Think of ways to activate DEIB in your day-to-day work

It’s one thing for organizations to say they are adopting diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. That can look like integrating DEIB into your core values, standing up a DEI committee, or having conversations about identity among your staff.

However, it’s a whole other thing for those same organizations to evaluate the work their employees do as a profession and figure out how to apply DEIB in the work they do every day.

That’s what I spell out for designers in my upcoming book, Design for Identity: How to Design Authentically for a Diverse World. It came about as I observed how more and more design organizations are talking about DEIB but mostly in the context of their internal operations – their culture, recruiting, leadership diversity, etc. – not in the context of the service they provide to customers. Designers design for everyone but there’s little, if any, discussion about the significance of our customers’ cultural identity in the design process so it’s often missing from or inaccurately conveyed in what we create.

Design isn’t unique in this regard.

The same can be said in other professions I’ve been involved in, such as consulting. And it’s just as crucial in fields such as education, medicine, law, and hospitality, to name a few.

Take some time to think about your profession, the service you provide, and how the customer experience and your final products could be different by intentionally factoring your customers’ identity into how you execute your craft.

If you need some help figuring out what that could look like, consider pre-ordering Design for Identity today. It’s a how-to for evolving our day-to-day dialogue and work tasks to make sure we don’t lose sight of the humanity of our customers, which is something none of us can afford to overlook.