This month, we are featuring the work of Sarah Fathallah, a designer, researcher, and educator who specializes in applying design to the social sector, with impact-driven clients like the International Rescue Committee and Open Society Foundations, to name a few. Sarah also co-founded Design Gigs for Good, a free community-driven resource to help more people use the tools of design to create positive social change.

You can connect with Sarah Fathallah directly at: https://sarahfathallah.com

If you are a DJN member doing interesting work, and would like to be featured in a future newsletter or blog post, please email us at designjusticenetwork@gmail.com.

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(This article below, originally appeared on Dscout , in 2020): This is an excerpt of that article - Please read the full article on dscount here: https://dscout.com/people-nerds/sarah-fathallah )

Every Space is Political

Transformative justice is more crucial than ever. Sarah Fathallah believes researchers are primed to assist in this critical moment if we can "move at the speed of trust."

WORDS BY TONY HO TRAN, VISUALS BY THUMY PHAN

A lot of folks in UX are in this for the right reasons.

They want to be champions for their users. They want to build products that leave a positive impact on the communities they design for. And they want to leave things better than when they arrived.

But often, the products with the best intentions behind them often go awry. Every day it seems like we hear of new examples of designs being used to harm communities and users. These unintentional consequences can be especially exacerbated when we’re working in an unfamiliar culture or community.

However, it’s beholden to the practitioner coming into these spaces to do so with a sense of equity and transformative justice. “Every space that we operate in is a space for resistance and inspiration,” says Sarah Fathallah, a social designer and design researcher. “Every space is political.”

Sarah’s work spans across the globe in more than 20 countries. She knows the importance of building with communities and avoiding the dreaded “parachuting in” mindset.

That’s why we took some time out of her day to discuss the importance of proverbs in research, the fulfilling beauty of working in the social sector, and why you should pay your users already.

dscout: You have a broad body of work spanning the globe. What’s your best advice for working mindfully and effectively across cultures?

Sarah: The number one thing is having people on the team who are deeply familiar with the context that you're working in. I'm not a believer in the ability of a group of total strangers to parachute into a place and be able to do the work effectively. People say they do this competently, but I seriously question the validity of that statement.

I think it’s necessary to build teams with knowledge of the cultural context that you're working in, whether that's your facilitators or fixers, your translators or interpreters, or any kind of professional or community-based role that can effectively serve as a cultural broker and help navigate the nuances of culture and community, both in planning and executing the research.

This also comes into play in the process itself of engaging with communities, whether that's comprehending the intricacies of language, religion, community dynamics, or even trivial things like clothing and greetings. I can't fathom how anybody who isn't from the community could learn that on a secondhand basis.

It’s also important to understand what it means to be in service of a community, and by extension to the team members who are from that community. When I'm leading a team working in a community that isn’t mine, non-hierarchical leadership means enabling team members to nurture and hold onto relationships way after I'm gone. This can look like doing childcare, coordinating transportation vouchers, taking notes, or doing whatever it takes to create the space and skill-sets for other people to do the literal work of community building.

I've been asked questions before about doing work cross-culturally and a lot of the times the questions will be around, "How hard is it to deal with language barriers?" I almost always chuckle at that because I don't think that it's the linguistic challenges that are the main issue. It’s more so the fact that the language of design and research is super inaccessible and jargony.

I love to do work in a way that builds capacity with team members and community members to continue doing the kind of collectivist and participatory problem exploration and problem solving that design can help us do. But in ways that doesn't make it contingent on you needing to have done some formal training in design to be able to do it. And part of that includes not requiring to know every entry in the glossary of design in order to be able to do design.

This is tied to how many thinkers—mainly Indigenous people—are challenging how epistemology needs to have a Western foundation, or otherwise it’s not valid. International development as a whole has a deeply rooted history in imperialism and neo-colonial practices. It's this idea that you bring in expertise from Anglo-Saxon and Euro-centric centers of knowledge that you then take to other communities. Then you “support” or “help” them. It’s paternalistic, patronizing, and transactional.

Acknowledging that I'm not dismantling all of that, I do try to disengage from coloniality as much as I can in my work, through restructuring power dynamics and making it more about a mutual, reciprocal relationship and less of an extractive one. And actual ways to do that are to provide material exchanges, compensate communities, build capacity, share skills and knowledge, and have a fierce commitment to relationship building.

Please read the full article on dscount here: https://dscout.com/people-nerds/sarah-fathallah

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Tony Ho Tran is a freelance journalist based in Chicago. His articles have appeared in Huff Post, Business Insider, Growthlab, and wherever else fine writing is published.

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You can connect with Sarah Fathallah directly at: https://sarahfathallah.com

Would you be willing to share your experiences with the Design Justice Network? There are no prerequisites (including a traditional design background), and past stories have featured members working in a variety of fields such as social work, community organizing, and handicrafts. We make the process easy for you (no writing involved!) and will only share what/how you consent for us to. We are particularly interested in hearing from members outside of Europe and the North American East Coast. If you have questions or interests, please contact lydiahooper@gmail.com.