Team reflections on emerging design methods

Last week, our design team had the opportunity to attend the Doing Design Festival hosted by Gerry Scullion and his team at This is Doing, where both the design community and the deep commitment of a number of great practitioners was on show.

This was an 8-hour line-up of incredible speakers such as KA McKercher, Marc Stickdorn and Rachael Dietkus, sharing their thoughts and experiences on some major topics within the design world.

The topics of ‘Designing with Humility’ and ‘Trauma-informed Design’ stood out to our team and have opened up conversations on how to best utilise this new knowledge to inform how we do things.

Our team shared some of their key takeaways and reflections from the festival.

KA McKercher’s session was a clear standout, with many in our team responding to the vulnerability they offered up in talking about their own experiences and mistakes working with disadvantaged communities in New Zealand as a fresh new design graduate.

“As a starter, it’s essential to learn through the journeys of other designers, especially about complicated situations like the ones KA highlighted. It motivated me to be more aware but at the same time to keep pushing.”

“KA’s talk encouraged reflection on what the designer’s role and place is when approaching a project on a fundamental level and allowed for self-reflection. Something you might forget in your everyday client work. And a reminder to not centre yourself as the vessel of problem-solving when taking on a project.”

“KA’s emphasis on humility as a designer and convener of people. I have been through enough ‘humility cycles’ - i.e, falling into traps and reflecting/recovering/learning from them to know how important they are to watch out for, but without the same depth of experience as KA to take a structured approach to do that. I loved the ‘map of traps and antidotes’ as a step towards that self-awareness for myself and as a way to communicate that knowledge with my teams.”

“Rachael’s talk brought to light the necessary sensitivities to approach trauma. The perspective of being trauma-responsive was a helpful method of how to behave in these spaces. The note of how design research projects often intentionally recruit vulnerable participants was an eye-opening fact.”

“I loved Rachael pointing us to the fact that trauma does not impact all of us in the same way. The context in which it occurred is critically important. A lot to consider when working on certain projects.”

Defining Trauma: ‘It’s easy for us to immediately think of trauma related to extreme circumstances or one-time events. Yet trauma can have many different faces; some we wouldn’t ordinarily label as such, like experiencing bullying, work stress or the aftermath of the pandemic.’

“And some more wise words from Rachael which I will consider going forward; ‘From improving healthcare to adapting to the virtual learning environment (and everything in between), many design projects work with people who may be impacted by a breadth of trauma. Reflect on the role of trauma in your practice and identify one way you interface with trauma in your current role.’

She also shared the Design Justice Network Principles, which I believe all designers should take a few minutes to read.”

This workshop, run by Adam and Renatus, was eye-opening to how we can facilitate a group when there is a challenging subject matter, or really, just challenges in general.

“How do we provide a ‘safe’ environment for people to feel they can be themselves and do their best work? It touched on the way our bodies react to unique situations in the same way. Did you know our body treats feeling unsafe (like being in danger) and feeling uncomfortable (like presenting to a group) in the same way?”

“I am constantly intrigued by the communication that is happening between our brain and our bodies, so this was another reminder that every little thing we are doing in our work needs to be considered and designed well for the best possible outcomes. Something to keep in mind when I dive deeper into facilitation practice at Emma Blomkamp’s Co-design Practitioners workshop this year!”

Our team walked away with some valuable learnings from this conference along with a renewed love of the complexities of our craft. All great reminders that we must stay aware of the complete picture surrounding our practice.

Driven by our natural inquisition and introspection, we continue to reassess and reevaluate how we can best engage and impact systems, organisations and human experience.