Designing for Liberation with Tania Anaissie

How might design practice need to adapt to serve the social sector?
How might we align our design practice to our values?

In design’s translation from the for-profit to social sectors it brought with it some harmful practices that no longer serve us. Join us to hear Tania’s journey of dissecting and rebuilding design thinking with collaborators to create Liberatory Design : Design for Equity, a liberation-rooted design practice. We’ll also invite you to explore how you can further integrate your values into your own practice day to day.

Liberatory Design is a creative problem-solving approach and practice that centers equity and supports us to design for liberation. It is made up of mindsets and modes informed by best practices from fields like design thinking, complexity theory, organizing, equity, restorative healing and beyond. Mindsets invoke stances and values to ground and focus our design practice, and modes provide process guidance for our design practice. Liberatory Design generates self-awareness to liberate designers from habits that perpetuate inequity, shifts the relationship between the people who hold power to design and those impacted, fosters learning and agency for those involved in and influenced by the design work, and creates conditions for collective liberation.

About Tania Anaissie

Tania Anaissie is the Founder and CEO of Beytna Design, a Founding Creator of Liberatory Design, a Founding Member of the Equity Design Collaborative, former Faculty at The National Equity Project and a former Lecturer at the Stanford University d.school. She has built a way of practicing design that helps organizations translate equity values into equitable products, programmes, and cultures. She is an expert content creator and facilitator with over a decade of experience working globally. Tania is a graduate of Stanford University’s Product Design program, an advisor in Stanford’s Design Impact program, and a StartingBloc fellow.