that's participatory design. And now the radical aspect? Yeah, so I didn't always use the adjective radical. I started doing it last year only because I realized over many years when I would meet people who were doing participatory design, they always meant something different than I meant. And so I would be very excited and then we start to talk at a conference or I'm reading their paper and then I realize, oh, we're using the same term but it means different things. So I use radical to differentiate between what I'm doing and maybe what someone else might be doing. It doesn't mean that other people aren't doing what I'm doing but it's just a differentiator. And I say radical not in the colloquial sense, which a lot of people use to mean extreme. I'm using radical meaning completely, right? So it's coming from the Latin word radix, which means the root. So it's to the root. It's all the way down from beginning to end, from top to bottom. And so normally what happens when you see participatory design, people mean a number of different things. One, they might mean, okay, I'm just including the perspective of the users. Two, they might mean a method. Are you going to do a user interview? Are you going to do participatory design, usability study? Three, they might mean a way of doing a method. So I can do a design studio with a group of designers or I could do a design studio and invite users to be a part of the design studio, right? So it's a way of doing that same method. And four, they mean a methodology, which is a collection of methods or guiding philosophies that help you to choose a particular method at a particular point in a process. When I say radical participatory design, I don't mean any of those. I use the term meta methodology, meaning it's not a, I don't have a toolkit of methods. It doesn't say use this method at this point. If you look at some participatory design toolkits, it'll say, okay, do this work, do steps A, B, C and D. And when you frame the problem, then reach out to the community and invite them in and then do these types of activities with them. When I say radical participatory design, there is none of that. It's just really an approach. You can use whatever methodology you want to do, but it means really three things. Number one, the community is always present and always leading. So instead of having times where you're doing work with the community and times where you're planning apart from the community, the community is a part of the research and design team. They are members of the team from top to bottom all the way through. There are no meetings, no phone calls, no discussions apart from them because they are on the team. Number two, the community members or the users, you could say, outnumber the professional designers. And that's more of a guideline. It helps improve the dynamics, not necessary. And then number three, the community members own the outcomes and artifacts of the process as well as the narratives around those outcomes and artifacts. And so that's kind of what I mean. Normally what would happen is you have a workshop on Monday, you have another workshop on Wednesday, and then on Tuesday, as professional designers, we're looking at the outcomes of workshop one and looking to see if it's still in line with our goals for the series of workshops. We're trying to see if any new information came from workshop number one that introduces nonlinearity, that sends workshop two in a different direction. We're trying to see what information from workshop one we carry over to workshop two. And all of this is sense making, the decision making, and interpretation, and evaluation. It's all happening without the community members present. So when I say radical, they're always there. They're full members of the team, from top to bottom, from beginning to end. They're always leading, and they own the outcomes and narratives of the work. Great. Thank you. Now I have an even better understanding what this is and what you mean. And a lot of things in terms came to my mind here. But let's maybe we can go back in time for a second. And I'm really curious, how did you arrive at this philosophy approach mindset? What was your journey? Yeah, it's interesting. I didn't realize designers didn't work like this. It's kind of funny for me to say that. You know, I started in engineering design. So the way that I was taught in school and university was to design based on feasibility. You know, you get the requirements, you get the information you need, and you satisfy those requirements. So I wasn't taught the human factors or the human elements side of it. But I did a project in El Salvador where I was building dual composting the trains with a group of friends and other students. And I remember traveling back to El Salvador in Central America one year later. And the community members whom we worked alongside to build those dual composting the trains in the village, like small villages of like 250 people. They didn't always use the latrines in the way that we thought they would use them. So for instance, one family used it as a closet to store, you know, farming equipment. Another family used it as a bathroom for very, very important guests, but never for themselves. And so that's when I first learned, oh wow, I need to actually consider do people want it? Can they repair it if it's broken? Can do they want to maintain it? Do they show ownership over it? All of that stuff. And that's when I started this journey. So I had a toolkit at one point in 2007, the Gates Foundation gave some money to ideo.org to build this toolkit. And I was doing work in international development. And the Gates Foundation, of course, does international development. They focus in global health and global education. So this toolkit that ideo.org created was used in the international development space. And we were very excited because then it could help us take some of the methods used in industrial design and software design and bring it into the international development space. But we're very excited. We thought it was going to be the magic answer. And it turned out not to be for a number of reasons. But one of the interesting things is that I remember that there was some place in that toolkit where it mentioned bringing in community members and doing this work alongside them. And I guess just the way that I interpreted that, I thought it meant you get the community members together at the very beginning, the first thing you do, and you just do the work alongside them. So it's how I did the work. And then I realized, oh, a lot of people just bring them in at certain points or a lot of people bring them in, but they're still in control of the process. They're still leading the process. It's not the leadership isn't coming from the community. And so it's one of those examples where you have a leader in the design community creating materials for other people to use. And they might get mad at me for saying this, presenting a particular way of doing it, even though they themselves may not be doing it that way. And I know this because I have since that time worked at a company where we've hired IDEO and you get to see kind of what it looks like. So yeah, it was just my particular interpretation. Maybe it has to do with my background and how I understood things. And I was surprised to find out that that isn't how they normally do it and that people have a range of ways of practicing participatory design. Fascinating. For the sake of contrast, and like in many of these conversations, we need to generalize, but I'm really curious, do you feel that there are advantages? I'm sure you feel that there are advantages to approaching it like in this full-on participatory way, this radical way, this fully making the community a full member of the design team. Like, what are some benefits that you see? What happens? Yeah, there's different reasons that people do participatory design in general. So number one, people might do it because it actually improves the design outcomes. So I want this design to be better so I want this design to be better, to work better so I need the knowledge of these people. So I'm going to bring them in in order to improve the outcome. Some people do it for mutual learning and I'm glad that we say mutual because it's not just unidirectional, it's bidirectional. So I or we as professional designers, we learn the lived experiential knowledge that the community has, their cultural knowledge. As well as the community of users learning the design knowledge or the institutional mainstream, whatever type of educational knowledge that we have, they learn that. So it's a mixing of the two. So some people do it for mutual learning. Some people do it number three from a perspective of what I would call justice or democratic processes. How can we come in and decide what people have access to or can use? They should be able to decide that. There's a phrase that some communities say, nothing for us without us. Nothing for us without us. And so if there's something for us, we should have say in how it's created and what happens to it, what it looks like, et cetera. And then I would say there are some people who do it specifically for what I would call change after the design. So if I truly want this design or effort to work, it requires that the community or the people who use it truly own it. And ownership is greater if they have been a part of the process to create it. So some people do it from that. So there's a whole host of reasons. I do it specifically from a justice perspective. So if you said, for instance, that actually Victor, the design outcome would be exactly the same. It wouldn't actually necessarily be better. It's still, from my perspective, would be important to do because of what is right and what is true and what is good from a justice perspective. Like you're creating things for people. They should have a say in how that works. But from a business perspective, again, it does actually improve the outcomes. I guess the best way to think of it is from an epistemological perspective. So when you talk about the ways of knowing and how we know things, right? That's when I say epistemology, the study of knowing and how we know things. What happens in the Western society is especially post-enlightenment. We have definitely like lionized and valorized a specific way of knowing. This is what I call mainstream institutional knowledge. You could call it third person knowing. I'm an outside observer. I can run scientific experiments and I can observe things and I can reach and arrive at the truth, right? But there are other types and ways of knowings, right? There is first person knowing. So my lived experiential knowledge from life. There is second person knowing, which is this type of interrelational subjectivity or what communities learn. So cultural knowledge or spiritual knowledge through groups of people. But even regardless of if it's first or second person, there are different categories such as there is embodied knowing, there's intuitive knowing, there's aesthetic knowing, and I can go on and on and on. And so what we're learning is that it's not just inclusion of the voice of the community members, because when I just say it's their voice, I'm actually not giving it the true value that it is. It's actually expertise. If my knowledge, my educational knowledge from working and university is considered an expertise, then you should also consider the other kinds of knowledge and expertise. And so what I've learned over the years is that in the work that I do, I actually think even more important than the design expertise. Not everyone would agree with me, but more important than the design expertise is actually the cultural knowledge and the live experiential knowledge of the people. So it actually makes sense because it just doesn't work very well when I don't have that knowledge guiding the process that we're doing. This brings me to the question around maybe it's not maybe the lack of adoption yet. Like does the appreciation for these different types of knowledge and then a specific appreciation for their third person type of knowledge, which seems to be very strongly embedded in the Western culture. Like is that maybe one of the obstacles to finding a broader adaptation of this radical approach to participatory design? Yes, yes, definitely. I mean, it speaks to the creation of the world. There was this debate in anthropology at one point anthropologists, some anthropologists started using the word ontology. And there are different ways of defining ontology, but in this specific way, we're talking about a way of being, different types of reality or existence. And there was this debate in anthropology because they would say, well, wait a minute, there shouldn't be anything called ontological anthropology. All you're doing is just talking about different worldviews. This culture here, this person, they just have different worldviews. But what these new anthropologists at the time were saying is that no, it's not just worldviews. People actually inhabit and live in different worlds. So it's an actually different reality and understanding and existence. And so yes, what we're talking about is I think really since the enlightenment, since the domination of the West over the world, colonization, it hasn't just been colonization of land. It's been a colonization of histories, a colonization of knowledge or types of knowledge, really a colonization of ontologies. And so we've lost a lot of what I would call relational ontologies, relational ways of being and existing in the world. And we kind of have more of this type of individualist, objectivist, I could say more positivist, et cetera, ways of being in this world in which we are separate from the world and we can observe the world and we can arrive at the truth of everything. There has been growing interest though because of the increasing desire to reconnect to indigenous ways of knowing around the world, specifically in Asia Africa and the Americas as well. And especially because of this, I would say movement to what we call decolonize everything, at least in the U.S., we have it. Decolonize this, decolonize that, decolonize that. So there's this decolonial turn that's happening. And part of that means delinking or disconnecting from this system where there's only one way or the best way of knowing and understanding that there are other ways of knowing. So it's growing, but yes, it's very difficult because there is a culture. And it's not just in the West, I want to say, well, you said it's true, it's in the West, but because of the domination of the West over the entire world and ways of being and putting the McDonald's in every country and things like that, it has really gone everywhere. And so we are trying to learn and reconnect to some of older ways of being, indigenous ways of being annoying. So when you shared this story with the common man, let's go, what are some of the objections you hear or the skepticism? Like, what do you get back as a response? Yeah, well, there's different responses, depending on if you're talking about, say, an executive in an organization that can allow this process to happen or not. Or if you're talking about professional designers who don't necessarily agree with doing it that way, right? Or if you're talking about communities who might be invited to be a part of this type of process. So there's different responses from different groups. Are you talking about a specific group or do you want to walk through all of them? I would say let's start with the design community. Yeah, so I think there have been a lot of problems, I think, we don't have to go into it with the design thinking movement, right? Hasn't all been good. There's been a lot of issues with it. But one thing I will say that I do like is the understanding and the democratization of design, right? I think one of the things they're trying to say is that, hey, everyone should be doing design. I try to go further than that and say actually everyone is doing design, whether they know it or not, right? And they can learn different ways of doing design. So one thing that professional designers will say is, well, wait a minute, where is my role? If this is just about communities doing design and we're equal, what's the point of me? I'm a professional, I've studied all these years. I should have some say, I should be leading the process. So I mean, the way that I respond to that is just to say that I actually, and again, I'm not everyone, I'm only speaking for myself, I actually think the community knowledge, the cultural knowledge, the spiritual knowledge, the lived experiential knowledge is greater than the institutional knowledge. And I'll give you an example to explain what I mean. Imagine that you're sick, right? Or you're feeling something in your body and you go to the doctor, the medical doctor. It's very difficult for a medical doctor to help you, to treat you, to get you to feel better without any of your lived experiential knowledge. If they're just using their institutional, I mean, of course, they can try to put things and measure where's the temperature and, but they need you to say something about how it hurts and where it hurts and when it hurts and things like that. In fact, there was an entire television show in the United States called House in which this medical doctor, he was supposed to be a diagnostic magician. He could figure out the toughest problems that no other hospitals or doctors could figure, could determine. But one of the things he would do is he would have his team of doctors who were doing medical fellowships. So they had finished medical school and they had finished residency and they would break into the homes of the patients that they were trying to diagnose because the patients in this television show often were not telling the doctors everything that the doctors needed. They were hiding some certain things because of embarrassment or ignorance or maybe there was a legal implication if they said what happened. So they hid information, but the doctors needed that information in order to come up with a diagnosis. So they would break into the home, do some investigation, get that information and then use that. However, there are many cases, you know, maybe not really huge problems, but there are many cases where you can listen to your body and without having any type of medical educational knowledge, you can figure out, oh, I'm hungry. I need more water. I'm dehydrated. I need to rest. I need to sleep more. Even think about a woman who's giving birth. Ealing the pain and which positions ease the pain more or which positions have less pain allows the woman to move into positions that actually help to facilitate and expedite the delivery of the baby. So there are actual natural and built ways in which we can listen to our body in order to achieve some of those results. So that's an example. I can give others, but that's an example of how I think lived experiential knowledge can be actually greater than the institutional mainstream knowledge without any context. And yeah, yeah. And then going back to that question from sort of the trained or professional designer and then asking you like, what's my role in this process? I totally get that question. I see the design professional for a very large part as a translator between like people with a challenge and a solution. And like, is that role different in your perspective? Yeah. And I did talk about this earlier because I was trying to give you a short answer. But yeah, the model is different. So I'd say the dominant model in my design professional design world is the designer as facilitator when you do participatory design. Right. So you are facilitating. You will run the sessions. You kind of lead people through the process, etc. Now, as much as we try, we I think are unable to fully neutralize the inherent power and facilitation. We say, okay, you know, try to be unbiased. We try to do this and that. But really, there's power and facilitation because facilitators make decisions. Right. They choose processes. They're always, they're always exerting power, not necessarily in bad ways, but they just are by nature of the position. So in radical participatory design, we don't use a model of designer as part of the design. We use a model of designer as facilitator. We actually use a model of designer as community member, community member as designer, and community member as facilitator. So let me walk through those three briefly. When I say designer as community member, I don't necessarily mean that the designer has now been living with this community for 20 years, so they're now an actual community member. What I mean is that as a community member, the designer sits alongside all of the other community members, equal to all of those community members, and brings the designer's skill sets of research and design, laying them alongside, equal to all of the other assets and skill sets that all of the other community members bring. Right. So there can be community members that are good videographers. There can be community members that are historians. Everyone is bringing assets. So it's not only that we value the designer's skill set. We value everyone's skill set. And in fact, one of the methods that you find in participatory design methodologies or toolkits is what we call participatory appraisal, or community appraisal, where we go through to see what skill sets does everyone have to bring to the table and what can we use in order to do the work we're doing. So that's one. Designer now is equal to all the other members, and the skill sets they bring sit alongside all the skill sets and assets everyone brings. The second one is easy. Community member does design work. So a community member as designer, they're participating in the design, the community member as researcher, they're participating in the research. The third one is community member as facilitator. So if you were to come into my project right now at NASA, or if you were to come and observe some of my community projects, it would be difficult for you to tell who is the professional designer and who isn't, because you would not see me facilitating all the sessions. Facilitation is done by the community members. Now, it's true, there are cases where I've done work where the community members, there may be no member of the community that's on the design and research team that feels comfortable facilitating. And in that case, what we do is we do a slow gradual process where in the beginning they're watching and eventually we're doing it together and eventually they're doing more of it and I'm watching and observing and helping. But yeah, they actually will facilitate the process and oftentimes there are community members who do facilitation as part of their work or their lives. So we use those skills. So it's not that the designer is facilitating because they have the best skills and that's most valued, anyone can facilitate. And what this does, I'll give you one more thing, it actually changes the methodology you may end up using. So instead of necessarily doing human-centered design in the context of service design or as the guiding methodology of service design, I've done projects where we have ended up doing things like society-centered design, community-centered design, life-centered design, planet-centered design. I've done projects where we do a lot more asset-based methodologies. So human-centered design is a deficit-based methodology. You say, what's the problem and you try to fix the problem? Again, that comes from a Western mindset. There are a lot of ones that are not problem-based at all, right? So we end up doing things more like futures design which is based on our vision, not on the problem. Positive deviates, which is based on actual successes within the community that we then uncover and then broadcast and share with others. Systems practices, which are about improving the health of a system, not focusing specifically on the problem. I can go on and on. But all of those come out more naturally, specifically because communities do not like to define themselves by what they lack. They love to define themselves by what they bring to the table and what they have. So good. I need to replay this episode after we're done. Again, so many questions. But one that is sort of nagging me all the time is I feel that there's, and maybe this is my limiting belief on bias, that someone is driving the process. Somebody has an agenda. Maybe your reply will be there's a shared agenda, but I'm curious, how does this process work and maybe what kind of challenges lend themselves for this approach? Like somebody needs to own either the desire to create a better future or the desire to solve a problem. Yeah. I mean, definitely. And yes, you write about my answer. It's a type of relational ownership, a collective ownership. So I think what tends to happen with participatory design is as a professional designer, I'm imposing my project on the community. When you do radical participatory design, the community actually has a say. Because they're there from the beginning, from beginning to end, from top to bottom, they're actually there during the framing, deciding what to do and how, go ahead. Yeah, sorry to interrupt you, but it feels like this is the key moment. How do we get to, what's the big bang? Because when you mention they are part of the framing, it's a groundswell or something, like somebody needs to bring these people together or something needs to happen. You're curious about how it starts? Somehow. Yeah. Yeah. So, yes. The way I tend to look at it is through three lenses. Who initiates? Who leads? Who participates? So yes, a participatory design project, specifically a radical participatory design project, can be initiated by community, can be initiated by a professional designer. Either is fine. The whether or not it's radical, not determined by the participation and the leadership. So yes, I can, like I said, the first time I did this was at Google. I can be in an organization and initiate a project and say, hey, I'd like to work on some digital literacy. I want to gather some people, so I do that. And then those community members help me gather other community members to make sure that we have what I call a qualitatively representative sample on the design and research team. And then we figure out what we want to do. That's how it started. Community members can do radical participatory design because they have a problem or they have an issue or there's something they want to work on. They want to re-envision a public space or whatever it is. And they get together and then they may call in. There's different, it's a spectra, so it's different amounts of participation with the professional designer. But sometimes they may just call in professional designers when they need them for a specific skill set. Okay, we have this design, but we don't know if it actually works. So let's bring in an architect. Let's bring in a structural engineer to make sure that this could be possible, et cetera. Sometimes they'll bring them in from the very beginning to be part of the team, et cetera, et cetera. It just depends. Sometimes they have community members that embody those roles already. So their primary role might be community member, but their work is as a designer and they're bringing their design skills as a community member. So it can be initiated from the community side or the organizational designer side. And I'm not sure if I answered your question. Yeah, I think so. And the reason why I'm maybe so nitpicking on this topic is it feels like the agenda is super important to who sets the agenda. Because if you're setting the agenda as somebody who's a part of an organization, maybe in a case where it's a foundation doing good for the world, like there is maybe. But when you're part of a company having, there's always, there's a business incentive. So I'm... Oh, yeah. It feels like that there will be some tensions there. Yes, definitely, definitely. I mean, it's one of the ways that we can exploit or take advantage in order to start a process like this. So you have an organization and they say, look, I don't want to do this. I'm able to make money without doing radical participatory design. So why do this at all? So you as a designer who really cares about democratic processes and social justice, you want to do this. But your organization doesn't care about it. So there's different strategies that we do or we employ to begin to move towards radical participatory design. But one of them is called using a failed project, which is what I did the very first time I did it. So I had a project. It was the pet project of a vice president. And it failed, I want to say, three times. And back then I was in this organization that had this model of beta products. You don't fully develop. Just get it to a point, put it out there and learn as it's put it out there. And that's what the VP wanted. And so we wanted to put this project out there, this educational product and service out there for the world and just learn as we go. But there wasn't any uptake. We wanted, by a certain deadline, we wanted to have, I want to say, 150,000 or maybe 15,000. I can't remember exactly people certified through this. And by that deadline, we only had 1,500 registered. People didn't have an incentive to deliver this educational service. All the partners that we were working with, they didn't have an incentive to teach it, to work with people. And then the people who would sign up to learn didn't have an incentive to do it. So people weren't doing it. So I said, well, hey, can I go out and do some of this work that I've been asking to do? But you said there wasn't a time. They're like, no, now there's even less time because it failed. Fix it, put it out there again. So we do that. Hey, it failed again. Can I take some time, work with community members and kind of, no, there's even less time because now it's failed again, third time. So the VP leaves the organization. I don't know if it's specifically because of this project, but we were working in a tough environment. I was in a part of the company focused on what they called emerging markets. So low to middle income countries building educational products and services. And we had really ambitious goals, but often in settings that didn't have as many resources as some of these other places. Around the world. So it was tough with big ambitious goals, but low resource settings. Oftentimes we didn't reach our goals, right? So he left. The project lead on my project switched to another project. And at that point we had new leadership come in and I said, can I go and do this thing that I've been asking to do to work with community members? Like, fine, do whatever you want. We don't, they didn't care. And then that gave me the green light. I had the money, we had networks of people and I could reach out, build the community, and then we together decided, is this something we want to do, right? Because I had an agenda. I wanted to work on this thing, but I'm flexible with my agenda to say, if the community doesn't want this, we're not going to do this. Or if the community wants to move in a different direction and we move in a different direction, right? So I said, hey, there's this digital literacy thing. I think it might be important here and we're working in North Central India. Are you all open, got together? And then we talked about it and they decided yes, we framed it and we did the work. This definitely requires, I would say this isn't suitable for every challenge out there, obviously. How would you describe the challenges that have the biggest chance of actually working or benefiting from this approach? Like, what are some of the ingredients? One of the things you already mentioned is you had the freedom to potentially scrap the entire project if you found out that the community wasn't interested, right? That sounds like a key ingredient. Yeah, I mean, it's hard for businesses to do it because they can always take advantage of people who will use what they want or they can create the demand, right? But it actually does have a business case in that if you want to create something that people want and will use, it actually helps to bring them into the process, right? Now, you may be operating as a company in a culture, in a country or in a culture where that doesn't matter, you can kind of create the demand. But in a lot of the places I was working, if you really wanted people to use it, in the example I gave, they were not using it, you needed to bring them in. And if you want to expand to more and more places around the world, it's really helpful to bring those people into the process, right? And really to create things that they have been a part of. So ultimately, I think, well, let me take a step back. Your question specifically, can you repeat your question? Well, everything is interesting what we're discussing so far, so that's totally fine. But I was looking for ingredients in challenges. Like, what makes a good challenge that fits this approach? Because I really actually think you could do it with most projects. The question is really the willingness of the organization to allow it. So if you told me, hey, I want to make a calendar application for people in Australia. And the company said, hey, I'm willing to do radical disorder design. I think you could actually still do it. And it could work, right? It's not necessarily that the challenge of what you're creating affects whether or not. It's really the organizational environment and the understanding of these different types of knowledges and how you treat that and the relationship between the community and the professional designers that allows it to happen. But I'll give you some examples of challenges. When I say challenges, now I'm switching to difficulties you experience when you do this, right? So what is that? People are still people, even if they're from the community and they're not the professional designers. So they bring with them their experiences just like professional designers bring experiences. And they bring with them their biases just like professional designers have biases. So you still have to deal with the bias of the community members on your team, number one. And number two, you still have to deal with possibly having a biased group of the community on your team. So I actually work really hard to, number one, try to get a qualitatively representative sample of the community on the research and design team. And I may not be the best person to figure that out. So the first thing I do is just get people to be on the team. And the community knows best the different categories and qualities of the community members and how we might best construct that. So I don't worry too much about that initially. I just get people on the team and then once I have community members on the team they help to kind of get the right people on the team in order to create a balanced team. The second thing I'll say because I know I'm sparking ideas and you want to respond. The second thing I want to say is that we do a lot of bias awareness activities and methods. We do a lot of activities to reduce the impact of our bias. And I haven't ever worked professionally on design teams that do that actively in every project. And I do that whenever I'm running a project I do that actively in all our projects. We're always bringing our what we call positionality to the forefront making it visible and bringing our biases aware and becoming aware of it and seeing how it could potentially impact and change the direction. And we're always bringing that. Go ahead. No, yeah. Let me check this observation with you. Like I feel that for to fully reap the fruits of this approach you need to be very early in the process. Like even before maybe you have identified a challenge or solution that's already 18 steps too far but you need to invite the community and ask them like we think that this is an opportunity do you also think that this is an opportunity and if it isn't like are there any other challenges? Like you need to be it's hard to describe but in a different mindset set different stage when you start engaging in this way of working compared to maybe to how organizations are used to work right now. Yes. In fact, I would say if you don't bring them the community in at the earliest possible moment you're not doing this approach. Right. That's the whole idea. It's radicals all the way. So they are there from the beginning. So if they're not there from the beginning it's not I wouldn't call it radical participatory design. Yeah. One visualization that I have in my mind right now is ideally like your board of directors would be the community and you as an organization which is a group of people processes systems are facilitating this community. Like it flips the model completely around. Yeah. In fact, I think there are examples of what we call community institutional review boards IRBs but it's community members that then can approve or reject the research that an organization is doing that's trying to do it in a participatory way. Right. Or the designs that an organization is trying to do in a participatory way. So some people try to do it through that way. Like, okay, well we don't have the availability we don't have time-wise but we could set up a board that then reviews the process of what this organization is doing. I think that's a level removed. I like having the community review boards but only if I also have communities in the day-to-day decision-making as well. Let's sort of try to head towards a wrap-up of our conversation. A few more questions. One of them is I'm curious how you're thinking about this has evolved over the recent years. The biggest evolution is trying to distill through induction after doing this over and over. What are the qualities? What are the guidelines? It's not really a methodology it's more of an approach you can use whatever methodology and so that's what I've done. I've written it down. I've done a few talks at a few conferences and so I'm hopefully going to get some academic papers published on it. And it's also been in trying to respond to people who say I like it but I struggle with it. So one of the answers for instance that I give to people who say well look I'm a professional designer this doesn't leave me any place and I gave you the example of the doctor but one of the examples I give to when people say well what place do I have as a professional designer? I talk about cooking. Cooking is a great example in which really everyone or many people do it not necessarily everyone. Many people do it and it's an important thing for people to do. However there is still a role for professional chefs today. They can run a restaurant so sometimes people cook a lot at home but they don't want to cook all the time so they might go to a restaurant and a chef can provide a particular kind of experience. Number two they might cater. So I have an event and I might reach out to a chef for a catering company that can design a food experience for the event. Number three professional chefs create cookbooks with recipes that people can try and use. However this doesn't mean that there aren't recipes and oral cookbooks that different communities and cultures have used and do use for centuries. Maybe they don't publish it in written format and make money in selling it but it's there and if they were to publish it or if someone were to understand and learn those methods some of these people who do the publishing in written form of cookbooks or you could say Western culinary chefs could learn from some of these methods. So there's still a place for actual chefs if they still have a role in society even though everyone should learn how to cook or it's important to learn how to cook for their life for their health. So maybe I want to learn how to cook in more healthy ways. So I look at someone who's published something related to that. So there's different things we can learn from each other and we need more conversation between these types of cookbooks to continue the analogy. Yeah. We'll definitely continue that analogy but on a later conversation Victor. So you mentioned that people maybe struggle with this and I can I hope that there's somebody listening right now and thinks I wish there was more that I could read or see or do or practice. What would you say are some of a few good resources for somebody to get familiar with this and maybe get started. That's a tough question because it's I don't know that I have well what I'll do is I'll I'll send you some links to just different examples or maybe some case studies where people can look at that. I'm working on a writing where you can kind of see my thoughts in written form based on what I've seen is as commonalities across these projects. So maybe elements that all of them have but in essence this is just you know this is just a way of of doing any methodology and this is just radical it's to the root it's all the way. So I am working specifically on trying to spread this by getting more organizations to do it. So my goal really is that you would have an organization and they would have a participatory design unit. Maybe they're not ready to do it for everything but they'll have a unit. Specifically I'm working I've been I've already had one conversation with the DC local government because I think government civic design is a perfect place to begin that process. As a civic designer I think my role is different than as a UX designer in organization. In an organization I'm trying to find the intersection between business needs and user needs. But if I live in a country that aspires to democratic ideals and I'm a civic designer there should not be a difference between the needs of the people and the needs of the government by the people. The needs of the people and the needs of the government of the people the needs of the people and the needs of the government for the people. It should be one. So my job is to realign those because our bureaucracy has taken those further apart. And so I've been talking and trying to get groups to start participatory design units inside of government programs where they have innovation studios. The difficulty of course is that at any point a radical participatory design process can immediately flip to what I call a colonial participatory design process. You know you can come in the communities created this nice prototype and I can come in as the executive say no we're not going to do that. Oh so you didn't actually give up power. You just pretended to right. And that's why I always talk about there are a lot of resources I can share on on power if you just want to read about power but the main thing that I say with radical participatory design is we don't empower right. Because when you empower if that's even possible you're actually reinforcing the hierarchy that you're trying to subvert. You're saying you have the power I have the power we as professional designers have the power to choose who participates when they participate how they participate if they participate what we try to do in radical participatory design instead of empowering other people we just give up power the community will soon power. They they they can empower themselves they won't soon power but we have to give up power to create space. But I'll share some I'll share some things I think one great book is the book that I'm reading that I was telling you about designs for the pluriverse which goes into autonomous design of commute bike by communities who talks about transition design. I think those are really great starting points to begin to see what it looks like across the world in communities that are trying to establish themselves. I am also a person that says radical participatory design doesn't have to involve a professional designer. Some people say no participatory design only means if there's both professional designers and community members. And I say no as long as it's community members it's it's it's participatory for me. As long as it involves the people that are that are going to use it. So. Victor if if people want to continue this conversation maybe with you is that a way they can reach out? Yeah yeah if you send me a note on LinkedIn don't just connect with me if you connect with me and you don't write anything I don't don't accept it. So just saying send a note like hey excuse me I heard you speaking on the services design show I wanted to connect to talk more you could also send me an email I'm happy for you to email me victor.mycernay udoewa at nasa.gov I'm happy to talk there as well. All right I hope many people do respond. I know we started with with the question one of the first question was what do you hope people will remember? Now let me rephrase this question a bit differently. If you had to summarize our I don't know maybe it's even 60 minutes less 60 minutes how would you summarize this conversation? It's time to get to give up power and allow communities I shouldn't even say allow communities but to give up power and communities will then will assume the power it's time to continue and deepen the decolonial turn that is occurring in the design field there's still a lot of work to do in terms of what knowledge is how it's produced as well as ways of being in the world and it's time to explore different ways of designing that result from relational ways of being and relational ways of knowing so if you are a designer I really encourage you to practice giving up more power and especially to begin to practice design in communities in which you're already a member I try to do that as much as possible so one of the reasons I work at NASA because now as an employee at NASA when I work on the employee experience I'm not an outsider I'm an employee myself working on that employee experience of course I'm not a customer so I for the programs that I work in so I have to bring in customers for that part but I'm I'm working on a racial justice project in a parent teacher association or parent teacher organization as a parent of a child at the school we're working to design a racially just PTA I have another project where I'm working on doing on doing a future design for two schools to create a racially just future and we're building a roadmap of design changes to our school community but I'm a member of the school community so it makes sense so I invite you to begin to do that try practicing design more in communities in which you're already a member yeah I love that and like that's maybe the hack that if you don't see the opportunity yet to do it in your professional environment right now but nobody is stopping you from doing this in the communities where you're already part of which aren't paying your salary and maybe that's that's a great way to to get started Victor I just want to thank you for doing this important work for sort of pioneering this I don't know getting people excited about these ideas showing I think what's possible creating awareness like turning the unknown unknown into the known unknown that that's really important work once again thanks yeah thank you I'll leave you with one final thought I've noticed again this is a pattern when I've done a project of participatory design and it's truly been radically participatory there's this strange transformation that happens where people are not the same at the end of the process and I would say a majority of the research and design team members a majority experience a shift in power for that first project that I mentioned I mean one person in the community became a project manager another product manager another designer another engineer another receiver promotion because of the work they were doing another another had a flower business and that business improved I brought in three people from the sales and marketing organization just to help diversify the team from my from my organization I didn't bring any designers or engineers and they all gave up their jobs within a year on to other things I gave up my job within a year moved on other things so and it's happening again I'm at NASA and someone on on this participatory design team I didn't initiate this I didn't make the offer was offered by executives higher up was offered a permanent position to join my team based on the skills that she had been gaining so this is kind of a natural thing and the beauty of it is if it's truly embracing multiple visions of the good life of what a good future is that the community members have the right to reject it oh I don't want to do that I don't I don't view becoming some designer as the best thing in the world and that happens as well I've seen people say no I'm fine because they have a different vision of what of what's good for them and that's okay because part of what happens when you do radical participatory design as you move into what we call pluriversal design or pluriversal futures where you have a pluralistic vision of what the future is so I leave you with that and hopefully that inspires some of you yes thank you for that inspiration and sort of a disclaimer as in know what you're getting yourself into change change is around the corner when this happens Victor awesome that you came on the show happy that we were able to make this happen I'm looking forward to chatting with more people who are practicing this and experimenting with it so but first of all yeah thanks for coming on thanks for having me what's your take on a radical participatory design are you interested in applying this in your own practice make sure to leave a comment down below and let's continue the conversation over there if you enjoyed this episode make sure to also click that subscribe button so that you will be notified when a new conversation comes out thanks so much for watching to the service design show and I look forward to see you in the next video