I enjoyed exploring “Liberatory Design: Your Toolkit to Design for Equity”. First, I appreciated the idea of this toolkit being analogous to a “card deck”, signifying that the many points and guidelines within can be shuffled and utilized specifically in certain situations when different circumstances call for different things. Several concepts that really resonated with me were: “...authentic user-centered design, not ‘you’-centered design...”; “Listen from a place of love.”; “Powerful design emerges from the mess, not from avoiding it.”; “Practice transparency of process and non-attachment to ideas.”. I was very inspired by the points about riding the bus to expand one’s empathetic and positional awareness, and tallying speaking turns during a meeting to distinguish patterns that cause imbalance. Both are somewhat simple activities, but render profoundly effective if carried out with careful intent. Two of the visual images in this toolkit also stood out to me: the one of the cartoon person with “values, biases, emotions, habits” written, and the other with the cartoon hand with “individual, institutional, structural” written. I feel like the question “How am I positioned?” raised in the text can be further explored and dissected to really analyze all aspects of identity and position as they pertain to specific environments and certain times. I wonder how this toolkit can be expanded to encompass resource providers for the PROTOTYPE (building) stage, in order to ensure that these partners are also abiding by the toolkit guideposts. I love the idea of “getting to know your end-users”, but I wonder if there can be a more technical, logistical algorithm as to how this can be carried out in a manner that is maximally efficient and effective. Lastly, I wonder when the text says “Using what you’ve distilled from the conversations, you narrow the project focus”, to what conversations are they referring? Ideally, these conversations are always taking place between designers and their users and the surrounding community. However, I wonder if there is a more formalized way in which this occurs to ensure that these conversations are specific and deeply address all considerable factors.
Issues that have been impacting my life and the ones around me mainly revolve around environmental issues. One of the pressing issues that affects the agriculture community in California is the State’s distribution of water. Now a tactic that the State Government has had for many years is to take water from Northern California and send it down to the South. The south is in need of water as they do not get enough to support themselves, but the issue is a bit larger and encompuses the states refusal to create more reservoirs to store water to be used during the dryer months. But the main issue is that the focus is uneven and falls heavily on the side of sending it to the south instead of distributing it evenly so farmers in all regions but mainly central and southern california have the proper amount of water to grow their crops. California is one of the leading states in the production and exporting of agriculture products due to our vast and wide scale of geological environments, but ...
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