Rachael Dietkus, Founder, Social Workers Who Design
In conversation with: Jason Mayden, Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Design


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Designing Workplace Wellness

Conferences

the importance of addressing trauma has often been overlooked or misunderstood over the turbulent past few years, centered around the global pandemic are cumulative trauma load has increased now as more people are returning to the office, it is more pressing than ever to overhaul toxic design workplaces and address workplace trauma. Social workers with their capacity to address a person's entire environment can help designers adjust their transactional approach to be more relational in their empathy as we look to close gaps in human centric design. Should designers think more like social workers to explore this intersection and explain the benefits of trauma informed design please welcome Rachel Dickus, founder of social workers who designed in conversation with fortune brainstorm design co chair Jason maiden. Mm hmm. All right, thank you guys for attending and being awake and everything I know after you eat, sometimes you get a little bit tired. We're here. Um first and foremost, thank you Rachel for being here. There's a strong midwest contingency in the building, so I just want to shout her out, She's from Illinois. But before we get started, I think it's important that we model a lot of your work by me asking how are you right now in this moment? How are you saying? How am I right now in this moment? Well, um, I wondered if you were going to ask this question, I have to say um even before you told me that you're gonna ask this question, I think I think I have to say I'm I'm almost certain that I'm probably the only social worker in the room and I think being a being someone who is working so closely and and adjacent to design constantly is uh is interesting and fascinating, but I often am the only social worker in the room and so there's uh there's an excitement with that but there's also a bit of a extreme nervousness that comes with that too. So um I feel like um uh Maisie Williams when she was on jimmy Fallon, remember when she like the april Fools and she started quivering. So that's what I am on the inside center ourselves. It is and we're back. So I think the intersection of social work and design is exceptionally important for people to understand. Would you mind walking us through like how that came to be and what do you mean by specialty of trauma informed design. So for me, I actually started out as an art design student many, many years ago, you know, back in the early nineties. And so uh things shifted for me when I took a sociology class and so I decided like, oh I can I can do design on the side, I can, I can be uh you know a fan but what where I was really passionate with understanding systems and people and how people are affected by systems and systems of harm as well. Um but throughout my social work career I was constantly working very closely with engineers. Architects designers actually worked um on construction projects at veterans affairs for a couple of years and and so I saw this this perfect um integration and intersection of where you could actually like live your values and do something of purpose while addressing immediate needs. But really trying to have those wraparound services to really try to eradicate like why you even need those needs in the first place. So uh it really just became this evolution of how can I be also a social worker who is participating in design but also actively be a designer as well. So tell me a little bit more about that because what you just explained is you're immersing yourself you know through empathy and observation but you're also able to step back and observe the context. Like what is that process like being immersed in it exposed to it but didn't happen to step back and synthesize it all. Well I appreciate what you said about context because I think context is a is critical and everything that I do as a designer as a social worker designer. But I think context is also a big piece and a big component of just how I define like trauma and what it means to be trauma responsive and design. Um you know there are there well entrenched trauma informed care principles that are created by the federal government here in the US but I like using this language of trauma responsiveness because it has this action component with it. It's the same thing for me. Like I um I made a made a comment at the lunch that that I actually had a degree in empathy because I'm a social worker. So for those who caught that, but I actually I shy away from the word empathy because I think it's it's missing that action component. And so I really doubled down on compassion. So like what does it mean to be compassionate when we're doing design? What does it mean to be full of care when we're doing design as opposed to just human centered and design. Again, those aren't bad things. But how can we, how can we flipped some of the language or use different language of actually is going to allow us to go far deeper in these processes and who were designing with or for a phenomenal and I think what's critically important is that we define trauma for some of us, trauma is a DJ from Atlanta or it's a lived experience depending on where you grew up. But I think for this audience specifically, like how would you define trauma? So there are, there are a lot of different, a lot of different definitions of trauma and there are many clinical and medical definitions and uh you know those I'm not going to share, I'm going to share one that I think is has I have um used and I've pulled from uh from from people who are just well known in in trauma trauma work and also in uh social work and trauma studies, but it's a combination of work from dr Bethel Vander Kolk who wrote the body keeps the score resume, Niccum who wrote my grandmother's hands and then Corinne Bell, who is a somatic abolitionist. And so it's a combination of of what these three have really like said that I feel like really embodies what we could be in. Well we could be in design about how we can also understand what this means, the design. So between the three of them, um your trauma is a response to anything that happens too much too fast or too soon. And but you know, because often that's where the definition starts and stops, but and it's coupled with this lack of protection or support. So you had an event or a series of events occur, but you didn't have someone to talk with, you didn't have someone who was there to support you to uh you know, make sure that you were okay. And then the third component, which I think is also often like left out is that the context is crucial. So what may be a traumatic experience for me may not be a traumatic experience for you and vice versa. So, you know, these elements of identity, intersectionality, position al Itty, these are all crucial and part of that, those components of what it means to be, what, how I would define trauma, what it means to be trauma responsive that is phenomenal and I think what's critical about what you said, if you guys haven't read the book, the body keeps the score, it is life changing when you understand physiologically what trauma does to you. So within the context of the design centric organization um you have a statement, you say trauma in the design centric organization is so unsettling, can you want to pack what that means? I think the you know, maybe I'll maybe what one of the things that I can share is that when I started doing this work and being much more explicit on, I want to I don't want to choose design or social work, I want to find a way to integrate the two. So I don't want to I don't know what the name is for the integration of both disciplines, which is why I often say I'm a social worker designer. Um but I think the thing that I initially started seeing was that you know, I started wondering about was that designers need to be trauma informed, like why are we not trauma informed and we're designing with or for or allowing others to to design you know, their own solutions. Um and the more I started digging into that work, what was becoming very evident very quickly was that designers themselves are often extremely traumatized by the design process by the pace and the speed at which we are expected to be working and you know throughout industry and then um so so there's the there's that element of the trauma, but then there's also significant secondary or sometimes called vicarious trauma that designers are experiencing because of what they're hearing. So when you're so think about when, when designers are doing research and there talking to individuals and you're working at this pace where you're going back to back to back like our body can only consume and and absorb so much and it's going to go somewhere and it's going to tell us things if we don't have a release or a way to to express that. You know, it's one of the reasons why a lot of designers um have openly and you actively tell me that, you know, I have a have a great supportive network, I'm in therapy, but they, but they don't necessarily have someone who can help them navigate both the design system and also um just live their work in a different way and and it's the work is emerging, you know, so I could say like um like this is what I do, like I can maybe like tally off like the things that I do, but I feel like a lot of it is it comes up by definition of what designers are working on, what may be the topics that they're working on. Um but the design is trying to uh design his historically, but also has been getting much more involved in what I would call serious and complex social justice issues and are not and we absolutely are not prepared to handle some of those complexities of the situation and that that is, you know, an exceptionally important point because one could argue we've just experienced, we're currently experiencing a mass traumatic experience that will affect us inter generationally and you know, in the field of study of epigenetic people talk about how trauma can be hard coded into our DNA predispose us to certain elements. Like are you starting to see bodies of research or initiating bodies of research to think about the generational impact of this shared experience that we're currently living in? You know, I think I think the people are researching this absolutely. Um I think one of my first key insights into the longevity of what the what this collective experience has been. So not just covid not related to the pandemic, but all of the other things that are related to that, you know, I mean, you're a parent, I'm a parent, you know, I have my southwards and healthcare, it's like we have like the trifecta. I worked in a toxic workplace, toxic design workplace, I was a working parent and I had a spouse who's working who is a critical care nurse and so exposed to covid constantly. So, you know, I think about the um like what are what are the things that we can that we can do on a small community scale that can then um possibly like fan out. And I think it ultimately comes down to how are we forming connections? So I've heard a lot about like relationships. I mean I even I just made I made a note of a few things that have been said. So words like trust, relationships, change ecosystem um you know, connection, resilient success, human needs, transformation all those things mean something completely different to me as a social worker. Designer completely different. Like and and I don't know if that's I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing but when I hear some of that language, I think about like what is the language that we're using and how are we using that to to really like change course on how we do design. And that's such a great point because we've seen over the past three years, a lot of great performative marketing to address some of the societal ills that we're all currently facing. And a very I would say you know, personal topic that's happening within the black design community is we're expected to show up at work and still perform at a high level and still deal with the nuances of being underrepresented in certain instances while still facing the reality of seeing things that happen in Buffalo, seeing things that happened civil arrests same thing for other demographics of designers who are underrepresented. So for the people in the room who are leaders? How do you suggest they brush those difficult topics with the employees that they know are suffering? But they don't know how to reach them because there's gonna be a mass exodus of people consistently if we don't, you know, attack it from that perspective. Yeah. This is this is a it's a tough question and and it needs a far longer to answer than the one minute and 45 seconds we have right in front of us here. Um I will say I I think that if if we think that we can manufacture care, I think that's going to be the wrong answer. Like we have to find ways to actually build true human connection. I mean it's um and I I don't think I do think it does. Um I think leadership is part of that. I don't think it's always necessarily starts with leadership. I think like everyone has people on their teams and they are telling you in both explicit and implicit ways like how they are suffering. I mean, I just I think about the volume of of grief, of trauma that we're all always swimming in. And I think the longer that we suppress that and that we don't acknowledge that the longer this is going to continue, it will be a different kind of a pandemic. And with that, I mean, how do you see the future shaping for responsible design And we have this information. We have the tools we have the moment where people can be emotionally and you know from a capital perspective invested in to take action. So what do you see the future of your work becoming as more people become aware of this type of this type of design? Yeah, I um I'm not gonna lie, I would love to see, I would love to see every single company here like have a team of social workers and not just hire them as therapists but hire them as social workers who are also designers because there it is a tiny but mighty like growing field of interest. Um I would say one other thing is that um you know it's not enough just to be trauma informed, trauma responsive. It's also like how can we be healing focused and how can we be care centered as well? Um I think that statement right there is the perfect way to end this session. I want to thank you Rachel fishermen. It's work, I encourage you all to follow what you're doing. Thank you for your time. Thanks