The Field Guide
What to expect
The aim of the field guide is to help designer’s develop power literacy. This includes building up your awareness of, sensitivity to and understanding of the impact of power and systemic oppression in participatory design processes. You will gain a holistic understanding of power, while examining the role you play in reproducing inequity—however unintentional—and what you can do to change this.
Whether you call your work social design, participatory design, action research, civic design, social innovation, design for the public sector, urban design or something else, the field guide will help you on your journey to becoming a more power literate practitioner.
The field guide includes an introduction to power literacy, five forms of power and tips on conducting power checks in your next design project. It also includes nine worksheet activities to be filled out during different phases of a design project.
A digital pdf of the field guide is available to download with a suggested $20 contribution via paypal or e-mail transfer (goodwill.maya[at]gmail[dot]com) in order to help support the designer’s livelihood. Read the thesis that the field guide was created as a part of here. A paper about the power literacy framework published in the international journal of design can be accessed for free here.
“After [using the field guide] I feel many things brewing inside of me. […] I’ve definitely found some new energy and language to work on social justice in and with my team!”
— Fien from Kennisland
Worksheets
Part one of the field guide includes five worksheets for you to complete individually and then discuss in a group. These worksheets will prompt you to reflect on the distribution of power in a past design project, and whether its impact aligned with your intentions. You may feel uncomfortable or uneasy as you go through the worksheets; this is part of the work.
Part two is where you put what you learned in part one into action for your next design project. Here, you will be introduced to the concept of a power check, moments throughout the design process where you slow down to reflect on how power is showing up in design decisions and the potential impact on marginalized stakeholders. Included in the field guide are four power check worksheets for you to fill out at different points in the design process: set-up, divergence, convergence and wrap-up.
The worksheets fold out of the field guide and can be taken out of the booklet to fill them in more easily by using the tear lines.
