How can we remove barriers into design? Insights from the UCD Gathering 2021
There are 4 authors for this post: Arooj Alim, Fionn Tynan-O’Mahony, Juliette Brelsford and Stéphanie Krus.
In May 2021, Claudia Hopkins asked a question on Twitter:
“Can anyone recommend non-profits or organisations that support underrepresented people to get into or be sustained within the design/research/tech industry?”
This fed directly into an ongoing conversation on the Service Design Scotland slack channel, and connected with a question we were exploring within our design team:
“How can we support more people from disadvantaged or underrepresented groups to enter the design profession?”
Our intention as a team
Over the past year, our design team has grown from 20 people to 50 people. Given the size and speed of our recruitment, we were concerned with how representative our team would be of the communities we design services and experiences for. This is especially important when we consider some of the services and government departments we support, such as the Disability Living Allowance for Children or Scotland’s Redress Scheme and the power design has to influence our lives. Our colleague, Emily Horgan, spoke about this recently.
Having more diverse and representative teams helps ensure that decisions are guided by more diverse opinions and mitigates the risk of deepening existing systemic inequalities through our designs.
As we recognised the many internal barriers we needed to address, we also felt the conversation was bigger than our team and decided we needed to discuss the topic more broadly in our community.
At the time, we were writing and submitting proposals to a number of conferences and thought ‘could a conference workshop be an opportunity to seed a conversation within the design community?’.
The demographics of the design community today
It’s very hard to get accurate data regarding the composition of the design community. There are a number of reports on the demographics of the UK design community such as this one from the design council or this blog from a GOV.UK team that illustrate this.
From other literature regarding black, indigenous or other minority ethnic groups we know that there are many barriers to equitable access to higher education and employment. We assume design is no different.
Coupled with this, we know the design community faces problems like:
- the need for more diverse teams
- challenges to hiring and retaining designers
- challenges facing individuals to get that first design role, even with diplomas and experience
There are other organisations and communities actively working to improve diversity in the design field, such as:
- the Design Justice Network
- Where are the black designers
- the privilege project
- the design club for children
We hoped that by seeding this conversation at a conference, we could together create another supportive body working towards addressing these challenges.
Taking the discussion to the UCD Gathering
In November 2021, we organised a workshop at the UCD Gathering Conference called Reimagining pathways to design.
We wanted to explore how the design community can reduce barriers of entry to enter the design profession. The aim of the session was to gather different perspectives and encourage connections between people and organisations.
During the workshop, we asked participants to discuss:
- their own career journey
- if initiatives like Code Your Future could be used within the design field
- how we can actively improve opportunities for underrepresented groups
The participants were mostly established in the design or education field, and many of the participants were in a position to influence the recruitment of new people. We asked them to share ideas collaboratively in small groups.
This conversation is just the beginning. We want to involve many more people, specifically those who face challenges to enter the design field.
Read on to find out what we learned from the workshop and how you can get involved in the next workshop. You can also access the workshop slides or watch the recording of it.
6 key takeaways from the workshop
We’ve summarised the discussion into 6 key actions that participants felt the design community could take to improve access and opportunity for underrepresented groups.
These points are designed to get you thinking about what you can do to promote diversity in your organisation and design teams.
1. Define design roles more clearly
Participants felt that an important step in enabling better access to the design industry is better understanding and defining design roles. Compared to Code Your Future, people might not know what skills are needed to be a designer or how their experience could transfer into design roles.
The Digital, Data and Technology Profession Capability Framework could provide a useful starting point.
2. Find new ways to reach potential candidates
Participants had lots of ideas about how to actively reach candidates from diverse backgrounds, such as:
- sparking interest about careers in design when people participate in user research or co-design activities
- running taster sessions for people who may be interested in a design career
3. Address the specific barriers faced by underrepresented groups
Participants felt that barriers to entry for underrepresented groups might include:
- the cost of traditional education or training courses
- time pressures from caring responsibilities or existing work commitments while training to change career
- location — even for online courses, people might not have the right conditions for learning
We hope to hear more about the barriers that people face in future workshops.
4. Change the way we hire people
Participants felt that access for underrepresented groups could be improved by:
- thinking critically about the qualifications and experience you ask for during recruitment
- ignoring degrees as a qualifier
- looking at attitude over experience
5. Offer opportunities to gain practical experience
Workshop participants felt that there were things they could do as individuals or teams to help people to gain practical design experience.
These included:
- mentoring
- creating internship opportunities
- being open to talking to people seeking a career change or fresh start
- talking to the UX community about personal journeys to the design field
6. Get buy-in from senior leadership
Participants felt that people in the design community should actively explain the benefits of a diverse team to senior leaders in their organisation.
Take a closer look at the workshop outputs
You can access and comment on our quick analysis on a miro board (password is: PathwaysToDesign). You can also view emerging themes on our Trello board.
Thank you to all the workshop participants
Thank you to all the following people for their enthusiasm and contributions:
Adrian Howard, Andy Parker, Anne Walker, Dan Healy, Jen Thomson, Kath Carrick, Lydia Valtind, Magda Figuerola, Milo McLaughlin, Rachel Kress, Sadaf Uddin, Sophie Pragnell, Vinishree Verma, and Willow Colios.
Some extra resources
- Journey to service design practice — Practitioner stories
- Research Skills Framework — GOVUK roles definitions for Digital, Data and Technology
- this twitter thread about the challenge to recruit in design from Sarah Drummond initially but with lots of answers worth checking out
