Choice

I promised myself. No more cookies!

I kept that promise throughout my grocery store journey. Then I arrived at the register. Maybe just one small pack of sugary goodness …

Yep. We’ve all done it. It no secret grocery stores are strategically designed to entice the purchase of items that may not always be the best choice. We know it. But we don’t always put thought into correcting our actions.

That’s Choice Architecture. A powerful system purposefully designed to affect the desired outcome benefiting the system’s owner.

Power is neutral. It can be used for good or bad. The choice is ours. Design is powerful and sometimes that power needs to be examined, evaluated, and re-designed.

If something is broken it can be redesigned, recreated, and re-crafted. You simply start by honestly evaluating the situation with the purposeful intent to redesign a better outcome.

Honest evaluation isn’t always painless. The past week of protests, curfews, and tensions have been emotionally painful for me.

Today the pain has lifted. The pain woke a desire to design something better.

Racism and inequity are products of design. They can be redesigned. We are a country founded on the genocide of one people and the enslavement of another. We have to honestly reconcile the impact of this inheritance on us all.

The construction of our countries social systems was designed to isolate and separate us. The systems empowered a chosen few with the privilege of invention, innovation, and creativity. These Systems laid the groundwork for misunderstanding, fear, and ultimately hate.

Design is no longer about inventing things; it is about recreating systems. In a world that continues to increase in complexity and technology, Human Centered Design can simplify, humanize, and bring order to this chaos.

When asked: What innovation do you think is changing the most lives in the developing world?

Melinda Gates of the Gates Foundation replied: “Human-centered design. Meeting people where they are and really taking their needs and feedback into account. When you let people participate in the design process, you find that they often have ingenious ideas about what would really help them. And it’s not an onetime thing; it’s an iterative process.”

Indeed.

Because an equitable reality has never existed, we cannot look to our past to learn how to design an equitable future. We, all of us, must build this reality into existence. To create a different story, we have to use a different approach.

I do not have the answers, but I’m committed to doing my part to work towards a solution. A disciplined design process, I believe, can support a transformation for all of us and keep us moving toward realizing the American dream for all people.

Let the work begin.