This is day 2 of our special week-long series on The Grove, an immersive experience on designing for meaningful change.
Navigating resistance and fear
Last time, we talked about how the weight of oppression can build up in our bodies and numb our convictions.
If you have the energy to "fight" back and try to design in ways that go against the system, you will undoubtedly face resistance.
Even when no one pushes back, fear can also creep in. You may think, What if I get my design wrong and create harm?
All of this may hold you back from moving forward or even getting started. Or perhaps this is the first time you've ever thought about these tensions.
Holding all of this complexity is core to the journey of collective liberation. It's not easy or straightforward. Sometimes, you feel quite powerless. And if anyone has told you that they have the solution or the framework, be wary.
The thing is that, if we want to do our part in designing liberatory futures, we have to be willing to navigate the complexity of the systems that hold us back. We have to put our comfort aside to take a stand. And we must find ways to hold onto hope of reshaping these systems when the work gets hard.
But how do we do this?
Where to start: unpacking oppression
We start by unpacking oppression.
This means examining the many ways that it's woven itself into the design of the world around us — from the tangible parts like products, services, and environments to the more intangible parts like cultural norms, belief systems, and power structures in the workplace and society as a whole.
That's where the The Grove begins. It helps you build a critical lens starting from the harmful, inequitable, and biased outputs of what we design and going back to the root causes. And it does this in ways that a capitalist workplace never would (whether that's out of disinterest, censorship, or, at worse, manipulation from those in power).
In this immersive learning experience, you'll zoom into the sensations, beliefs, and values you carry within you and zoom out to the systems around you. With a clearer mapping of the complexity of this work, you'll become better equipped to make change where it counts — at the roots of the problem.
With this in mind, I leave you with a prompt: What's the one thing about oppression you wish to unpack?
