The problem of waste: marginalized communities
Welcome back to this series on what we design to throw away. In the last entry, we looked at places that have been termed, “sacrifice zones”, which we defined as “areas of the world that industrial and postindustrial countries have determined are expendable for the purposes of maintaining an economic system of consumption.” In this entry, we’ll look at another problem exacerbated by our acceptance of waste as just an inevitable part of our design process: marginalized communities.
A note right at the beginning here: on the day that I set to publish this, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling that legitimized the discrimination of (specifically) LGBTQ+ people by ruling in favor of web designer who declined to create a website for a gay marriage. It didn’t matter that the incident that sparked the lawsuit actually never happened. Now, this is only tangentially a design issue, but my overarching point throughout this whole series—and really through all of my writing is that design as a profession has real-world effects outside of just the aesthetic. It makes the posting of this today all the more relevant and I felt that not addressing this news would be remiss.
Marginalized communities
How do we define who is or who isn’t marginalized? At its most granular, that could come down to specific geographic or sociopolitical contexts, but in an increasingly globalized community driven by market-oriented policies, individual contexts are often preemptively determined by Western-defined global norms. So, marginalization is often defined as whatever falls outside of a white, heteronormative mindset, but, more broadly speaking, marginalized communities are those that are either under-represented or not represented at all by the cultures in which they live in and around. This can be on the basis of race, nationality, sexuality, religion, ability, gender, and more. Some groups that are typically seen as marginalized almost everywhere are queer, or Indigenous, or are wheelchair-bound, or are in other ways outside of the norms for which society is designed. As in the last entry, I use the word design here intentionally. “Disability”, for example, is a designed experience, not an inherent one. Society and infrastructure are designed for those that fit within a narrow definition of what has been designated as “typical.” The result of this design-for-a-few mindset is that people are left on the edges—the margins—of our creative and problem-solving efforts; near enough to see the results of our work, but not near enough to experience them first-hand.
I want to focus for a minute before going forward, on the idea of marginalization as a designed experience. There is nothing inherent or inevitable about marginalization; it is a choice that we as societies, organizations, developers, or even individuals, make in situations and it is a choice that is often made in the name of expedience, efficiency of process, a lack of experience in designing for marginalized groups, or—at worst—disdain for people who are not like us. Mike Monteiro, in his book Ruined by Design, puts it like this:
“When you decide who you’re designing for, you’re making an implicit statement about who you’re not designing for. For years, we referred to people who weren’t crucial to our product’s success as ‘edge cases.’ We were marginalizing people. We were making a decision that there were people in the world whose problems weren’t worth solving. These are the trans people who get caught on the edges of ‘real names’ projects. These are the single moms who get caught on the edges of ‘both parents must sign’ permission slips. These are the elderly immigrants who show up to vote and can’t get ballots in their native tongues. They are not edge cases. They are human beings, and we owe them our best work.” (Ruined by Design, pg. 22)
This is an absolutely critical piece to understand as we go forward in this entry. Design has a critical role to play in eliminating marginalization. Marginalized people often lack the same access to the platforms that we do to make sure that their voices are heard. As we head on into a future of hotter climates and increasingly inhospitable places to live, those who are marginalized are always the first groups to lose what little rights they had. If we as climate activists cannot ensure a future for those at the margins, then we really haven’t ensured a future for ourselves either. To make that clear, let’s continue on.
Marginalization and design
“The fundamental truth is that we cannot save the planet without uplifting the voices of those most marginalized.” —Leah Thomas (The Intersectional Environmentalist, pg. xii)
Designers often point to the way that their products positively impact the lives of consumers and users as one of the most important aspects of their jobs. We’ve proved that design can add economic value to organizations: good design can equal increased profits. But not all designed products positively impact the lives of the people interacting with them. A very simple example is that of anti-homeless architecture. We might not like to think about it, but someone, at some point, sat down and applied design principles to the task of say, making sure that people without housing can’t sleep on park benches. And why? That way, the problem of seeing the consequences of homelessness can be moved to, well, somewhere else. It is a cruelty done to people on the edge of society that is meant to move them out of sight—beyond the edges of our vision. Companies exist that make money producing bolt-on accessories meant to make a difficult economic situation even tougher. This is marginalization through design.
To begin to examine marginalization through design though, we need to start by looking at the who, in general, makes up the population of those who call themselves designers. This is important because when design becomes more representative of everyone, those designs increasingly benefit everyone. A multitude of perspectives and experiences make each design richer and it increases the chances that what is being designed will actually address the issues that its users have. There are many subgroups of designers: architects, animators, industrial designers, advertisers, and many more, and it is safe to say that marginalized communities are by and large underrepresented.
Real climate justice cannot be made if those that are marginalized remain on the edges, even if their circumstances have been made better through design. Design is for everyone and so design needs to look like everybody; what that means is that marginalized communities need more than simple solutions, they need a voice and platform from which to advocate for themselves and the agency to make those things happen without being forced to rely on someone else. This is why inclusion in the design community of those traditionally considered marginalized is such a critical part of climate justice. Remember, marginalization is a designed experience. Marginalization happens when people’s needs are ignored and it is easier to ignore people’s needs if they are not in the room. Climate designers should aim to be inclusive designers.
Eliminating marginalization
“Without the help of the eventual end-users, no socially acceptable design can be done.” —Victor Papanek (Design for the Real World, pg. 304)
So then, how do we reduce—and eventually eliminate—marginalization in design? It requires changes to the dominant design paradigm in a few ways: first and foremost, it means finding ways to expand access to design education so that everyone can participate. Next, climate change has to be a part of the design curriculum; designers have to learn early about the consequences of design, both good and bad. With these educational goals out of the way, marginalization can be targeted by continuing to encourage remote work and by lowering the bar to entry into the industry by allowing more hardware and software options beyond just a few. The last major piece is equal pay and access to promotions and leadership roles. Let’s take a closer look at each piece:
Expanding access to design education
College can be difficult to get into. For people who aren’t financially stable college can seem like the ladder up to a better economic situation, but the debt that one has to take on in order to do so can be an even bigger gatekeeper than the college’s admissions department. For the design industry, this means that graduating designers tend to be either unaffected by student loans due to fortunate financial circumstances or burdened with debt and desperate for whatever jobs they can get. This is not conducive to social change-making; in fact, it just solidifies the current social order. Simply put, costs are too high and when combined with the fact that most design jobs—even entry-level ones—require Bachelor’s degrees it makes it even more difficult for marginalized people to find jobs in the field. We have to find better ways to educate designers so that everyone has a chance.
Extending design education to include climate issues
Similar to the way that Critical Race Theory broadens the way that legal experts practice and interpret laws, our individual design industries would benefit from understanding how our designs affect the environment. When we design things from the outset with climate change in mind, the things we make last longer, they more effectively solve users' needs for longer, and they become less likely to end up as waste. It also allows us to stop thinking of waste as an inevitable byproduct of the design process. So much of what we create becomes waste, the packaging is made to throw away; the style is here today, gone tomorrow; the software quickly bricks otherwise-usable devices in an effort to get us to buy more and toss out the old. These are all designed objects. The saying that “it’s too expensive to buy cheap” is more true every day and especially so for those that are poor. Cheap items may sound like a bargain to those with good incomes, but the price of the object often reflects the cost of labor—cheap, disposable, and an afterthought. We pay a premium for permanence, but ultimately, we all pay a steeper price for cheaper goods and that price is a degraded planet choked with plastics and sacrifice zones filled with communities that are written off as expendable.
Enabling remote work and decentralizing design
One of the best ways to include marginalized communities in the design process—and to be designers themselves—is to embrace working remotely. One outcome of this is that this allows designers to live where they can afford to. Freedom to work without fear of not having to make rent in an unaffordable city allows designers to feel freer to make waves in the design process. It is easy to imagine a scenario where a marginalized person doesn’t feel that they can speak up about something like a potential bias in an AI project or racial discrimination in the location and design of a housing project. When your job—and thus your health insurance or financial stability—is on the line, it is extremely difficult to stand against harmful ideas or designs. Another outcome of this is that it can allow designers to more easily live in the communities that they are designing for. Design studios and offices can exist in areas that need their work. When design work is decentralized more people can have their voices heard on an international stage. And in an increasingly small and crowded world, we need to be able to see global design work more than ever.
Equal opportunities enable people to escape the edges
In the world of design—as with most industries—the upper echelons are dominated by White, cisgendered people. This also passively results in marginalization. We just talked about the risk inherent in rocking the boat and how anyone who is marginalized might feel that the risk isn’t worth taking when their job can be on the line. Representation in design teams is important so that designs don’t discriminate, but representation in design leadership is a must as well. Speaking about injustice and intersectionality, Leah Thomas tells her readers about the founding ideas of the Combahee River Collective. “The CRC, inspired by anticolonial and antiwar movements and the work of the Third World Women’s Alliance, argued that the liberation of Black women would result in freedom for all people. Black women were and are faced with racism, poverty, and sexism, and if Black women no longer bore the brunt of all of those injustices, then everyone would benefit.” (The Intersectional Environmentalist, pg. 21) Intersectionality can work against people for whom multiple types of discrimination mean multiple levels of mistreatment, but the idea can be turned on its head as well; having intersectional design leadership can mean that design projects can undergo levels of scrutiny against injustice before being handed down to design teams. This allows lower-level designers to focus on putting their creativity to the problem at hand, not on navigating issues of marginalization. Every designer, regardless of religion, sexuality, physical ability, gender, and so on, needs to be able to see a path to the top of the industry.
Intentional Action
“Most of the prominent cultural icons speaking out about climate change are White. This is not because people of color don’t get or don’t care—in fact, polling shows people of color are more alarmed or concerned than their White counterparts. That includes 69 percent of Latinx Americans, the most of any racial group. Gatekeepers must welcome in the wisdom of the communities most impacted by the extractive economy—frontline communities of color and Indigenous communities. Centering these storytellers—in television, in print media, and in pop culture—can mobilize important constituencies, particularly those who will be directly affected by climate chaos and displacement but who do not relate to the mostly White actors, politicians, environmentalists, and scientists who are the planet’s current high-profile spokespeople.” (All We Can Save, pg. 123)
For every person, the climate crisis hits harder, when it hits home. We need to be able to connect the problems of climate change to our everyday lives; it is no wonder that communities of color and Indigenous communities are more concerned—their lives are already being affected in tangible (and dangerous) ways. Designer Favianna Rodriguez, quoted above, is exactly right in stating that we need to see more storytellers from those communities, frontline and marginalized, telling the world about the circumstances of their lives. This includes the design industry. For every White person like myself who has been given a platform from which to speak or write, we need so many more people who don’t have my same life experience to show us their world, their lives, and their hopes and fears (the Field Guide is always looking for more writers, in case this stirs anyone to their keyboards).
There is no passive way to eliminate marginalization, whether it be in design or in the wider world—it only goes away by being conscious of the problem, recognizing the harm it does, and choosing to revise the way that we design the world around us. There are no disposable people, none who are expendable as long as designs are iterated upon and profits flow. As mentioned above, if we cannot ensure a future for those at the margins, then we really haven’t ensured a future for anyone; like with our discussions of sacrifice zones in the last entry, the existence of any people or place that can be deemed expendable or sacrificial means that any people or place is able to become expendable, to become waste. Today’s marginalized and frontline communities are tomorrow’s erased communities—it doesn’t have to be that way. What we choose to throw away says more about us than what is thrown out, so now is the time to ask who we are and who we choose to be. Now is the time to ensure that we don’t lose any more people to the margins, to the rising waters, to the unstable temperatures, to preventable violence, to a system designed to produce garbage byproducts. The time for action as designers is now.
So, call-to-action time
Designers of any discipline, who are some designers—or what are some designs—that you have seen that either address the issues of this series? What are some that you have seen that make things worse? Sound off in the comments section over on our Mighty Networks site!
Reading recommendations for this entry: Ruined by Design by Mike Monteiro, The Intersectional Environmentalist by Leah Thomas, All We Can Save edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K. Wilkinson, and Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek
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This entry was written by
Matt McGillvray
Matt is a designer and illustrator living near Portland, Maine, and has been working for more than a decade doing branding, illustration, web design, print design, social media posts, and even a little SEO.
When not designing he’s usually reading, writing, or running. His current big writing project is a book about design and climate change. He is a chronic teller of puns and will not apologize for that.