084 – Equity-Centered Design for Non-Profits with Sheryl Cababa

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek:  Ever wondered how to empower your end users through design? Are you familiar with design research or design thinking? Stay with us; by the end, you’ll have the insights that can transform how you approach design and education in your organization.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. I’m your host, David, And in this episode, we’re going to be talking about all things design research with Sheryl Cababa.

Sheryl is the author of Closing the Loop, which is a mastermind in systems thinking and equity-centered design. As chief strategy officer at Seattle’s Substantial Studio, she’s transformed digital strategies for impactful entities like the Gates Foundation. Residing in Seattle, Sheryl delights in complex baking projects and imparts her expertise at the University of Washington’s Design Program. Sheryl, thank you so much for being here on the episodes today.

Sheryl Cababa: Thank you. Excited to talk about all things design.

David Pisarek: So am I. I love design. I’m a designer at heart. I don’t do enough of it. Staying trendy, staying on point, learning the new styles and what’s going on, and how we can incorporate accessibility into the design. I think we’re going to have a really amazing conversation today.

Sheryl Cababa: Yeah, I’m excited. Awesome.

David Pisarek: So I guess let’s start at the beginning. What is design research?

Sheryl Cababa: Design research, it’s basically understanding the needs of your end users or end beneficiaries, people who will be using or affected by the products and solutions that you’re developing, and really understanding their context and involving them at every step of the way within the design process. We call it design research because it’s a little bit different from pure academic research in that you’re just trying to create insight. Rather, design research informs eventual design solutions. We always have that in mind as we research.

David Pisarek: How can a non-profit think about things in a design research methodology?

Sheryl Cababa: One of the things we do, I work a lot in education. I work with philanthropists and EdTech developers who are basically creating digital solutions for the most part in education as well as various services. We describe our work as speaking to elevate student voice throughout the process.

Really trying to understand students’ contacts in terms of what products and processes are they using now within their education. We’re doing project on potential math solutions, math digital solutions. We’ll be talking to students about their experiences in math, not just with digital solutions, but just like their perspectives in general.

Then, later on, involve them in coming up with ideas. We call that stage of the design “process ideation for potential solutions” or “how to solve some of the problems we identified.”

Then, later on, they would validate the solutions as they become prototypes, and we would test with them. It’s basically taking whoever is typically least powerful in the design process and empowering them to have input and context.

David Pisarek: What’s a way that you could empower somebody that isn’t as involved in the process?

Sheryl Cababa: One of the ways that design research, again, differs from traditional forms of research is that we often engage in what we call participatory methods. Sometimes in many organizations, you might hear this described as co-design or co-creation.

What that means is identifying problems or challenges or opportunities and bringing actual end users into the process. In healthcare, this might mean involving patients in the process of ideating.

In education, it means students and teachers, people who are often at the receiving end of solutions that get tossed to them, and they are just like, “Okay, I don’t know if I like how this is designed or I don’t even know what it’s good for,” and basically giving them the tools to be engaged with product developers throughout the process.

For example, we just had a workshop where we were asking students to imagine the future of math. It might not seem directly related to eventual product development because it seems so broad, but there are lots of nuggets of wisdom that come out of that. For example, students say they want math to be more directly relevant to their day-to-day life and to understand the point of it.

They want to get out of the theoretical. They want to do more collaborative work. Those kinds of things can be inserted into ideation sessions so that they’re imagining a future and future scenarios, but then those can funnel into actual feasible ideas.

David Pisarek: I think that’s really cool. End-user-centric design, being able to think from their perspective.

And a lot of people, I think, really struggle with that, being able to go, “Okay, here’s what we want because we’re trying to solve this business problem. Maybe it’s fundraising, maybe it’s how people use our services or the products that we provide” or things like that. But what’s their experience? How can we look through their lens? And I think this is what you’re talking about there.

Sheryl Cababa: Yeah. If you just think about well-designed digital consumer products, we oftentimes point to Apple. It’s funny because you were just complaining about your muffin.

Apple is oftentimes It’s called up as a standard for really good and engaging end-user experiences. But you also get that on products, good or bad, like Instagram, right? It’s giving you what you want in the moment, and it’s really super easy to use. It’s very engaging.

Those lessons can be learned rather than causing harm by creating digital distractions and things like that. They can be used as well for good purposes in spaces like education, like how do you make EdTech products more engaging? You can borrow from some of those kinds of tenets that are used in consumer digital products.

The way that they arrived at that for those consumer digital products is by doing loads of research. Having people testing and constantly getting feedback and improving their products. So by its nature, design thinking is an iterative process, which means you have the opportunity to take that feedback and feed it back into your product or service or the way you do things.

Really effective way of just extending who your stakeholders are, understanding their needs and wants, and then acting on it and also feeding that input back into the process.

David Pisarek: One of the things that I like to do when I talk with our clients (and I think I’ve mentioned it on a couple of episodes in the podcast here) is ask yourself, “Why.” But ask yourself “why” three to five, what is it that you’re trying to solve this? “Why are we trying to solve that? Because X, Y, and Z. Why is this a problem? Because blah, blah, blah.”

Then you can actually really get the core of why you’re doing what you’re doing, who you’re trying to help, and how you’re trying to help. Then you really understand the core, what it is and why it is, and then start to address how you’re going to solve that.

Sheryl Cababa: Yeah, I totally agree with that. There’s this one startup founder, now an investor. He had often said, “Fall in love with your problem, not with the solution.” So really understand the problem space and what you’re trying to solve for.

And also, as you mentioned, the outcomes you’re trying to achieve. And then those two things, whatever the problem, the clarity on what the problems are, as well as the outcomes you’re trying to achieve, should meet in the middle in terms of what the solution should be.

The solution shouldn’t come first. There are a lot of things out there where it feels like a solution to searching for a problem.

I think, for example, a lot of the generative AI we’re experiencing right now falls into that category, where it’s, “Okay, now we have all of this information, and it’s being processed in this way. What is it good for?” And not to say that’s a terrible way to innovate, but I think if you’re working in the non-profit space and you’re really focused on problem-solving in specific areas and for specific communities, then you really want to understand the problem and you want to be clear on what your outcomes are.

David Pisarek: Yeah, and I think this ties in quite a bit into equity-centered design. And the way that we reshape and we engage with our audiences, what are your thoughts on how non-profits can think and work in that way?

Sheryl Cababa: I think if you have a neutral view of design thinking, you can just look at it as like, “Oh, we’re just trying to serve the average user. In education, we’re just trying to serve the average student.” And what that means is that you see a lot of EdTech products, for example, being developed around really privileged students in very white-dominant environments, and they have a lot of resources, their schools have a lot of resources.

Now, in our equity center and design practice, we use what I think in many circles is called inclusive design.

Really thinking about who are the people, the end users and end beneficiaries who maybe have the most extreme experiences and designing for them, or maybe are least served by today’s solutions and today’s system.

For example, we do a lot of work that’s meant to benefit students from historically under-resourced communities, which can be Black, Latino, and Indigenous students, as well as multilingual learners.

The idea is that if you design for them, it will trickle up and everybody else will benefit, too. That can be used for designing many different products. Some of the examples you just see in the real world are, for example, like curb cuts.

Curb cuts were designed for those with mobility issues, but a lot of other people benefit from that, too. If you’re pushing a stroller, you benefit from it. If you’re pulling or pushing anything on wheels, if you’re walking with your bike, you benefit from that, even though it wasn’t designed for you because it was designed for those who have an extreme experience.

Same with subtitles and movies and TV. Those are meant for people who have difficulty hearing. You can see that others can benefit as well. So that’s the perspective is designing for those who tend to have the worst experiences today and are the least supported and designed for them and everybody else will benefit.

David Pisarek: Just back to the closed captioning comment.

There’s a good friend of mine who swears up and down that their children can read as good as they do because on their main television, they’ve turned closed captioning on. But as the kids are watching their TV shows, they’ve got the closed captioning on, so they can follow along as well.

So, yeah, totally hear your point about making sure that what you’re doing helps maybe some of those, I don’t like saying the word, but outlier cases. And, yeah, it will help more people. It will bring inclusion and help those that might not think that they need it, but can still benefit from it.

It’s like somebody that goes for years and years and years without going to the eye doctor, then they go, and they get a very minimal prescription for a pair of glasses. They could see the world fine before, but now everything is really clear. They didn’t know what they were missing until they had something in place to help them.

Sheryl Cababa: Yeah, exactly. The avenue for that is those are who you should be doing research with; those are who you should be doing co-design with because then they can come to the table with their lived experience and help inform design decisions and basically the work you’re doing so that it’s not just confined to those who have the most power in decision making, but that there is input from those who will be most affected by what you’re designing and creating.

David Pisarek: Love that. Are there any key principles that a non-profit or charity should be thinking of when trying to embark down the equity-centered research road?

Sheryl Cababa: Yeah, I actually wrote a little bit about this, and it’s very different than conducting traditional research.

When you are working with individuals in those communities who have suffered from a lot of trauma or who are essentially from historically marginalized environments, the idea is that you should have representation on your team person and foremost.

We have researchers or designers or developers, people on your team who have that lived experience as well. That is not what we sometimes “call parachute design,” where you are parachuting into a community that’s not yours, and you’re like, “I’m going to work here to try to understand them.” It just reminds me of real 19th-century explorers who would go to Polynesia or something and just be like, “Oh, my gosh, they were so savage there.”

Not having that perspective is really important. It’s really important to really have lived experts on your team. Oftentimes, because we work with diverse communities, we sometimes have what we call cultural moderators on our team. People who can work to bridge that between our team and the communities that we’re working with.

We bring in people from the community on our team. The other thing is that there’s this really great paper called “Why Am I Always Being Research?”

It was published by the organization Chicago Beyond. I recommend anybody embarking on research with communities that are not theirs to look at it because It talks about the potential harm that design researchers can cause if they’re not practiced in thinking about “how do you engage communities,” like blowing in, doing a lot of research, releasing your papers and your insights, and then dipping straight out and they never hear from you again, and nor do these problems ever get solved.

What’s nice about design thinking is that the research is meant to directly inform potential approaches, solutions, interventions, and things like that. The idea is that you should be engaging with folks from the community in participation in design. So, it’s not just understanding their context, but also imagining the future, much like how we engage students and imagine the future of math. So I think that those are some tenets.

Don’t just extract people’s stories. Engage them in the imaginative part, which is the fun part is really thinking about what the future could look like.

Make sure to validate that with them later on. And then also, yeah, it’s super important to have a representation on your team.

And also, you should understand your positionality as a designer or as of any practitioner who’s going to be doing this work. Where do you come from? What are your biases? What are the ways that inform your ways of thinking? And make sure that you have self-awareness about that as you go into this process.

David Pisarek: Just your point about the team making sure you’ve got diversity, not just in nationality or race or gender or affiliation or anything like that.

If you don’t have that in your team, seek out people from the community to volunteer to participate to help in some way. You’d be surprised how many people are willing to give up some of their time to help an organization that has an impact in their community.

Sheryl Cababa: Yeah, I would stress not asking them to volunteer, but actually paying them for their time, which is really important to us, making sure people understand They are valued in this process, and we’re not just asking them to, If we’re getting paid for this work, so should you.

I think that an important aspect of it is making sure that we are able to put a monetary value on their time, as well as doing some reciprocal activities. Because I work in education, sometimes students ask us, “How do I get into the design field? What do I need to do?”

We oftentimes offer up mentoring, we offer up making connections to people or organizations, and even schools that might be helpful to learn from.

I think that’s something that is a really important way to reciprocate with the community that we’re designing with.

David Pisarek: I think that’s really great. We’re talking about an educational campaign. You’re in the educational space. I’ve got about 11 years of post-secondary education. So let’s talk about it-

Sheryl Cababa: I’m sorry.

David Pisarek: I loved it. I loved it. I thought it was great working and connecting with the students. It was just such a really awesome vibe. That was my experience.

Sheryl Cababa: Yeah, I’m joking.

David Pisarek: I’ve never been in experience, but it was mine.

Sheryl Cababa: I’m joking. It’s a complex system. It’s a complex space, but it’s also a very fulfilling space for both students and educators. So I’m sorry, I was joking around there.

David Pisarek: Yeah, no worries. So, When we think about stakeholders, what stakeholder systems are needed to be successful?

Sheryl Cababa: Yeah, that’s such a good question.

This is the intersection that I love between design thinking and system thinking. With design thinking, you bring in that focus on people and empathy and really understanding people’s experiences and involving them.

With systems thinking, you’re thinking about “how broad are the stakeholders who I should be engaging? How are things interconnected? What are the potential radiating effects of the decisions we’re making or the things that we’re designing to insert into the system?” Some good examples in education is that, let’s say, you’re coming up with courseware or something in the post-secondary system.

Oftentimes, there’s a lot of digital courseware that’s being used now in higher ed. You’re not just thinking about how students are going to experience that, which is what you might do as a design thinker. You also have to take into consideration the other things that might cause the success or failure of this product or solution.

That could be, “What’s the IT environment within the institution that you’re hoping to deploy this at? What are the standards that are being required from an education perspective? What is the regulatory environment when it comes to things like student privacy and data protection and things like that?”

Also, budget finances, who is running the institution: What are their potential hopes and dreams? The way I think about that is as you think about how broad your stakeholder should be: one, doing a stakeholder map. This is where mapping is really useful.

We’ll work with different decision-makers within the process and be like, “Who else needs to be involved in this?” Because they’re going to have an impact on what you’re trying to do.

And trying to understand all of their incentives because there are oftentimes really competing incentives along the way. For example, maybe your digital product can’t be integrated into a university system because it only works with certain learning management systems.

And so your IT director might just be like, “No, we’re not going to go with that. We’re going to go with this one because it works better. It’s less of a lift for my team. And so we’re just going to go with that.”

And that might be a worst product for those who are in the classroom. But understanding what those incentives are and what drives people helps you develop solutions better so that you can take that into account.

If you’re talking to a variety of IT directors, then you’ll understand what their incentives are and be like, “Okay, if they’re a barrier to the uptake of this because they have certain preferences, we might want to work that in, or we might need to know how to navigate that.”

That’s just one example. I’m not trying to say, “Oh, yeah, IT directors are always blocking things.” They’re really facilitating how digital products are used in various institutions. So you can’t trivialize what their needs might be. You need to integrate that into your thinking and understanding of how you create solutions.

David Pisarek: Yeah. There are technical requirements. Do the students in this example, do they have the hardware that can support whatever platform? Right specs, are they on Chromebooks or Macs or PCs? What are the devices they’re using? So there’s all kinds of limitations that we might not initially consider.

If we were to throw that concept, “Hey, you know what? There’s things that we don’t know about.” Bringing people in, surveying learning, having communications, conversations, getting details about what it is that they do, how they’re doing it, and really understanding that you’re going to learn an awful lot through that process, help inform some of the decisions that you get to go through the design thinking process.

Sheryl Cababa: Yeah, that’s right. I think you won’t be able to solve everything. It’s not like you can get every possible leak and block that or whatever. It’s just knowing what you need to anticipate and being able to prioritize.

An example I think about a lot in education was that time almost ten years ago now when the LA Unified School District decided to give iPads to everybody. I think it was this moment where, “Oh, yeah, we’re closing the digital device It’s an equity thing. We’re going to give these devices across the board to everybody.”

But they hadn’t really considered the different barriers. There are so many students who don’t have internet at home, and now they’re digitizing experiences that used to be analog.

So how can they possibly do their schoolwork? There was friction between the publisher, who was supposed to create the software, Apple, and the school district. And it was like there wasn’t the right amount of planning between these entities to make sure the timeline is matched up and things like that. And then, almost immediately, there were accusations of students hacking the system. And I think there’s an open question about that.

I think some of them were just trying to make this product work for them in the way that they want. There’s a lot you can learn from what people hack.

David Pisarek: There’s a great video, and every so often it will pop up in my feed of this lady that appears to be a product designer.

It’s a split-screen reaction video. And the screen beside, we’ve all probably seen, you’ve got kids, I’ve got kids. If you don’t have kids, you’ve probably seen kids play with a toy with a box and shapes on the top, and you have to fit the piece in.

So the start piece goes in the start, whatever. And this video is this woman who appears to have been the one who invented this toy. And I go, “Oh, square peg goes in the square hole.” She’s like, “Yeah,” super excited. Rectangle peg goes in the square hole. It’s the same size shape. She’s like, “No,” but she’s okay with it. Then it goes to, I think, a crescent shape: goes in the square hole. And there is a circle that goes in the square hole. Then there was a start when everything went in there, and by the end of it, it broke down, crying like, “How can you possibly do this to me?” And I could see your face right now, Sheryl. Go with things with the best of intentions.

But we don’t necessarily know how somebody is going to interpret that or use it or whatever it is that they want to do. People want to push boundaries sometimes.

Sheryl Cababa: Yeah. And I think you can actually get some of that. You’re engaging those users throughout the process. You’ll see this happening as you’re developing products and services.

Yeah, I’ve seen some of the wildest things when people have been testing products, and I was like, “Oh, my gosh, I had no idea they would try to do that.” And that resonates in some ways. It’s funny because there’s a research lab at the University of Washington, where I teach, called Kids Team.

It’s intentional for product developers to come in with things that they’re designing and developing for kids. This is a group of kids who are basically within this program to learn about product design, I guess. They’re in elementary school. I think the oldest age would be 11 or 12.

I remember some of my students at the University of Washington were testing products with them, and they were just like, “They are savage. They will tear your product to pieces in terms of their critique of it, the way they test and use it.” It’s very, very eye-opening because we do have a bias towards what we call and design the happy path, which is we think, “Oh, this is ideally how people will use this.”

Oftentimes, it blocks us or prevents us mentally from accounting for the other ways that people might perceive this or the other ways people might use it. Just watching somebody test something can just blow all those assumptions out of the water, which is why that process is so important.

David Pisarek: I totally agree.

We learn early on in our educational path that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. I think everybody, if you’ve been to school in North America, all the many places around the world, understands that to go from here to here, you have to go straight, right? And there’s a really great photo of epic design fails thing in real life. And one of them is a municipality.

They drew, and there’s an aerial shot of it. It’s a sidewalk that goes like this, but there’s nothing in between. This is like a beaten path on a diagonal through the grass because people just want to cut through. They don’t want, right? So what did they do? They ended up bringing the sidewalk back and making it bigger rounding it and curving it instead of going right to the corner.

They solved that, but they went through this thing of pouring brand-new concrete and all this type of stuff. They maybe didn’t plan for the way people actually use things. And I think that that’s an important thing for us as designers, as people at work in non-profits, how are people going to use our products?

How are they interacting with us? How can they get in touch with us? How can they find out about what we do? Let’s eliminate some of that friction.

Sheryl Cababa: Yeah. It’s funny you bring up that example because I used to work a renowned user experience design firm called Adapted Path. And that’s the idea.

You want to understand the adapted path that people will take, or people are inclined to take and design for that rather than designing something and seeing how people get around it or create their own rules. Instead, it’s easier to try to design for that to begin with, as you were saying. You’ll use a lot a your resources if you understand that you don’t have to for all the concrete.

Yeah, I really love that example, and that’s why it’s important to engage people throughout the process. Also, it’s a reminder I want to say, one of the tenets of design research is actually not asking people what they want.

Because people in general are pretty bad at articulating what they want. What’s that famous Henry Ford quote, which was like, “if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” I think you can understand context and then interpret some of that.

Then when it comes to, I had talked about ideation earlier, allowing people to really imagine things without any constraints or restriction, it doesn’t mean all of the things they imagine will become actual solutions, but the way that they think about things can inform feasible solutions.

There is some interpretation that happens along the way, even within the community, because there are these other things that you need to consider as you walk down the path of creating something new to problem-solve or something specific.

David Pisarek: Amazing. Sheryl, thank you so much. This has been fantastic.

We’ve learned some really great things from you that I can take back to my team. I hope the people listening have been able to get some really great insight, advice, even if it’s just something to think about when you’re going down your path of, “Okay, we want to serve this group of people in our community in this way.”

Well, is that really the way? And let’s empower ourselves to think bigger, think big, think outside of the box.

Let’s rethink the way that we actually think. I think that’s an interesting way to understand what it is that we’re talking about, is it’s not about doing something new. I think it’s really about figuring out a way of doing it more inclusively and better to serve the heading group.

Sheryl Cababa: Yeah, I totally agree with that.

David Pisarek: All right. So if anybody wants to get in touch with you, what do they need to do?

Sheryl Cababa: Yes, I’m on LinkedIn, just Sheryl Cababa, I’m the only one out there.

I’m also on Twitter, just @SherylCababa.

You can Find My Book on Rosenfeld Media, which is my publisher, and it’s called Closing the Leap: Systems Thinking for Designers.

David Pisarek: Amazing. So, Sheryl, thanks again for joining in. It’s been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast.

Everybody listening, if you want any of the details we spoke about, want links to Sheryl’s Book or LinkedIn or Twitter, X, whatever you want to call that social media platform, link to that. We’re going to have all that on our show notes page. Just head over to nonprofitdigital.com. Click on this episode for all the details.

Until next time, keep on being successful.