Tania Anaissie, David Clifford, and Victor Cary on Liberatory Design

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I’m Rebecca Middles. Today I’m joined by a superstar lineup of design thought leaders to discuss libertarian design. Victor Carey, senior director at the National Equity Project, formerly known as the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools, has worked in education for over 40 years, starting

as a high school teacher in Richmond, California. David Clifford is the co-creator of Libertarian Design. He also founded DSX, an educational nonprofit that invites creative courage in all of us to design for equity. And if we’re lucky, we may hear him talk about love.

Tanya Anisey is also a co-creator of Libertarian Design. She is the founder of Baytna Design. She is also faculty at the National Equity Project. Thank you all for joining us today. Victor, what was the inception point for Libertarian Design?

In what ways does Libertarian Design connect to design thinking? It’s a great question. Before I respond to that, I just want to be sure to give a shout out to our other LD crew members. Tom Malarkey, who’s a colleague of mine at the National Equity Project, and Suzy Weiss,

who is, I guess, an independent consultant now, but was formerly a lead for K-12 design at the Design School at Stanford. So sorry they’re not with us. We run in a pack, so we miss them on this podcast. So really, the inception of this really had to do with our respective needs at National

Equity Project. We were, for many years, talking about this notion of design as part of the work that we do as basically we’re a coaching organization. We work mostly with school districts around the country, and our strong suit is practice of coaching with a strong equity orientation.

And there’s a lot of design involved in that, but we had all kinds of different ways we were talking about it, and we knew we needed to get a little bit more intentional and rigorous about what did you really mean by that. And unfortunately, we had some friends right down the street from us at Stanford that had been doing amazing work, and we went and took one of their courses to kind of sharpen our

chops around design, and then really out of that, it became clear that there might be opportunity to do some work together, because they, and I don’t want to speak for my colleagues, they wanted to sharpen their chops around how to use equity more intentionally into the amazing design thinking practices that they already had established. So that led to an informal partnership, and I really want to emphasize that, because we

came together at a mutual regard and mutual respect for each other’s work, but we didn’t want to be, at that time, two organizations coming together and getting into sort of the trap of trying to make a partnership with a bunch of overhead around it. We wanted to be together around our love for the work that we were doing and be, and get in the right relationship with us, because we knew that was going to establish what might

emerge from that. And so that’s sort of how we got started, to really meet each other’s needs, and I’ll mention one thing, I’d be remiss, and we each had very, I think, different things that we wanted to get from it, from the national equity project point of view. Libertory design is part of a larger framework, we call our Leading for Equity framework, that

includes equity, complexity, and design. And so that approach is what we use to drive our work now across the country with the districts that we work with. I think that’s enough. David or Tanya, please add anything that feels relevant to that question.

I would add that, to echo your point about the work that we were doing down at the K-12 lab, part of my job was to really examine design thinking through the lens of equity, and that the notice and reflect was a prototype to hack design thinking, and an intentional hack to pause the notice and reflect power, intention, bias, system. And it really didn’t become this magical flower that it is now until this partnership that

you mentioned. I think I shared with you earlier that I’ve heard that there’s a pause that’s being referred to that kind of talks about that too, the Libertory pause that people are using. Maybe you can incorporate that into some of your shares, but I think that hits on what you were just also sharing, David.

Maybe you could continue by adding what are some use cases for Libertory design and education, whether that’s school redesign and pedagogy, is it both mindset and mythology? What could you add to that for use cases? It’s all of those things. So use cases, Libertory design, in its short life, I have seen being used both on the personal

level in designing objects in relationships to other humans, in designing processes, in working with your team, and in systems design. I’ve noticed that Libertory design can be used, so say you were designing a class or even a unit. You can use Libertory design in particular, the Libertory design mindsets, lay them out

in front of you, have first said, who are you working with? What might some barriers be for you earning their trust? You can lay out your mindsets and choose which mindsets you want to ground yourself in before you start designing or co-designing that unit or that class with your students, whatever age they are.

You can use the modes, and it doesn’t have to be in a linear way, it can be all over the place, but you can use the modes to then, with those intentions and with the folks that you’re designing with to guide you through the design process. You can teach it, literally, so the Monterey Bay Aquarium is using Libertory design to design all of their adult workshops.

Then all the Libertory design modes are getting baked into those experiences, and then those teachers are taking the national science standards with Libertory design and baking them into their schools. You can use it for school design, again, in setting intention and in going through the process and a warning.

This is, again, as very intentional, is that Libertory design really does slow the process. Yes, design thinking is good and that it is human-centered, and yet it still is moving at a pace that privileges dominant culture. Libertory design has all the creative aspects to it, but is asking you to slow way down and really privilege to, again, Victor’s point, privilege relationships and building that

relational trust. It’s also happening at the school district level as well, thinking about work that I know Tanya and I have done with the Austin Independent School District, working with those principals and district leaders, also in designing a student equity council across 15 high schools.

Of course, I have my list here. It’s also helping students within classrooms to set their own design intentions, and then also we always ask students to collaborate, but never offer opportunities to practice how. One way is to, again, root in Libertory design mindsets and then share those mindsets with

each other. What as a group do you want to ground your practice moving forward and then really have the regular check-ins to notice and reflect on how you’re showing up? That’s a lot of great ideas. I hope we’ll hear even more as we continue.

Tanya, what are the use cases for Libertory design more broadly? We’ve got some great educational examples. What are some more broadly use case scenarios? I would describe them as infinite, but the way that we use it. At Baitnow, we do a lot of organizational and culture change work with folks.

We work in the nonprofit sector, some of it’s K-12 with foundations. We’re working in the tech sector. We’re using it in a couple different ways. One in an internal sense to say how can we use Libertory design as, I describe it as the bridge between we have these equity values or commitments.

We’re learning about the history, the implications, our biases, and then there’s this huge intimidating gap to be like, okay, but what do we do? How do we do it differently? Then they get to the stage of like, oh, okay, we’re starting to see within our systems, decisions, programs that some of these things are creating harm or they’re creating these

unintended outcomes, but this is where our values are breaking down. Now we found it. Then it’s this feeling of, oh my God, how do we change the system? The way that we use Libertory design is to say, it’s not as intimidating as it feels. We’re going to be rooted in the history and identity.

We’re going to be talking with people who are living this problem right now to understand how they’re working on it, what they think about it. Basically break it down to say it’s not this magical, I have a value, I have no idea what to do. There is a way to break it down and make sure that your decisions are rooted in your equity values.

That’s our whole thing. It’s like Libertory design is an alternative way to make decisions. Some of the use cases are internal and external projects. An external project might be saying, we have this product in the tech sector that’s impacting XYZ number of content creators.

We want to make sure that our content creators of color or varying ability are able to access our platform and make their income. Maybe the product’s not serving them. What does that mean? How can we learn about how it could be different?

Or internal work could say, we’re looking at the experience of staff of color and we lost a lot of staff of color during the pandemic. How can we understand our policies, our culture, our decisions? That’s a design project in itself. You can apply Libertory design and say, okay, let’s redesign some internal stuff.

There’s some healing that needs to happen. There’s some curiosity there. I would say the ranges are sort of infinite. It’s like you have a challenge. It’s ambiguous and you can access the people that are impacted.

That is the starting point to say we could make this different. I can see how that could connect to attendance challenges. Definitely with subgroup populations that we’re not getting served during the pandemic. That example can be related so well. I’m going to even see board members.

We can even talk about board meetings at some point. Board members looking at this process as an example. Thank you, Tanya. Victor, if a team used Libertory design in new school development, what do you think would be different?

We could talk about culture, structure, pedagogy, connections. Which one do you want to? Yeah, there’s so much. I think what Tanya just said about infinite ways. I think what I would offer, I want to go back to something David said,

go quickly, which is one of the things that struck me about human-centered design and one of the important features was bias towards experimentation. And so the rhythm was very, very, very fast. And the fact that David was prototyping this notice and reflect is critical from an equity perspective. Because if you can’t get in a relationship across difference and all that entails,

then you actually can’t design for something different. And so when we spent 10 years doing small school development work in the local San Francisco Bay Area, and if you couldn’t get a design team to get in a relationship, they couldn’t actually build the school of their dreams. They just couldn’t do it.

And so what Libertory Design does, it creates possibility not only for relationship, but then to actually be able to imagine and try some things. And a couple of the key features that’s in Libertory Design that were added in our collective work was critically recognize oppression, attend to healing, embrace complexity. Those are key, key, key features that I can’t stress enough.

So when you’re trying to do new school development or reimagine existing school, those elements have to be present. Otherwise, you simply reproduce the inequitable outcomes that you see in schools even to this very day. And that’s been exacerbated by the current pandemic. It really has.

I see your partners, which others can’t see, really nodding their heads and agreeing with this. And I also hear love at the root of that, which I think we talked about in the beginning. Just to play off a little bit more about what you shared, Victor. And David, I’m going to ask you a question next, so feel free to also win. But how does Libertory Design, either mindsets or tool sets,

help system leaders create those shared values and iterative agreements? So right now, because it’s been out there and we are using it as a key feature of our approach in the districts that we work with, it’s very clear that the mindsets are very, very sticky because it invites people to expand their mental models about how things work. And that’s just so critical.

Oftentimes, people are trained that this is how you do it. This is the right way to do it and so on. And they have perspectives and beliefs. And our invitation is, well, that’s fine. But we’re grappling with something where none of us seems to know what to do now.

So we may need to expand how we think about what might be possible. And so the mindsets creates some conditions for those relationships. The next goal for leaders who are the formal leaders in organizations, whether you think of a school leader or the superintendent of a district, where they’re trying to actually break out of the usual cause and effect kinds of actions

they take that’s reflected in a strategic plan. That’s good for some things, but when you’re trying to create greater equity, where there has never been equity at the level that we hold as a real possibility, this is where Libertory Design becomes an incredibly valuable resource for creating that space to do that kind of work over time.

And one last thing I’ll say about it, which is Libertory Design helps to level the playing field and you hear that all the time. So the question about power, which is so endemic in hierarchical systems like school districts, this becomes a mechanism to redistribute power in the making the change. And people can take leadership in their own spheres of influence that can add up to something

greater than the sum of the parts. Again, connecting to what Tanya was sharing too with the outside of external projects and community conversations can see this energy. Let’s lead into this. Let’s go a little bit more with that.

When you think about that, David, how does Libertory Design help leaders and learners then embrace that complexity? And if you feel inclined, how might this even apply to current scenarios of community gatherings or board meetings that we’re experiencing now as a society? What comes to mind first is that, and I know everyone in this call believes this as well,

that everybody is a designer. Leaders are designers. They have the power in many instances and so do boards to design contexts or containers that allow others to manifest their internal designer. The question is, what kind of designer are you?

What kind of designer do you want to be? And Libertory Design offers a how in the modes and it also offers the mindsets and heart sets to the how to inform the how. So I think about what Victor was just sharing and Tanya, that if you are going to co-design particularly with communities that have historically been left out of the design process,

you are going to want to want mindsets is seek Libertory Collaboration. Get everyone together, especially those who are most impacted by the problem. When you’re all together, focus on human values. When you’re together, focus on building relational trust. When you’re together, particularly if you have a lot of positional power and a cultural

structural power, work to transform power. This is about again seeking Libertory Collaboration and becoming really self-aware of what you are bringing and what you are not to the design context. And that’s really hard for leaders to do. And so that is also a practice in humility and a practice of self-awareness.

And I’m dropping all the Libertory Design mindsets, if you’re not catching that. And here’s the key. And this is for all the leaders out there of nonprofits, of for-profits, of schools. These mindsets are really important. I would also really want to plug because oppression thrives on risk-averse behavior.

Schools and our school systems thrive on this to really embrace creative courage, that’s another mindset, and take action to learn. The only way you can learn is by doing. The only way to really start designing towards equity and liberation is to try it in healthy, trusting relationships with creativity.

So I think about work that I’m doing with the school in Southern California working with their board. And the board holds a tremendous amount of power. And they also hold a tremendous amount of assumptions about what school looks like, what’s best for a school, what their experience was like, informed by what their parents experienced, and so on and so forth.

So working with the board is particularly important because they are the ones who are in charge of supporting the principal or the head of school. And they are also responsible for making sure that the values are, the fiduciary responsibility, that the values and the finances are aligned. And if you can bake liberation into every dollar,

right, and every minute that an organization spends and how they behave, imagine, imagine what schools and nonprofits could really do for our humanity. You could say that that’s an ethical obligation we have with taxpayer dollars. I appreciate that. Tonya, I know you probably have lots to say on this.

Feel free to add to it, but I also want you to, if you could incorporate a little bit about the network that you help with, particularly the equity design collaborative and any related network so people can get a sense, I’m sure they’re excited by this conversation, but ways that they can get involved and find out more if you could also include that. Absolutely.

Try to think, what would I add on this thread? I think the piece of complexity that it feels so emotionally overwhelming, I think Victor and David have spoken to this, and that’s where we see a lot of people stop, is it’s just totally overwhelming. It can trigger some feelings of shame, confusion and fear.

I think what Libertory Design, one of the ways that it’s powerful in helping people embrace complexity is saying out of comfort and what we’re rewarded for in school and the workplace is problem solution, problem solution, problem with no space in between. The faster you can be, the more promoted you will be. But the reality is that’s not always what’s serving us, our staff, our communities, our

children for sure. Embracing complexity, Libertory Design helps you say, not just broadly, just say with it, you’ll be fine. But rather it says, we know it’s scary, but let’s start to break it down. We want to understand, let’s talk to people, understand what they’re going through,

but also why are they experiencing this? We did a project, a co-design project with folks living on benefits, and the things that they would share about what they were experiencing, they would say things in interviews like, I’m so ashamed, this is generational curse, these are largely women of color.

And so we started to go back into the history to be like, where is, what is this narrative? Because it doesn’t, it’s false. Where does it come from? Right? Not their experiences are false, but this narrative that it’s their fault or that it’s

shameful. And you can go directly into quotes, let’s say for Ronald Reagan that use like verbatim, this language to make some policy choices around cutting social benefit. So it also invites you to say, and that’s embracing complexity is not to say, one, we’re not going to jump to a solution.

We’re going to talk to people who are impacted, but also we’re trying to understand why. Right? Look, people are often making choices in the system to survive given the shitty choices they were given. So like, why are these choices the case?

Where do they exist? Why are certain people impacted more? So it’s allowing you in sort of a more held space to say, let’s open up, but not just ambiguously, now the whole world is up for redesign, but rather like we have to design contextually.

Like, how could you redesign a school and attendance policy behavior concepts without understanding the racial implications, like the history of what’s happened to your community and your city and your district. So it’s opening it up with some heldness. That’s not a word.

Now it is. I’m all about made up words to say, you know. Great. Libertry is made up according to my Google edit function. Yeah, you should.

I hear you also calling out what I hope true leadership would look like is embracing complexity and being thoughtful about a community versus management. And I love that you really call it out and you have tools and mindsets and dispositions for people to face those hard conversations. If they were easy, they wouldn’t be having them.

So appreciate that. If I can add a little bit to leadership, because that is a critical part of our theory of action for making change, making systems change. So we talk about leadership as rebel host leadership. So rebel connotes a lot of things.

We’re not talking about a rebellion with weapons, but we are saying that being willing to interrupt the status quo that leads to the continuing leads to an equitable outcomes for young people and host, meaning that you’re creating space for that co-design to be possible. And just a quick hit on what that looks like for us. We run a 17 district network called the Building Equitable Learning Environment,

is what the Bell Network and the one of the features of the Bell Network is the creation of circle teams made up of students, teachers, side administrators, central office, and sometimes community folk. And so you can imagine and they are essentially serving as design teams in their district to take on some issue, some challenge.

And here’s the key. Identified by the students. Identified not by the adults, but identified by the students that they want to work on. So you can imagine that the challenge of creating a design team where student voice and leadership is authentically part of that.

So that’s it. That’s that. You don’t see that in very many places. And so and Libertory Design becomes sort of the catalyzing process for that to emerge. And it’s very exciting.

So we’re testing this in a very intentional way and hopefully we’ll have some things to report in the next few years about it. So I heard a network. Thank you for sharing Victor. Tanya, you tell us a little bit more about the equity design collaborative as well.

Yes. So the equity design collaborative came together quite organically. And how I first heard about it, I was chatting with David was having a real moment in my personal life about like this. I think this is my calling.

This needs to be my work. David’s like, great, I’ve been talking to some other people. So there were folks in Florida, DC, St. Louis, Bay Area, and it started as an organic. Like someone wrote an article. Like someone was featured somewhere.

Oh my gosh. And so we sort of found each other. People who were interested about this intersection, in particular, of equity and design thinking. So what does innovative equity change look like? And had some critiques and some new tools and some thoughts.

And so we started coming together for an informal show and tell. The organizer, Dr. Christine Ortiz, was calling it a show and tell. And so we’d come to you like, what are you working on? What are you grappling with? Holding each other accountable, curiosity.

So it became this beautiful space we even met in person. And then the equity design collaborative, we decided together to to name the larger field equity design, to speak to this work and the movement. And so this amazing group, lots of folks of color, very women and femme led and non-binary. And so then that felt like a very pivotal moment.

We have liberatory design, there’s equity, there’s community design, there’s a lot of different forms of them within the collaborative. But I’ll say at that time we were sort of niche. I would be going to design conferences to speak about liberatory design and our network. And I remember once they put me in this huge auditorium,

I was so excited. And I think like 20 people came. I’ve been there. I mean, those were our people, right? They were the right people.

Yeah. But it was still like super niche. And people kept saying, you know, things would say things, they would say things to me like, oh, this is probably good. If you’re doing design thinking project, you know, about like poverty or something.

I was like, no, this is just how we do design. And so for a while we were super on the fringes, which is a good place to be. It’s not a bad thing, which I think allowed us to be so experimentative. But now it just feels like a tidal wave.

Is how I describe it. There was a restorative design conference led by Greater Good. There’s a design justice network. There’s groups in New Zealand, Australia, UK. So I think they were all sort of emerging or had been emerging,

but now we’re learning about each other. And I’m meeting people at conferences I’ve never heard of who are like, hi, I’m an equity designer. It’s just like, great. Where did you come from?

So I think now it’s sort of, you know, a lot of the large design firms we’re working with have been saying, hey, we really want to rethink our practice. So I think the tidal wave is sort of turning. And that in design education, they talk about like, what is the manifesto of every era?

I hope this is our new manifesto is like, this is the way that design needs to be in the world. And that, you know, education and equity are heading this direction as a whole. I do too. I do too.

Thank you. I love the energy that you showed. And I imagine you’re inspiring others to be involved. So where can people find out more and how can they get started? Well, you of course can find us at our organizational homes.

You can actually agree project, Baitin and design, DSX, Suzy Wise doing design for belonging. Of course, connect with us. Love to hear from you. There’s the equity design collaborative. There’s the design justice network, all those different ones I mentioned.

So please just find people like the Libertory Design hashtag on social media. We’ve been finding each other that way. We have contact forums on LibertoryDesign.com and in our Card Deck website. What would y’all add? I would just say we’re open.

Like we want to hear from people. We want to see the movement grow. That’s right. That’s right. Well, we’ve, one of the things we haven’t said is that Libertory Design,

we want to set it free. One of the things I’ve been most surprised by is that people have had zero contact with us. They just got the cards and they ran with them, you know, and, and we’re getting these stories now that are just amazing. And we certainly didn’t design for that or plan for that, but it has emerged.

And it’s pretty, it’s one of the sweetest things that’s happened in my life to see something like that. Speaks to the truth of the work and this energy. I am. I recently came across a quote from a craftswoman, Vivica Hino, What you give away, you keep forever.

And to Victor’s point, Libertory Design, it’s very own liberation and love were baked into the very process, the mindsets and the card decks themselves. And there’s a reason why the new visual is a flower because we believe again that everybody is a pollinator. And that’s through engaging with Libertory Design, they will feel the love, they will feel the

liberation, they will feel the creativity and want others to feel it as well and share it. And I’ll hop in and add, Suzy Y is one of our Libertory Design crew members who’s not here today. Just released a book, Design for Belonging, that I believe is on pre-order now. So definitely want to shout out that too as a way to stay connected or dive in. Wonderful. We’ll put a link to that as well in the podcast. So thank you for sharing.

David Clifford, Tanya Nisey and Victor Carey, thank you so much for the work you’re doing and for sharing with us today. Thanks for tuning into the Getting Smart podcast today. We want this podcast to be actionable and insightful and a great way to learn about what’s next in learning. In order to stay on the cutting edge, we need people in the field to tell us what they’re

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