Beyond a convenient story: Being comfortable with 'incomplete'

As designers we are often forced to tell just one story, to simplify the complex, and to produce things quickly. In healthcare, we solve for sticky problems and to create solutions we often pick the convenient story. This time we are not choosing the convenient route.

After the last several months, we recognize we need to take a step back. As a design team we must acknowledge the hand we play in the potentially discriminatory outcomes of our work. It is time to hold ourselves accountable, to change the way we work by questioning the system in which we work. To do this, we must be willing to be uncomfortable; to learn about the inequities we have upheld in our field and more broadly in society; and to challenge ourselves and colleagues to actively change the status quo. We recognize none of us are experts but the work cannot wait.

It is rare that we are able to create a project that has no clear roadmap or goal. Our process has been like throwing spaghetti on the ceiling and waiting to see what sticks. With a multi-directional approach, we aimed to jumpstart discourse to impact our mindsets and design process to upset the current state.

Within our design team, we have created a space to share messy questions about DE&I considerations within our work. One project the team discussed was around designing research for a digital marketing campaign around clinical trial recruitment. We had the opportunity to question the potential discriminatory impact of the project from multiple angles including the range of participants included in the research, to the qualitative research platform used to conduct the research, to the channel in which the communication would be released. In another project, we reviewed the unintended consequences of a past design and explored ways to provide equity to patients' celebrating and grieving various cancer milestones. We focused on surfacing opportunities to welcome different people's identities to mark moments.

Through two cases studies we'll walk you through how we uncovered our blind-spots and kept our momentum to design for equity, diversity and inclusion.