[Image Description: Colorful card deck with the top card faced down and the bottom cards faced up. The top card is designed with a blue background with randomly placed petal-shaped clip art in bright colors like turquoise, orange, lime green, fuchsia, purple, and yellow. Across the card in white font is the test, “Liberatory Design, mindsets and modes to design for equity.” The cards below show a bottom border in dark blue, with petals in gray or light blue There is some text visible on the bottom cards but it is not readable.]
Liberatory Design Card Deck
Liberatory Design is an approach to addressing equity challenges and change efforts in complex systems. It is a process and practice to:
Create designs that help interrupt inequity and increase opportunity for those most impacted by oppression
Transform power by shifting the relationships between those who hold power to design and those impacted by these designs
Generate critical learning and increased agency for those involved in the design work
Liberatory Design is both a flexible process that can be used by teams and a set of equity leadership habits that can be practiced daily. It can be used in a variety of ways and by a variety of actors, including innovation efforts, strategic planning, community-driven design, and collaborative teams. At the core of Liberatory Design are a set of beliefs:
Racism and inequity have been designed into systems and thus can be redesigned;
Designing for equity requires the meaningful participation of those impacted by inequity; and
Equity-driven designs require equity and complexity informed processes.
Liberatory Design is the result of a multi-year collaboration between Tania Anaissie, David Clifford, Susie Wise , and the National Equity Project [Victor Cary and Tom Malarkey].
About The Deck
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. 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.
Visit www.liberatorydesign.com to download the deck for free in English and Spanish.
Please share how you are using Liberatory Design by tagging #LiberatoryDesign.
If you need more decks than are currently available, please contact sharris@nationalequityproject.org.