Lauren Williams, designer, researcher and educator, on how design upholds power and how it can help dismantle it | Women at Work

Women at Work

In this episode of Women at Work, host Ana Guerra interviews designer and researcher Lauren Williams about the intersection of design, power

Key takeaways

• Lauren Williams defines design as an inherently political practice because it involves the capacity to shape the world and exercise power.
• The concept of 'innocence' in design refers to practices where designers attempt to distance themselves from the real-world impacts of their work.

Main topics

• Design as a political practice
• Critique of design thinking

Notable quotes

Design is a practice of power and political in itself.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a powerful call for designers to move away from

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:05) Welcome to Women at Work by Hay, episode 7, season 6. Welcome to another episode of our podcast. I don't really know how your listeners feel about life nowadays. To me, things get weirder and weirder every day. Things are so weird, so difficult to comprehend, that it feels like we're alienated from our own experience. And, of course, not everybody feels like this, but... Being young or middle-aged in the creative landscapes of any city, big or small, around the globe, brings an extra dose of uncertainty. They say the darkest hour is that before the dawn. If you feel that way, you're not alone. We hear you. We have much more power to change things than we're made to believe. Speaker 2 (0:54) I'm Ana Guerra and today we're talking about design, but perhaps not in the way you might expect. Our guest is a designer, but she's also a researcher, artist and educator whose work asks some poignant questions about the systems we're living in. Who they were designed for, who they harm, who gets to imagine alternatives and whether design can do anything more than make those systems look slightly better. She works with visual and interactive media to understand, critique and reimagine the ways in which social and economic systems distribute and exercise power over black life and death. She has worked across design, policy, economic justice, education, facilitation and speculative design and has created projects that imagine everything from liberated economies to a world without police and prisons. Sounds amazing. Incredible, incredible bio. Lauren Williams, welcome to Women at Work by Hay. Speaker 1 (1:53) Thank you for having me. Speaker 2 (1:55) How are you doing, Lauren? Speaker 1 (1:59) It's Speaker 2 (1:59) a Speaker 1 (1:59) loaded question. If you want the real answer, I'm probably sitting, I'm a little heavy, sitting with a lot of grief. Speaker 1 (2:13) Coincidentally, at this moment, I'm in my friend's house. It's not my house. It's very stylish, but she's an artist. Because there was a tornado yesterday in Detroit. So there's powers out like at my house and at my studio. Speaker 1 (2:28) I'm safe, but it's, there's, it's just like a little taken, but more broadly, I'm just, my mom is sort of at an end stage of life. And so figuring out care and like back and forth there has been a lot lately, but it's also teaching me a lot. So yeah. Speaker 2 (2:45) I can imagine, but so sorry to hear that. I mean, Speaker 1 (2:48) you're safe, which Speaker 2 (2:49) is the most important thing, but yeah, it must've been. Really, really, really scary. We don't get tornadoes here in Barcelona. You Speaker 1 (2:57) don't really get them here either, which is why it was kind of crazy. Climate Speaker 2 (3:01) is one of those things that we will probably talk about later. Lauren, as I mentioned in the introduction, the pressure was quite real with this interview because you have a very well-founded political basis for your design and your creative practice. And that's also something very, very refreshing and very nice to hear. Speaker 1 (3:21) Many Speaker 2 (3:22) times design is debated as this kind of one side would be let's make things nice and the other side would be Speaker 1 (3:30) let's Speaker 2 (3:31) make things functional, practical. There's always this kind of conundrum, but there are a few occasions in which the politics are intertwined in the critique. Although, of course, like... At the root of it, there is a lot of it embedded in how we give shape to the world. How did, in your case, politics and design get together? When was the first time that you started thinking about these matters? Speaker 1 (3:54) Um, I think the best, the most succinct way to answer that is that I think I just come from a school of thought that understands everything about us as people and what we can do in all of our decisions as political, in the sense that they concern power, they require power, they exercise power. And so if I understand power is like, our capacity to shape the world, to shape our own experiences of life, to direct our own actions, and sometimes, you know, to control other people's, then I inherently understand design as a practice of power and political in itself. So I think as a framing point, that's part of it, but also I should probably explain that I started Speaker 1 (4:48) my career and like came out of undergrad, having studied economics, political science, and then went straight into working in sort of community development and social policy in the U.S. So for me, design as a field of study was like a much later thing. I didn't study design until graduate school and it sort of looked like a pivot because I left policy and D.C. and went to study. design in California. So yeah, my orientation to design came out of a frustration with the nonprofit industrial complex I was deep in in that career and I'm kind of back in now. But I was in Washington, D.C. at a time when like civic design was becoming really popular and design thinking as like a vehicle for that was becoming really popular. And I was frustrated with how I watch us. not us as in my organization, but like the U.S. field around like social development and things like that, making decisions about what could help poor people without poor people involved. And so hearing design thinking talk about empathy and like designing with and in the interest of the people who will actually experience something sounded really promising. So that's what. sort of shifted me toward design but I can say more later about why I've also come to critique that as well. Speaker 2 (6:30) Yeah definitely that's one of the questions that I really want to ask like the design thinking but we will get to that. First I would love to know like because you grew up overseas and you had I can imagine you had a lot of input like from living in different places. Were you one of these creative kids like how did you how do you think that that childhood that kind of different inputs in your in your brain modified the way that you looked at the world and especially at the US Speaker 1 (7:01) Yeah, I think for context, we left the United States when I was like three or four and moved to Japan. My dad was in the Navy. And so we were stationed overseas for most of my life until high school when we moved back to the U.S. So I think it's important to say that like the context in which I was overseas was as an occupying force in other countries. I didn't understand that as a kid, obviously. I just thought everybody lived in Japan at some point in their life. So I think for one thing, that kind of like normalized just other places and other cultures and other languages for me and normalized being out of my own element because all the places we lived were. either majority Asian in Japan or majority white in Italy. And so it was very obvious that I was not from there to everyone, including myself. And so just like the comfort with being uncomfortable is something that I think has been really formative for me. But then when it comes to creativity, yeah, my mother is a musician. She's a jazz flutist. And then throughout my life taught band, orchestra, languages. And I think anytime we lived overseas, she very intentionally sort of embedded us in the place we were in, you know, to the best of her ability. So like, we would often live off the base, which is not necessarily common. Or my piano teachers were always like from the place we were living in Japanese or I guess Czech when we were living in Italy. But anyway, we were engaging with the places we lived, not just sort of staying in this completely American bubble on the bass. So I think she was a huge part of both shaping my understanding of what creativity is through music and this idea of creative expression and self-expression, but also... very intentionally like making home in places that are born in a very literal way, but making them not so through relationships and through learning about the places we're in and things like that. Speaker 2 (9:28) That is a very nice way to kind of experience the world because many times people move Speaker 1 (9:32) around Speaker 2 (9:33) the world and they kind of impose their own way of seeing things in other countries, especially when you come from probably a more privileged space. It happens a lot in Barcelona. So it's very nice to hear that, like that way of trying to learn the local culture and language. Speaker 2 (9:53) I read something about your political evolution because I'm imagining little Lauren growing up overseas and then going to study and getting all political. And like you said, like you described this process as just pivoting a little bit and then a little bit and then a little bit going a bit forward. I was wondering, like, what were you pivoting away from when this process started? And like, what did you go towards? Like, how did you start it and how is it going? I guess it's a process. Speaker 1 (10:25) I appreciate you thinking that I was like a politicized child. I was not. I was, yeah, I was kind of oblivious. I think, again, I was so, I didn't remember our life in the United States. So for me, I was just like flopped in Japan. And I was like, this is where everyone does this. Like, this is what we're doing. And it probably wasn't until like. Speaker 1 (10:49) I think what I would say to some degree, returning to the United States in high school. So when I started high school, ninth grade, I was like 13. We moved back to Prince George's County, Maryland, which is where I was born. And then we came back to and it's a majority black county for a long time. I don't know if it's still true. It was the wealthiest black county in the country, I think. But that also means. given the volume of black people, there's also many not wealthy black people in the county. So it's sort of uplifted as this pinnacle of black excellence and wealth. And also it contains multitudes as black people do. And so I was thrown into a high school that was 100 % black and I had never... Speaker 1 (11:37) been immersed in Black culture outside of my immediate family. And so, for me, it was a culture shock. Um... And I'm not saying that was, like, a political awakening for me, but I think it was the first time I was starting to understand... what race was and like that it had these assumptions around it about how you were supposed to act and um things like that and it probably it probably started a little earlier in middle school like being in a at a base in Italy where more of our fellow military families had more recently been stationed there from the U.S. so they had these perceptions of like how I should have shown up as a black a little black girl that I was like completely unaware of. Speaker 2 (12:19) Right. Speaker 1 (12:20) So I'm saying that not to say, even then, I don't think I was clearly politicized, but I think... Speaker 1 (12:28) going to college I was taking a lot of courses I didn't know what I wanted to major in so I was taking a lot of international studies classes just things that were already interesting to me and learning a lot more about you know colonialism and global global politics and economy I was learning about I was an econ major as well and I was consistently confused about why anyone would make any judgments based on economic theory because rationality