Design Community Engagement

👩🦰 Persona Spectrum For Inclusive Design (Figma Kit) (https://lnkd.in/eGD38hs4), a wonderful little accessibility tool for designers to include permanent, temporary and situational contexts in design decisions. Open sources, with all illustrations and assets for presentations and print. By 🐝 Mahana Delacour. --- 🔶 1. Accessibility ≠ Compliance We should never rely on automated accessibility testing alone to “ensure” accessibility. Compliance means that a user can use your product, but it doesn’t mean that it’s a great user experience. Manual testing makes sure that your users actually can meet their goals in their own context. It often feels daunting to get started, but small first steps are a great beginning. First, gather people interested in accessibility. Document what research was done, where the gaps are. And then try to include 5–12 users with disabilities in a dedicated accessibility testing. One way to find participants is to reach out to local chapters, local training centers, non-profits and public communities of users with disabilities in your country. You might want to add extra $25–$50 depending on disability transportation. Once you have access to users, run a small accessibility initiative around key flows in your products. Tap into critical touch points and research them. Eventually extend to components, patterns, flows, service design. A good target is to incorporate inclusive sampling into all research projects — at least 15% of usability testers should have a permanent, temporary or situational disability. --- 🔹 2. Building Accessibility Research From Scratch If you’d like to get started, I highly recommend to check “How We’ve Built Accessibility Research at Booking.com” (https://lnkd.in/eq_3zSPJ), a fantastic case study by Maya Alvarado on how to build accessibility practices and inclusive design into UX research from scratch. Maya highlights the idea of extending Microsoft's Inclusive Design Toolkit (https://lnkd.in/eN5J7EkJ) to meet specific user needs of a product. It adds a different dimension to disability considerations which might be less abstract and much easier to relate for the entire organization. And as Maya noted, inclusive design is about building a door that can be opened by anyone and lets everyone in. Accessibility isn’t a checklist — it’s a practice that goes way beyond compliance. A practice that involves actual people with actual disabilities throughout all UX research activities. More resources in the comments ↓

The challenge of practicing systemic design (or any work that aims to shift deeper roots and structures) is a systemic issue in itself. It’s often incompatible with the systems in which it's undertaken (aka “host systems”): companies, institutions, NGOs, or the collaborative spaces in between. This misalignment is rooted in the linear, neoliberal mental models from which the host systems have sprung. Encoded in structures like output-driven incentives and siloed departments, they translate into rushed timelines, narrow briefs, limited collaboration, and so on...the very opposite of what’s needed for transformational work - work that engages complexity through relationality. In short, the misalignment permeates all layers of a host system, activating its “parts” into an interlocking web of systemic barriers that constrain and distort the work from within. I frame it this way because the challenge calls for a systemic lens. Only then can we move beyond isolated or symptomatic fixes like standalone capacity-building and change management - and toward an approach that matches the systemic nature of the issue itself. This is what I’m exploring in the visualization below: What might such an approach look like in practice? As unfair as it may feel, practitioners, whether in-house or consulting, are uniquely positioned to lead, by taking on what the Design Council and The Point People aptly call a “double brief”: To design for system change within BOTH the context of their project and the organizational context in which that work takes place. Embodying the very behaviors the work requires, they hold a pragmatic sense of how to “code” the system differently in order to support such behaviors. And crucially, they are invited in, positioned to engage with intervention points for transformation from the inside out. In the image below, I’ve visualized such intervention points as “cracks” and “grooves” of the host system - opportunities to introduce and immerse people in new practices, enabling mental model shifts through experiential contrast: 💥 Cracks: Moments of growing recognition of the system’s limits, like crises that expose structural rigidity and the illusion of control. 🌀 Grooves: Accepted forms, rituals, or mindsets, like pre-defined services or cost efficiency, that might be tactically leveraged. The visual then explores how individual demonstrations of the new might be woven into a larger force of change. And how we might facilitate its transition into a stable, supportive ecosystem for transformative practice. The ideas of weaving together change and facilitating transition still feel abstract to me, as I haven’t yet engaged in that kind of work firsthand. But creating this visual was an important start. It helped clarify the abstraction by surfacing specific, grounded question - an invitation to myself and other curious minds to continue the exploration the visualization began. #SystemicDesign #SocialInnovation #DesignForChange

We frequently mistake metrics for truth and build whole interventions on quantitative sand while ignoring the qualitative bedrock of human behaviour. You can meticulously measure a statistic, yet fail to recognise the cultural nuance or historical mistrust that underpins that figure. True systems thinking requires an architecture where we stop viewing storytelling as soft science and start analysing lived experience as structural evidence, equal to any clinical trial. Without this design rigour, our most expensive strategies are little more than well-funded guesses that fail to address the root causes of the problem. As you finalise your annual reports this season, resist the temptation to rely solely on the comforts of executive summaries and pristine charts. This is the precise moment design thinking becomes critical because a spreadsheet is incapable of capturing the complex reasoning behind why a community accepts or rejects a solution. You must treat narratives as primary data points and return to the field to listen. Before you publish your findings, interview the beneficiaries of your program; if their raw quotes contradict your polished graphs, have the professional courage to trust them.

At 50 million users, we spend 80% of our time listening to customers. At 100 users, we spent 80% of our time ignoring what customers asked for. Both strategies were right. — When we started Gamma, 80% of our effort went into one radical idea: "What if creating presentations felt effortless? Type your thoughts, skip the design entirely." The other 20%? Table stakes. Present mode. Share button. Just enough to technically qualify as a presentation tool. We were solving a universal pain point: that blank slide staring back at you, demanding design skills you don't have. As users started signing up, then churning, we shifted to 50/50: Half pushing the AI forward. Half understanding why people left. Turns out when someone can't change fonts or upload their logo, they don't stick around. Even if your AI is magic. Then we hit an inflection point: More users signing up than we knew what to do with. The 80/20 flipped completely. Today, 80% of our roadmap comes from our community and user requests. When the same friction point appears fifty times, we fix it. We listen ruthlessly. The other 20% stays reserved for bets they'd never ask for — like building websites when they asked for better slides. Most product advice says pick a lane: visionary or customer-obsessed. That's backwards. You need both. The mix just evolves: - Pre-product market fit → 80% paradigm shifts, 20% basics - Approaching PMF → 50/50 balance attack - True inflection → 80% customer pulls, 20% future bets We've built to 50 million users this way. Not by choosing between vision and feedback. By knowing when to weigh each one. Nobody asked for content-first presentations … they asked for prettier templates. Sometimes the best answer isn't giving customers what they request. It's solving the problem they didn't know how to articulate.

𝐂𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐫𝐨𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐠𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐢𝐞𝐫. I've worked on governance programs with very different levels of maturity. One thing never changes. Projects move faster when everyone knows what they own and what they don't. Without clear responsibilities, simple questions become long discussions. ↳ Who approves a business definition? ↳ Who decides that a data quality issue is important enough to fix? ↳ Who validates access to sensitive data? People often expect the Data Office to answer everything. It can't. Governance only works when business and IT each have clear responsibilities. That's why I almost always introduce a RACI early in a program. Not because it's a mandatory framework, but because it removes uncertainty. It gives teams a common language and makes escalation much easier. The first version doesn't need to be perfect. Start simple, test it with your stakeholders and adjust it as your governance matures. ——— 📕 Download my Data Stewardship Playbook from my Featured section. 👋 Follow Mathieu Le Guével to fix Data Governance.

When Design Becomes Democracy: The Branding That Helped Win NYC 🍎 Walk through Queens or Brooklyn, and you can't miss it: that bold blue-and-mustard palette plastered on lamp posts, storefronts, subway entrances. Not the safe corporate navy of typical political campaigns. Not another sterile template. Instead? Taxicab yellow. MetroCard colors. Hand-painted bodega awnings. Zohran Mamdani's campaign didn't just break the political branding mold, it rebuilt it from the streets up. Designer @AneeshBhoopathy (working with @Forgecooperative) created a visual identity that feels less like a campaign and more like your neighborhood. The hand-lettered wordmark carries an authenticity no focus-grouped logo could touch. This wasn't aesthetic for aesthetic's sake. Design is positioning. Design is strategy. Design is a promise. Here's why this matters: In a race against establishment figures like Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani's branding became differentiation as disruption. While opponents spoke in the visual language of power and polish, Mamdani spoke the language of the street corner, the subway platform, the corner store. Every color choice was a neighborhood. Every typographic flourish rejected corporate blandness. The saturated palette didn't whisper, it shouted: "We are not like them." Mamdani understood something his opponents didn't: In a city exhausted by politicians who all look and sound the same, being visually honest is revolutionary. Design isn't just what it looks like. Design is what it says about who you serve. When done with intention, design shapes perception before a single word is read. It builds trust before a single speech is heard. Mamdani's Democratic Socialist primary victory wasn't because of the branding. But the branding was the visual manifestation of everything that set him apart: authenticity, community rootedness, and a willingness to reject the playbook entirely. The lesson: Don't ask "What do campaigns usually look like?" Ask "What does our community look like? What colors live in their daily lives? What typography do they trust?" When your visual identity is truly of the people you serve, they don't just notice it. They recognize themselves in it. And that changes everything. Can design really shift political outcomes? Drop your thoughts below. 👇 #PoliticalDesign #BrandStrategy #CampaignDesign #NYC #DesignMatters #VisualIdentity #ZohranMamdani #Branding #IdentityDesign

The future of learning isn’t content. It’s connection. The most transformative learning doesn’t come from having the perfect curriculum or the best content. It comes from real conversations—unscripted, messy and human. Think about the last course you took—do you remember the details? Probably not. But I bet you remember the last conversation that challenged your thinking. This isn’t a coincidence. From ancient philosophers debating in the agora to coffee shop brainstorming sessions today, we’ve always learned best through dialogue. Conversations engage us in ways lectures never can. We’re building learning backwards—focusing on content when we should be designing for connection. So here’s the question I’ve been wrestling with: What if we designed learning experiences powered by conversation instead of content? Let me share three stories that transformed my view on learning: 1️⃣ Design School, 2012 No books. No lectures. Just projects and endless conversations. I learned more from one afternoon of pinning my work on a soft board and discussing it with peers than from weeks of formal instruction. 2️⃣ Leadership program, 2022 At NextLeap we created a leadership program for first-time managers. We ditched the instructors completely and created a "Sandbox" where 80% of it was peer discussion. The results? People left with not just knowledge, but a support network and their own leadership philosophy. 3️⃣ LxD Lab, 2023 20 designers came together to co-create a handbook. But the real magic wasn’t in the final product—it was in the conversations. The collaboration, the shared insights, and the moments of “I hadn’t thought of it that way before” made the experience transformative. In each of these experiences, the real learning didn’t come from content delivery. It came from connections. From dialogue. From the power of people learning WITH and FROM each other. Here's what these experiences taught me: Your best curriculum is an empty canvas. Your richest content is sitting in your learners' heads. The best learning tool isn’t a book or a lecture—it’s the person across from you. The future of learning isn't about better content—it's about better conversations.

Design With Lineage. Most packaging lives fast and dies young. Opened, emptied, flattened, forgotten. A few pieces slip through that cycle because they're either too useful or too well considered to throw away. Hoja Sagrada begins with that afterlife in mind, not the unboxing but what happens once the product is gone. The project draws from Guaraní traditions where objects are made to last, travel and carry meaning over time. Patterns, colours and textures act as memory, shaped by landscape and daily ritual. Every reference comes straight from place. Reds and ochres from earth pigments and seeds. Deep browns and blacks from charred wood and plant dyes. Greens and yellows from leaves and roots. The palette reads like forest, fields and river translated into colour, forming a visual culture that grows, gets harvested, woven and worn. That logic extends into the product itself. Created for Paraguayan yerba mate, a traditional South American infusion shared socially from a single vessel, Hoja Sagrada builds from Guaraní mythology and the ritual around drinking it, then lets that structure define the object. The pack echoes the calabash gourd used to serve mate, keeping opening tied to drinking so the packaging folds into the ritual instead of interrupting it. What emerges is packaging designed to be handled, kept and reused. Once empty, it stays useful and continues life as a kitchen container. Reuse is embedded in the object rather than added later as a sustainability gesture. Longevity is reinforced visually. Facial expressions shift across SKUs to signal energy levels, while secondary markings reference indigenous tattoo patterns to communicate intensity and volume. The pack carries enough character to justify staying in circulation instead of heading straight to waste. Clarity comes from the order of thinking. Myth and ritual lead, structure follows, graphics arrive once the object has purpose. Sustainability appears as the outcome of those decisions, grounded in use, meaning and durability. The Guaraní made things to travel and to last. A basket wasn't just functional, it carried a piece of someone's life. Continuity mattered more than disposal. Modern sustainability counts grams of plastic and CO₂. Their measure was simpler. Does this object deserve to exist. Every item linked people to time instead of passing briefly through their hands. Today we design for recyclability and market it like redemption. If a product needs a recycling symbol to justify itself, maybe it shouldn't have been made in the first place. The lesson is simple. Make fewer things and make better things. Design something people want to keep and reuse takes care of itself. 📷@Vasily Aleev

Their parents called them crazy for leaving ₹50 lakh jobs. Today, their textile brand empowers 500+ artisans It all began in the quiet weaving villages of West Bengal, where Sujata and Taniya discovered their calling. What started as curiosity transformed into Suta, a brand redefining India's textile traditions through contemporary design. The sisters walked away from stable corporate jobs to explore the world of handloom. During their visits to West Bengal's weaving communities, they witnessed artisans creating magic with their hands - each saree telling a story no machine could replicate. This firsthand experience of India's textile heritage inspired them to leave their corporate comfort zones.  They built an ecosystem that: 📍 Revived centuries-old weaving techniques 📍 Provided dignified livelihoods to 500+ traditional artisans 📍 Created contemporary designs honoring generational craftsmanship 📍 Ensured fair wages and sustainable practices The company reached Rs 75 crore in revenue for 2023-24, showing a 33% growth from Rs 57 crore last year. Every Suta saree carries more than fabric. It carries dreams, resistance, and the quiet revolution of craftspeople reclaiming their narrative. From corporate spreadsheets to empowering rural artisans, Sujata and Taniya proved that true entrepreneurship is about human connection, not just profit margins. Which local craft in your community deserves a spotlight?