Una was invited to give a virtual talk for a Transmedia Studies class at Hanyang University in Seoul. “Design Justice Approaches to Transmedia Co-Creation” discusses the design justice principles and framework through the lens of a long-term engagement with Feathers of Hope, an Indigenous youth advocacy project in Ontario.
SCRIPT
TRANSCRIPT
[TRIGGER WARNING: This talk contains content that may be triggering to some. From 3:50 to 12:36 there will be discussion of colonial violence, religious abuse, the abuse of children, communal harm and generational trauma.The timestamps are noted in the transcript]
>> SLIDE 1:
Design Justice approaches to transmedia co-creation”
Speaker Name & Date: 이윤아 / Una Lee / June 20, 2022
SPEAKER 1 (Tammy): Can you hear the announcement? Okay, recordings in progress
SPEAKER 2 (Una Lee): Thank you so much for this invitation Tammy, I just feel really honoured to be talking to you today. And just grateful for you and the class making accommodations across time zones so that we can talk to each other, even if it’s asynchronously and mediated. Today I’m going to be talking to you about design justice approaches to transmedia co-creation.
>> SLIDE 2:
The animation shows 3 orbs moving toward each other to form a venn diagram, they then overlap each other forming the And Also Too brand identity
So, When I think about design justice, I think a lot about power. Any design endeavor involves and interacts with three groups — the people who benefit, the people who participate, and the people who are impacted. And often, those who are impacted by a design “problem” or “solution” don’t actually participate in the creation of that solution. And so they dont always benefit from it.
My design studio, And Also Too, puts forward design practice in which these three spheres overlap as much as possible. And so we try to make sure through our practice, those who are impacted are also participating and are also the key beneficiaries
What we do is we use co-design processes to create transmedia. I’m going to talk about what that looks like in the context of an engagement that we’ve been involved in for about 10 years now. And I’ll say that my studio is primarily a graphic design agency, so you’ll see that most of the work I’m going to be talking about today is art and publishing based. But it’s really my hope that you can extrapolate from these stories to understand how the methodologies can apply to other media, like technology, other digital media I know the class has been working a lot in.
I’ll also reflect on this engagement in light of the design justice principles. I’ll close by sharing some lessons we learned through putting the principles into practice.
I need to start though with a trigger warning. Any story about seeking justice begins with violence, and this one is no different.
>> SLIDE 3:
Trigger Warning
In the first 5 to 10 minutes or so of this presentation, I’m going to be talking about colonial violence in multiple forms, religious abuse, and mass deaths of children. If you need to skip ahead about 10 minutes, or 4 slides, please feel free to do so. I can provide Tammy with links to some background information if you’d like to learn about the context to understand the rest of the stories when you feel more prepared to do so.
I also want to mention that this talk is harshly critical of the impact of Christian missionaries. This may be hard for some of you to hear, but I want to ask that you try to remain open to learning about histories that you might not have heard about before.
With that I’ll begin
[00:3:50] Triggering content begins
>> SLIDE 4: A historical missionary photo from 1904
I’ll start by telling you a bit about myself, and how who I am connects to my work.
I was born in Canada, but my ancestors are from Korea. This image is from 1904. The white woman in this image is Alice Sharp, a Canadian Methodist missionary.
For both my parents, missionaries were a lifeline. Cheju, like the rest of Korea, was decimated after the war. That’s where my mother is from, and she survived on the generosity of British nuns who gave her pencils so she could continue to go to school and who would give her food as food was scarce at that time. When my father was a poor student in LA in the 70s, he met a missionary who invited him to join a Korean American church. And he showed up because he was told there would be bibimbap after services, and he continued going to get access to Korean food which was rare to him at the time.
That same missionary brought me and my mother on a mission trip to Cheju in 1994 when I was 14 years old. We were told to knock on people’s doors, and if they were not Christian, to try to convert them.
When they invited us into their homes, we were told to explain to them that their beliefs were wrong and evil. And that in order to be saved from inevitably going to hell, they needed to accept this savior that was imported from the west, that wasn’t indigenous to them.
I learned that many of these people were Buddhists, or they believed in folk magic or shamanism. Or they might have practiced a mix of many different spiritual traditions. But they did have beliefs that guide what it meant to live a good life and to live morally and ethically. I was also seeing the ways that western military and economic influence was shifting the culture and economy of Cheju, and that the traditional ways of life that my mother had always told me about were becoming less and less viable through all of these dynamics.
That trip was extremely uncomfortable for me, and it gave me this growing awareness that these missionaries might have believed they were saving people’s souls, but that they were part of a larger project that was creating harm that they weren’t acknowledging and taking responsibility for.
>> SLIDE 5: Historical missionary photo
This image also depicts a Canadian missionary, this time surrounded by Indigenous children in Canada.
At that point in my life, I knew a little about Canada’s violent history, and how the greed of European empires led to the brutal occupation of Indigenous land and mass murder of Indigenous peoples. In school, it was taught this, but it was taught as a short and really sad period of history, but one that everyone had moved past and put behind them.
After I returned from that mission trip, I began to learn more about the mechanics of the colonial project that is Canada.And the role of missionaries in that project. One cornerstone of that project was called the Indian Residential School System, which was the network of boarding schools that Indigenous children were forced to attend from 1894 to 1947. These schools were funded by the Canadian government but were administered by Christian churches.
The way that it worked was that children were abducted from their homes and communities and relocated to these school sites, and they theoretically were kept there until they were 15 or 16 years old, however many of the children died in these schools before they were released.
The purpose of these schools was to assimilate Indigenous children into dominant Canadian culture. They did this by forbidding children to speak their native languages, preventing them from seeing their families, and forcing them to practice Christianity. Because of the conditions of these schools and the crowding, these kids were exposed to new diseases with minimal medical care, they were underfed, scientific and medical experiments were conducted on them, they were physically abused, and they were also sexually abused. In one school, it was found that the mortality rate of children was 69%.
There were survivors and they had and have ongoing trauma. Studies have shown really strong correlations between residential school experience and chronic disease, mental illness, and lateral violence, which means that the indigenous people may be more likely to enact violence on other indigenous people, the survivors of these residential schools that is. The repercussions of this trauma play out within families and communities, which leads to intergenerational trauma.
>> SLIDE 6: Map of Canada outlining Residential school locations, investigation sites and confirmed burial sites
Thousands of the children who died were buried in unmarked mass graves on these residential schools properties. Their parents and communities never knew what happened to them. Often, they would be told that the children just ran away.
This is a map of residential schools across Canada. There is an ongoing investigation now to find these mass graves, and allow communities and families to mourn and return the remains to their communities. The locations marked with red are confirmed unmarked grave sites. The yellow locations are those that are the ones that are currently under investigation. The one in blue over in the bottom right indicates an investigation that happened where no gravesites were found. All the rest of the markers in grey are schools where investigations haven’t yet been conducted.
Mission work has had devastating impacts. Mission work and its connection to western imperialism also paved the way for my parents to migrate to North America, to buy property, and to raise me on stolen land.
>> SLIDE 7: FOH Forum participants
Around 2012, I was invited to provide graphic design to an Indigenous youth advocacy group in Canada called Feathers of Hope. And to me it felt like an opportunity to reconcile this really complicated relationship with this land that I was born on and that i was learning more about
Feathers of Hope had just held a forum, where over 100 Indigenous youth gathered and built community based on their shared experiences. They discussed the types of changes that they wanted to see in their communities and their vision for the future of their communities
On the last day of the forum, the youth presented to dignitaries like elected officials, social service workers, police administrators, and other people with power and influence in their lives. Again and again, they spoke about the impact that residential schools had on generations of their elders and now on themselves. They also pointed out that Canada’s current child welfare system evolved from the residential school system, and how there is this vast overrepresentation of Indigenous children and youth being removed from their families and being put into the custody of the state. So the system really continues these colonial methods of cultural assimilation.
[00:12:36] Triggering content ends
>> SLIDE 8: FOH Forum participants
For many of the youth, it was their first time using their voices to advocate for themselves. And it was such a powerful experience to witness. For many of the dignitaries, it was their first time being quiet and actually listening to Indigenous youth.
After the forum, Feathers of Hope began writing a report on all of the recommendations that the young people came up with. They did this in collaboration with a community advisory of several young people who participated in the forum. That’s where I came in. They invited me to design the artwork and layout of this report.
The ask that I was given was to create a design that would capture both hope and despair. It really needed to convey the power and the hope that was building amongst these young people, but it also needed to communicate the seriousness and the gravity of the issues. So it was a very contradictory brief. And they really didn’t want it to look like rainbows and sunshine. They wanted it to look serious, and not like it was made by kids for kids.
So I took a design brief, I found out what were their key audiences, what were their goals, the messages, the tone. All of the things that designers want to know in order to create an effective piece of design
>> SLIDE 9: The initial concepts
This was the first set of concepts I presented to the youth advisors. I wanted to present one that was very “youthy”, that’s the one on the left. It was an aesthetic that was very popular at the time.. this was 2013 or so.
The one in the middle, you can see that there are feathers that are folders on printed paper. and the print that is on that paper is the UN convention on the rights of the child. Which is one of the documents that Feathers of Hope looks to in order to really establish the rights o f children and be able to hold the Canadian government accountable to this convention that they’ve signed onto.
And the one on the right is based on the activity that happened at the forum where young people were holding string that represented their ties to each other.
The feedback I received was somewhat lukewarm. The one on the right was chosen because of its connection to the experience of the forum and the multiple layers of meaning. This idea that we need to reconnect these relations. That they’ve been cut in these various ways.
And so i go to work on making this one more visually impactful. You see the feather kind of fades into the background and the string doesn’t really pop out against the foreground. and so i worked on it but with each iteration the response kept getting more and more lukewarm.
My vision was for hands to be holding these strings but i couldn’t find an image of that. It just looked so horrendous.
>> SLIDE 10: Diagram of the conventional design process
I’m sure that a diagram like this feels pretty familiar. It’s what the design industry puts forward as a healthy and normal, iterative design process. The idea is that you create a rough prototype and just keep iterating on it and improving it. There’s this idea that inevitably through this process. your design will get better, it will do what it needs to do and it can go out into the world. When in fact with Feathers of Hope my iterations were taking it farther and farther and farther away from anything that the young people wanted. And it was incredibly discouraging and demoralizing.
Through this process, I kept thinking, What am I doing here? I’m a Korean Canadian settler. I benefit from this colonial state, Why am I even working on this project? What insight can I bring to this incredible initiative?
>> SLIDE 11: Photo of a medicine bundle
The design process that I had come to know and trust so deeply was failing me and I had a really disastrous meeting. and I think the group could tell just how low and discouraged I was feeling. At the end of the meeting, they tried to give me a little bit of a pep talk but they also gifted me this medicine bundle. It’s a really important traditional item. they said, use this, take it home, experience it, and we know that it will help. And I had no idea what was inside of it.
>> SLIDE 12: Photo of the medicines
When I opened it this is what it looked like. In the red container compartment there’s a braid of sweetgrass. In the yellow there is tobacco, in the white is cedar, and in the black is sage.
These are the four sacred medicines and each one has a different purpose. Each of the colours has a different meaning. The fact that there are four of them and that there are four directions have a lot of significance. But It’s not my place to teach you about these medicines and the medicine is what this is called. So I’m not going to try and do that today. but i do encourage you to look into it for yourselves.
So I opened this, I saw the medicines, I understood that they were sacred. But I really didn’t consider myself a spiritual person for reasons that I’ve already mentioned.
Because I grew up in the church I didn’t have any connection to spirituality that my grandmothers or great great grandmothers or ancestors had practiced.
So I felt really lost and also quite awkward but I had promised them, and I had received this gift, and so I felt a responsibility to use this gift. I had no idea what to do with these medicines so I went to google and I learned that you burn them and it starts smoking and this smoke that it creates is called a smudge.
>> SLIDE 13: The practice of smudging
You waft this smoke over yourself and that they might .. the smudge might protect you, it might clear out bad energy
They have a lot of different purposes. I didn’t know at that time that each of the medicines had different purposes and that you just choose one and use it for the purpose that you need so I lit all of them up in my tiny little studio room and the room very quickly filled up with very intense smoke. I started choking because the smoke was so intense. I couldn’t breathe so I had to put an end to this experience. I thought it was interesting. I thought i’m going to just take a nap. I don’t know what else to do, because that is what I do when I’m stressed out.
So I went to lie down and I was feeling light headed in that moment. I grabbed my iPad, thinking I’d put on some Netflix and I’ll let it play and take my nap.
>> SLIDE 14: Vanishing Point by United Visual Artists
When I opened my Ipad this is the image that happened to be on the screen. I guess that I had been browsing some art blogs earlier and this is a piece called Vanishing Point by United Visual Artists and it’s these lasers that are pointing in different directions and creating this illusion of perspective. A few things really stood out to me about this image, the first is that it’s kind of smoky and hazy, and it just connected so perfectly to the experience that I just had of using those medicines. There was also this darkness, and because of this darkness the light was shining so brightly, and it spoke to that initial brief that they had given me– give us hope but also make it serious. And so I knew immediately what the artwork needed to look like.
>> SLIDE 15: Concept sketch
So I sketched this really quickly. It’s an image of a feather emerging out of darkness, it has the smoke of the sacred medicine smudge rising up in front of it.
>> SLIDE 16: Photography setup
That night I got some black paper and cut out a feather and I rigged up this photography setup where light was shining through the back of this cutout feather and I had this smudge sitting in front of it.
>> SLIDE 17: Cover page of Feathers of Hope report
So This is the cover of the Feathers of Hope Action Plan.
When I first showed it to the team people literally burst into tears and I thought it was initially from the sense of relief. An “ oh, we finally have something” but I realized soon after that it was because I had used this gift that they had given me, I had used their medicines. I had used culture to go from something that was very dry and lifeless, a technical execution of a design brief to something that had profound meaning.
>> SLIDE 17: Photograph of Feathers of Hope Report Back cover
All along I had been approaching this as a design problem that had to be solved. And just going through the steps that I had learned and the design process, and getting really frustrated not knowing why this process wasn’t serving me.
I realized that the key was really in culture, and that the young people needed to reconnect with their culture, with spirituality, with their traditions.
And that because I was trying to go about it in this very particular western methodology of design that I wasn’t receiving the images and inspiration that this project needed
I needed to the cultural piece and not just the political piece because in this case the two can’t be separated from each other
>> SLIDE 18: Feathers of Hope Report spreads
And in fact I needed to step away from all that I had previously understood about design to create this design
>> SLIDE 19: White text on a green background. The text is as follows:
“Feathers of Hope is an Indigenous young people’s movement, yet we cannot do it solely from an Indigenous lens. We need allyship and solidarity. The question is how to think of design as solidarity work. It is not an easy journey.”
Laura Arndt,
Founder, Feathers of Hope
So later, And Also Too interviewed Laura Arndt, from Feathers of Hope, about this project and wanted to hear her reflections. and that question that I had been asking all along. and that question about why me in particular. she really answered that in this statement. She said: “Feathers of Hope is an Indigenous young people’s movement, yet we cannot do it solely from an Indigenous lens. We need allyship and solidarity. The question is how to think of design as solidarity work. It is not an easy journey.”
>> SLIDE 20: Photograph of Feathers of Hopeteam holland a copy of the report with a large box in front of them
I have lost count of how many copies of Feathers of Hope we’ve printed and how many reprints we’ve done, but there are 40 maybe 50 thousand copies of this report floating around which is a pretty astronomical number for a report that was intended to go to legislators and people in the social service sector.
You’re probably familiar with the Truth & Reconciliation process in South Africa to confront the wounds caused by apartheid, a moment where people can talk to each other, and create a path to move forward.
There was also a TRC in Canada that was modeled on the South African one. This box that is stilling here is the archive of the TRC in Canada and this is a photo of Feathers of Hope being placed into this archive as a key document in this process.
>> SLIDE 21: White text on a green background. The worlds “Feathers of Hope Reconciliation Model” are at the centre with the following surrounding it (starting at the top); “Issue > Forum > Advisory > Media Creation > Release > Impact”
So this is the Feathers of Hope model of reconciliation. It begins with an issue, from there a forum is organized where youth from across the jurisdiction come together and connect with each other. They speak their truth to people in positions of power. from that forum an advisory made up of a smaller group of forum participants is created. And they then work to create a piece of media that comes out of this process, in this case it was a report but as you’ll see in subsequent stories that media can take many different forms. That product is then released, it creates impact in the word, and from that momentum another issue takes focus and the cycle continues.
>> SLIDE 21: A neon light vortex
So I like to think of this process, or this model, 3 dimensionally. We are now in our 5th cycle of this process with Feathers of Hope and with each cycle the relationships and trust deepen, which means that our collaboration also deepens.
So Feathers of Hopes 2nd forum was on the Justice and Juries system in canada and the inequitable ways that the justice system targets and incarcerates and doesn’t serve indigenous communities
Unfortunately I don’t have time to get into that project today but what I can say about it is that the design process was just as profound, if not more so, than with the first report.
>> SLIDE 22: Photo of youth speaking at podium, photo overlaid with the following text:
FEATHERS OF HOPE
Child Welfare
So after the Justice & Juries project, Feathers of Hope held a forum on the child welfare system in 2015. And I’ve already touched briefly on the child welfare system but it determines if a child needs to be removed from their home and decides where that child is placed and for how long. This happens if there’s a situation of abuse or neglect that’s reported in the child’s home.
So in Canada, Indigenous children make up a disproportionate number of kids in the system. As I’ve mentioned, this system originates in the residential school system. It also should not surprise that the same kinds of harm that happened in residential schools are still happening today. Kids are still being taken away from their families and their communities. Nearly all of them are placed in the care of non-Indigenous guardians. Some of these guardians insist that the kids practice a religion that they didn’t grow up with, and then they are sometimes told that they were taken away because their communities are corrupt, their families are immoral, and that their traditions and ways of life are backwards.
So at the forum, the young people that were in the system talked about the impacts that it had on their mental health, on their physical well being, through the abuse that they may have experienced and how many of them coped using drugs and alcohol. But it also put forward a vision of an alternative system that is based in Indigenous culture and where the system, instead of taking kids away from their homes addresses the root causes of the harms they’d experienced.
>> SLIDE 23: Photo of young woman to the left with the following text to the right:
Quill Violet
Christie-Peters
With the Child Welfare project, the design collaboration deepened in a couple really meaningful ways.
This time around, we knew that we would be working on a toolkit to support young people who were in the system. I knew that I wanted to work with an Indigenous artist to create the imagery. It felt really important that the aesthetic of the toolkit felt grounded in culture, and also felt trustworthy. I didn’t think that I was the appropriate person to create that imagery.
So this is Quill Christie-Peters, she’s an Anishinaabe arts programmer and self-taught visual artist, and she brought a multitude of gifts to this project which I’ll be showing you in a minute.
>> SLIDE 24: 3 photographs of brainstorm notes and idea generation
But just because Quill and I had technical expertise in image-making, it really didn’t mean that non-designers and non-artists couldn’t ideate effective images. In fact, all the youth advisors were either in the system or had recently aged out of it, and so they were really in the best position to know what kind of imagery would resonate with their peers.
So in deepening the co-design process, I wanted to open up the image making process to the advisors.
These are some of the images and ideas that the youth advisors generated in our image workshop. We see things like, “broken home” or “lost souls”. We also see fish swimming together down the stream. We see this drawing of a medicine wheel that we’ve seen earlier. And we see that there is a desire to build cultures. So we see a lot of images coming up– some that seem hopeful and some that feel very sad.
>> SLIDE 25: A photograph of a sketch
In the end though, this was the image that the advisors chose. It is a tree trunk, with roots that are growing below the ground, and the text there says; “we stand by our roots”. This was drawn by one of the youth who actually walked out of the meeting, didn’t participate in the image creation session, and I thought that maybe he wasn’t interested in participating, but when he returned hours later, and he apologized to me for leaving and he handed me this and he said he was feeling really triggered, but that being part of this process was very important to him and he wanted to make something that really apple to how he had felt.
So I saw this and thought it was incredible and I asked him to share this image with the other young people. When he presented it, he talked about how trees need strong roots to grow, and when they don’t have the support of those roots, they become weak and don’t develop into healthy adult trees. He talked about how the child welfare system cuts kids off from their roots, and that in order for people like him to thrive, they need to feel rooted and connected.
And the youth advisors unanimously agreed that this was the image that we needed to make.
>> SLIDE 26: 2 photographs of youth sketches
So Quill, the artist I was collaborating with, led a workshop with the youth to flesh out the tree metaphor and create a story around it that connected to their experience and their hopes for the future.
So these are a couple of drawings that the young people made in that workshop to think through the tree a little bit more. And what the story of this particular tree was. Then Quill went and created the drawings.
>> SLIDE 27: photograph of youth creating the cover art
Another way that the co-design process edeepend This time around is that I brought the photography setup to one of the meetings and showed the young people how to make the artwork.
So this is a photo of some of the youth photographing Quill’s artwork.
And this is the final image.
It depicts a young person holding onto the trunk of a cedar tree. You might remember that cedar is one of the four sacred medicines.
The tree is wrapped protectively around them. And both the tree and the young person are bathed in light from the moon, and smudge from medicine.
>> SLIDE 28: 4 divider pages from the Dear Cedar Toolkit
These are the divider pages of the toolkit. It shows a young person who has been separated from their family. Who feels so scared and alone until one day they find this cedar tree. And the spirit of the tree comforts this young person, and connects them to their family and their culture. And the young person grows strong and healthy with the support of the cedar tree.
>> SLIDE 29: spread from the Dear Cedar Toolkit. The page on the left depicts a tree, on the right is text
So toolkits can feel pretty impersonal and dry. The name “toolkit” doesn’t evoke a lot of comfort, but the youth advisors wanted this piece to feel really comforting. And they wanted to make sure that the young people use it. So I’m going to read to you from this introductory spread; “Hello, I’m Cedar. Just like you, I need the right conditions to grow healthy and happy. That’s why good homes are so important. You probably have questions about why you’ve been taken away from your family, what your rights are, and what happens next. In the pages of this toolkit, I will do my best to help you find your way.”
>> SLIDE 30: spread from the Dear Cedar Toolkit.
So to extend this comforting tone into the tools themselves, we formatted the toolkit as a conversation between a young person and Cedar.
So the young person asks questions. So for example they say; “Do I have to accept my foster parents’ culture or religion?” And Cedar answers, Cedar reminds them of their rights under the law, and also points them to resources that they can access to support them when they need it.
So this conversational approach, or the deeper meaning, mimics the traditional way that Indigenous youth have learned from their elders, through asking questions and being told stories. So there’s a familiarity to it, maybe even if you haven’t experienced it first hand. There’s a familiarity ancestrally
So there were unfortunately some long delays in the process of getting this into the world. We’re now getting ready to release this toolkit more widely soon.
>> SLIDE 31: A vibrant photo of young people standing facing each other in a circle, they are wearing traditional attire and each holds one hand to the centre. The photo is overlaid with the following text:
FEATHERS OF HOPE
Culture, Identity, and Belonging
In 2017, Feathers of Hope held the Culture, Identity, and Belonging forum. This forum deals with issues that I’ve already touched on, like loss of tradition, language, spirituality and more, and the impacts that those losses have had generationally.
>> SLIDE 32: 3 photographs of women. Under each photo are the following text:
Chief Lady Bird
Kaia’tanó:ron Dumoulin Bush
Monique Bedard (Aura)
This time around, we decided to create a series of graphic novels, or FOH had decided. Also by this time, my studio had grown to four people. The lead designer on this project was my fantastic colleague Guadalupe Pérez Pita.
So Lupe and I invited these three incredible women to create the artwork for these graphic novels. Chief Lady Bird is a Chippewa and Potawatomi artist, illustrator, educator and community activist. Kaia’tanó:ron Dumoulin Bush is an Onkwehonwe/French-Canadian illustrator and visual artist. Amd Monique Bedard (Aura) is a Haudenosaunee (Oneida) artist.
>> SLIDE 33: A photograph taken during the forum
As always, the youth advisors worked to identify key themes from the forum. But what was different this time around was that the advisors took those themes and translated them into storylines for graphic novels. Here is one group presenting a story idea.
>> SLIDE 34: A photograph taken during the forum
This photo shows a large format worksheet that my colleague Lupe created. You can see here that we asked the youth advisors to take those storylines that they had ideated, and break them down into what was text, what were events, what were the key plot points, what were the scenes and the settings. and this is what we used to help us create the actual panels of the graphic novels
So whereas with the other projects, the youth advisors were identifying themes and provided feedback on content. This time they were actually writing the stories themselves.
>> SLIDE 35: Photo of Elton Beardy
One of the youth staff of Feathers of Hope, Elton Beardy, took the story notes and crafted them into 3 beautiful scripts.
>> SLIDE 36: A photograph taken during the forum
So we took sketches of the panels along with the text back to the youth advisors. So this is them reading through the first draft of the graphic novel and adding their revisions with sticky notes.You can see there’s a lot of sticky notes
>> SLIDE 37: Panel from Blueberries
So here are some panels from the 3 graphic novels.
This one is called Blueberries, and it’s about healing from the trauma of the child welfare system. Using traditional medicines, in this case those were blueberries
>> SLIDE 38: Panel from Way of the Gentle Heart
Way of the Gentle Heart is about connecting with elders and learning from them about how sacred different gender and sexual identities are.And there is a small medicine bundle that this person is holding
>> SLIDE 39: Panel from Manidoo Makway
Manidoo Makwa is about finding your voice through ceremony and finding the strength to protect the land that you live on from exploitation.
>> SLIDE 40: 3 Graphic novel covers
And these are the covers of those three graphic novels. These graphic novels are really unique in that Indigenous youth and elders were depicted as heroes and adventurers. It’s a kind of representation that is sadly very rare in Canadian media.
>> SLIDE 41: Photograph overlaid with white text reading
FEATHERS OF HOPE
Health & Well-Being
So this last project is still underway.
In 2018, Feathers of Hope convened the Health & Well-being forum. I have already mentioned many of the impacts that colonial violence has had on Indigenous communities. The young people at this forum spoke on those issues– mental health, physical health, spiritual well being. They also talked about how they might move to traditional, land-based, and community-based ways of healing and wellness. Their visions were really beautiful, so for instance, they talked about how they might bring knowledge of traditional medicines to young people.
The Health & Well-Being youth advisory has been meeting throughout the pandemic. I’m particularly excited about this round of work with FOH because it’s the first time the advisors have been fully and totally empowered to select the media that we’ll be making together. In previous iterations of this work, the media was predetermined, but in this case, it was wide open.
So I led a couple co-design conversations to generate different ideas and evaluate those ideas.
>> SLIDE 42: Descriptive test to the left and a project example to the right
Story 1
Jon listens to a podcast
Jon gets goosebumps when he hears his question.
He listens intently as they talk to their guest, another young person who has struggled with drugs and alcohol. The three of them speak honestly and openly, without shame or judgment. He’d never be able to talk to his friends or parents like this.
Jon feels like he has been welcomed into a community he never knew he needed.
*The End*
In the end, the young people chose to create a podcast where guests will come on and talk about different aspects of indigenous health and wellbeing.
This is a slide from a speculative design activity, where I wrote a story to try to bring the podcast idea to life.
In a few days, I’m going to be travelling to the first in-person Feathers of Hope meeting since 2019. We are going to work on planning the podcast’s first season. So it’s really exciting
So that is some of the design history of FOH to date. And there is so much more to these stories as well as Justice and Juries which i didn’t have time to cover today.
>> SLIDE 43: white text on green background. Text as follows:
DESIGN JUSTICE
Those who are impacted by a design outcome, or by an issue that is being addressed through design, must benefit from and be participants in the design process.
So I want to move on to a brief discussion of the relationship between the design justice movement and FOH.
This is a very basic articulation of design justice that I put forward around 2015.
“Design Justice– Those who are impacted by a design outcome, or by an issue that is being addressed through design, must benefit from and be participants in the design process.”
I’m not saying that no one else was practicing design in this way; it’s just that I hadn’t heard anything like this specifically articulated in relation to design.
The only articulations outside of mainstream corporate design that I was hearing about were design for social good, or social impact design.
>> SLIDE 44: 2 images. On the left is a poster of a woman using a device to drink water with the text “Design fo the other 90%” over the bottom half and on the right an image of the LifeStraw product
This is what a lot of that looked like.
This is a poster for a 2007 exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in New York. The name of the exhibit was “Design for the other 90%” and the image is a woman, presumably in Africa, drinking from a shallow pool of water through a design object. Although the object doesn’t have the brand name on it, you might recognize it as the life straw which is a device you can put directly into a body of water and drink from. it has a filter inside to filter out the contaminants
Let’s look at this image for a second and instead of me analyzing this for you, I have some questions that I’ll leave with Tammy for you all to discuss.
>> SLIDE 45: Poster on the left, text to the right as follows:
What assumptions and stereotypes about Africa and African people does this photograph reproduce?
[Una reads slide]
>> SLIDE 46: Poster on the left, text to the right as follows:
What assumptions and stereotypes does the name of the exhibit reproduce?
[Una reads slide]
>> SLIDE 47: Poster on the left, text to the right as follows:
What messages are the formal and technical aspects of this poster sending?
[Una reads slide]
So what do you see first, what aspects seem less important. We might look at what aspects of the photo are illuminated and what’s in shadow. We might look at the composition of the type in relation to this life straw object– the I aligning so perfectly with the object, what does that say
>> SLIDE 48: Poster on the left, text to the right as follows:
Does the product being featured here address the systemic problem of access to clean drinking water? If not, what kind of solution is being promoted?
[Una reads slide]
>> SLIDE 49: Poster on the left, text to the right as follows:
Does the type of design practice promoted here address design’s complicity in the systems that prevent people from having access to clean drinking water?
[Una reads slide]
>> SLIDE 50: Poster on the left, white space to the right
So sentiments like the one in this poster remind me a lot of missionary work. And the sinister part of it is that, because practitioners of this kind of design were not often being critiqued, and to be honest still aren’t being critiqued widely, the work that they were doing was seen as this model for how design might make the world a better place.
>> SLIDE 51: AAT branding visualizing uses a venn diagram to illustrate collaborative designs balanced power
So I invite you, when you’re looking at any design, to use a diagram like this to analyze where the locus of power is.
>> SLIDE 52: White text on green background as follows:
MOVEMENTS & ARTICULATIONS THAT INSPIRED DESIGN JUSTICE
Disability justice
Black feminism
Media justice
Digital justice
I also invite you to look into these movements and articulations, that come outside of design practice. because these were really instrumental in shaping the design justice network principles. So disability justice, black feminism, media justice and digital justice are some of the movements that really helped inform thai articulation. And i believe you are all reading Sasha Costanza-Chocks book Design Justice, and she writes about these in detail in her book.
>> SLIDE 53: White text on green background showing timelines for FOH and DJN one on top of the other
A Timeline of Practice & Principles
Feathers of Hope (with a timeline to the right)
Design Justice Network (with a timeline to the right)
So this is a timeline of FOH and DJ practice and principals.
The work with FOH actually predates DJ, and it’s that work that inspired the inquiry – what might a design justice movement look like?
So in turn, articulating the principles has provided clearer insight into subsequent projects
I don’t think that it’s always that evident that the principals actually come from practice and not necessarily the other way around. They don’t come from just a theory of what should exist. But they are more so an articulation of what we’ve learned through practice.
So DJ and FOH co-evolved and informed one another.
To clarify this diagram the events at the top are FOH and at the bottom are DJN.
>> SLIDE 54: White text on green background. Text as follows:
FOR DISCUSSION
How do the principles show up in the work with Feathers of Hope?
Are there aspects of the work that fall short of the principles? How might we deepen design justice in our work with Feathers of Hope?
So I’ve prepared a couple discussion questions for you now that you’re familiar with the FOH stories. I would love to hear your responses.
So the first being, “How do the principles show up in the work with Feathers of Hope? And then secondly, “Are there aspects of the work that fall short of the principles? How might we deepen design justice in our work with Feathers of Hope?”
This engagement is ongoing and there’s always a cycle of reflection and adaptation and that’s what led to this 3-dimensional cycle of engagement. I would love to hear from you where you think we could be doing better.
>> SLIDE 55: White text on dark purple background. Text reads
Lessons
So to close it out, I’m going to briefly share some lessons that I’ve learned over the years co-designing not just with FOH but with all of the groups that we co-design with.
>> SLIDE 56: Image on right, text on left as follows:
Work to understand your personal relationship to the issue and the community.
“Work to understand your personal relationship to the issue and the community”– There’s no such thing as a neutral designer. Even though a lot of design schooling really pouts that idea forward. Your positionality relative to an issue and a community matters and if you ignore it, you ignore the privilege that you might have and the harm you might cause.
>> SLIDE 57: Image on right, text on left as follows:
Move at the speed of trust.
“Move at the speed of trust”– Ask yourselves, whose timeline are you on? and What priorities and values are embedded in that timeline?
Back in 2015, yes I had this strong idea of design justice practice and what that should look like, and how my work needed to shift so that we could practice in a principled way… However these kinds of practices require deep long term engagement. Much deeper and longer-term engagements than standard design processes. And these things require trust. My relationship with FOH had started in a very conventional client-designer fashion. Had I pushed for deeper engagements too quickly and before we really knew and trusted each other, I can see how I could have created the kind of harm I really wanted to mitigate.
So with each project, the engagement gradually and naturally deepened.
>> SLIDE 58: Image on right, text on left as follows:
Co-design is more than a series of steps or activities.
“Co-design is more than a series of steps or activities”– In recent years, I’ve noticed this proliferation of design thinking tools. And they’re really promoted as plug and play pieces where you select the activities you want to use, get the people, follow the steps, and then boom, you have a design solution.
I want you to remember that at the end of the day, you’re creating something that didn’t exist before. And often, that inspiration isn’t going to come from a series of pre-planned activities.
The most important part of your work might not be creating or executing the idea, but figuring out how to get to the idea. But instead figuring out how to get to the idea. You have to find a way to let epiphany and insight in. And I call this part of the work “magic,” but you can call it whatever you want but it needs to be there.
>> SLIDE 59: Image on right, text on left as follows:
The strongest solution might not come from you.
“The strongest solution might not come from you”– The engagement with FOH proves that those who have experience with an issue are the ones who have the most insight into the solutions. I really believe that it is our job as design justice practitioners to listen, to facilitate, and to advocate for the ideas of those who are directly impacted. It’s our job to create an environment in which everyone’s brilliance can shine. It’s not our job to have all the answers.
>> SLIDE 60: Image on right, text on left as follows:
Beauty is not a luxury.
And finally, “Beauty is not a luxury”– Sometimes we get so focused on the design brief and the technical execution of the design that we forget about beauty, or we feel like its an afterthought and we can build beaty back in later. And we have this idea that it needs to function before it looks good.
When I talk about beauty, I don’t just mean visual aesthetics. I mean, does it make your chest swell? Does it give you shivers? Does it draw you in and make you feel like you belong there?
Because beauty is culture and it takes something that can be mundane and makes it a profound experience. It helps us to connect to each other and connect to something greater than ourselves.
So these are just some of the lessons I’ve learned through this decade-long engagement as well as other engagements. It’s been quite a journey. And now I look forward to hearing questions.
>> SLIDE 61: White text on dark purple background. Text reads:
Thank you!
Feathers of Hope
feathersofhope.ca
And Also Too
@and_also_too
Thank you so much and if you want to learn more about FOH you can go to feathersofhope.ca. And Also too you can find on twitter and instagram here.
[End of Una Lee’s presentation.]
QUESTION & ANSWER PERIOD
[this portion of the talk has not been transcribed]
SPEAKER 1 (Tammy): okay, well I want to thank you very much, I’m going to stop recording here.