Talk: Design Justice Approaches to Transmedia Co-Creation

Una was invited to give a virtual talk for a Transmedia Studies class at Hanyang University in Seoul. “Design Justice Approaches to Transmedia Co-Creation” discusses the design justice principles and framework through the lens of a long-term engagement with Feathers of Hope, an Indigenous youth advocacy project in Ontario.

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Design Justice approaches to transmedia co-creation

이윤아 / Una Lee / June 20, 2022

Hello! Thank you for the intro!

I’m honored to be invited to talk to you about design justice approaches to transmedia co-creation.

When I think about design justice, I think about power.

Any design endeavor interacts with three groups — those who benefit, those who participate, and those who are impacted.

Often, those who are impacted by a design “problem” or “solution” do not participate in the creation of the solution, and do not always benefit from it.

My design studio, And Also Too, puts forward a vision of design practice in which these spheres overlap. So those who are impacted also participate in order to benefit.

And Also Too uses co-design processes to create transmedia. I’m going to talk about what that looks like in the context of a particular engagement we’ve been involved in for close to 10 years now.

My studio is primarily a graphic design agency, so you’ll see that most of the work I’ll be sharing today is art and publishing based. But it’s my hope that you can extrapolate from these stories to understand how the methodologies can apply to technology and other forms of media.

I’ll also reflect on this engagement in light of the design justice network principles. I’ll close by sharing some lessons we learned through putting the principles into practice.

Trigger warning

I need to start though with a trigger warning. Any story about seeking justice begins with violence, and this one is no different.

In the first 10 minutes or so of this presentation, I’m going to be talking about colonial violence in multiple forms, religious abuse, and mass deaths of children. If you need to skip ahead about 10 minutes, or 4 slides, please feel free to do so. I can provide Tammy with links to some background information if you’d like to learn about the context when you feel more prepared to do so.

I also want to mention that this talk is harshly critical of the impact of Christian missionaries. This may be hard for some of you to hear, but I want to ask that you try to remain open to learning about histories that might not be talked about that much in South Korea.

I’m going to start by telling you a bit about myself, and how who I am connects to my work.

I was born in Canada, but my ancestors are from Korea. This image is from 1904. The white woman in this image is Alice Sharp, a Canadian Methodist missionary.

For both my parents, missionaries were a lifeline. Cheju, like the rest of Korea, was decimated after the war. British nuns gave my mother pencils and food. When my father was a poor student in LA, he met a missionary who invited him to join a Korean American church. She told him there would be bibimbap after services, so he started going to church.

That same missionary brought me and my mom on a mission trip to Cheju in 1994 when I was 14 years old.

We were told to knock on people’s doors, and if they were not Christian, to try to convert them.

When they invited us into their homes, we were told to explain to them that their beliefs were wrong and evil. And that in order to be saved from hell, they needed to accept a savior imported from the west.

I learned that many of these people were Buddhists, or they believed in folk magic and shamanism, or practiced a mix of many different spiritual traditions. I was also seeing the ways that western military and economic influence was shifting the culture and economy of Cheju, and that the traditional ways of life were becoming less and less viable.

I had this growing awareness that missionaries on Cheju might believe they were saving people’s souls, but that they were part of a larger project that was creating harm they weren’t acknowledging.

This image also depicts a Canadian missionary, this time surrounded by Indigenous children.

At that point in my life, I knew a little about Canada’s violent history, and how the greed of European empires led to the brutal occupation of Indigenous land and mass murder of Indigenous people. In school, it was taught as a short but sad period of history, but one that Canadians had moved past.

After I returned from that mission trip, I began to learn more about the mechanics of the colonial project that is Canada. One cornerstone of that project was called the Indian Residential School System, which was a network of boarding schools that Indigenous children were forced to attend from 1894 to 1947. These schools were funded by the Canadian government and administered by Christian churches.

Children were abducted from their homes and communities and relocated to these school sites, where they lived until they were 15 or 16 years old, although many died in these schools before they were released.

The purpose of these schools was to assimilate Indigenous children into dominant Canadian culture. They did this by forbidding children to speak their native languages, preventing them from seeing their families, and forcing them to practice Christianity. Children were exposed to new diseases with minimal medical care, underfed, experimented on, physically abused, and sexually abused. In one school, it was found that the mortality rate of children was 69%.

Those who survived have ongoing trauma. Studies have shown strong correlations between residential schooling and chronic disease, mental illness, and lateral violence. The repercussions of this trauma play out within families and communities, leading to intergenerational trauma.

Thousands of the children who died were buried in unmarked mass graves on residential school property. Their parents and communities never knew what happened to them. Often, they would be told that the children ran away.

This is a map of residential schools across Canada. There is an ongoing investigation now to find these mass graves, to allow communities and families to mourn and decide what to do with the remains. The locations marked with red are confirmed unmarked grave sites. The yellow locations are those that are currently under investigation. You’ll see one blue marker that indicates a site where no mass graves were found. All the markers in grey still need to be investigated.

Mission work has had devastating impacts. Mission work and its connection to western imperialism paved the way for my parents to migrate to North America, to buy property, and to raise me on stolen land.

Around 2012, I was invited to provide graphic design to an Indigenous youth advocacy group in Canada called Feathers of Hope. It felt like an opportunity to reconcile my complicated relationship with the land I was born on.

Feathers of Hope had just held a forum, where over 100 Indigenous youth gathered and built community based in their shared experiences. They discussed the types of changes they wanted to see in their communities.

On the last day of the forum, the youth presented to dignitaries including elected officials, social service workers, police administrators, and other people with power and influence in their lives. Again and again, they spoke about the impact that residential schools had on generations of their elders. They talked too about how Canada’s current child welfare system evolved out of the residential school system, and how there is a vast overrepresentation of Indigenous children and youth being removed from their families and put into the custody of the state. This system continues colonial methods of cultural assimilation.

For many of the youth, it was their first time using their voices to advocate for themselves. For many of the dignitaries, it was their first time listening to Indigenous youth.

After the forum, Feathers of Hope began writing a report with a community advisory made up of several young people who participated in the forum. That’s where I came in. They invited me to design the artwork and layout of this report.

The ask was to create a design that would capture both hope and despair. It needed to convey the power that was building among these young people, but also the seriousness of the issues.

So I took a design brief, and I got to work.

This was the first set of concepts I presented to the youth advisors

The feedback was ok and I proceeded with developing the one on the right

I’m sure that this diagram feels pretty familiar. This is what the design industry puts forward as a healthy design process.

You create a rough prototype and keep iterating on it and improving it.

Well, my iterations were taking it farther and farther away from anything the young people wanted.

Through this process, I kept thinking, What was I, a Korean Canadian settler in a colonial state, doing working on this project?

The design process was failing me

After one particularly disastrous meeting, the team gave me this medicine bundle

Medicines it contained were sage, cedar, sweetgrass, and tobacco

They said, use this, we know it will help

I opened the bundle and this is what was inside. Tobacco, cedar, sage, sweetgrass.

Each medicine has a different purpose. It is not my place to teach you about these medicines, so I won’t.

At that time, I didn’t consider myself a spiritual person. I had been turned off by religion, and I had no connection to the spirituality my grandmothers or great grandmothers might have practiced.

I had no idea what to do with these medicines so of course I googled it

I learned that you burn them and it creates smoke that you waft over yourself and this is called a smudge

At the time, I didn’t know that you’re supposed to use different medicines for different purposes, so I lit them all up and my tiny studio filled with smoke.

I started choking because the smoke was so intense.

I went to lie down because I felt a little lightheaded

I opened up my iPad, thinking I’d watch some Netflix

This is what showed up; I guess I’d been browsing some art blogs earlier

This is a piece called Vanishing Point by United Visual Artists and it uses lasers to play with perspective and vanishing points

But in this mindset this image immediately pointed to the artwork I needed to create

Scribbled down this sketch

I saw a feather made of light coming out of darkness

with the smoke of a smudge rising up in front of it

And prepared a sage smudge

This is the cover of the Feathers of Hope Action Plan

When I first showed it to the team people literally burst into tears

It was going to be more than just a cover

It was going to be the emblem of a movement

This is the back cover — there’s the sage

And I realized that all along, this wasn’t a design problem to be solved

I think a lot of us here know about the design process — we follow the steps, we solve the problem

The key was in culture, and until I really understood the culture these young people wanted to reconnect with I got nowhere; i wasn’t receiving the images and inspiration that this project needed

I needed to engage in the cultural piece and not just the political piece because in this case the two can’t be separated from each other

I realized that my design education was all about selling products and persuasion — it wasn’t about culture

I needed to step away from design to create this design

“Feathers of Hope is an Indigenous young people’s movement, yet we cannot do it solely from an Indigenous lens. We need allyship and solidarity. The question is how to think of design as solidarity work. It is not an easy journey.”

— Laura Arndt, Founder, Feathers of Hope

Later, And Also Too interviewed Laura Arndt from Feathers of Hope, about this project.

That question I’d been asking all along — why me? Was answered in this statement.

– I’ve lost count of how many copies of Feathers of Hope we’ve printed and how many reprints we’ve done, but I believe that there are maybe 40,000 copies of this report floating around

You’re probably familiar with the Truth & Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, to attempt to confront and heal the wounds caused by colonialism and apartheid.

There was also a TRC in Canada.

– In March 2014 the report was placed as an offering in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Bentwood Box, which is an archive of the process.

FORUM

ADVISORY

MEDIA CREATION

ISSUE

RELEASE

IMPACT

Feathers of Hope

Reconciliation Model

This is the FOH model of reconciliation.

Beginning with an issue, a forum is organized, where young people connect with each other and speak their truth to people in positions of power.

From that forum, an advisory made up of a smaller group of forum participants is created.

That advisory then participates in media creation, both content and design. In this case it was a report, but as you’ll see in the subsequent stories, these media took many forms.

The media product is then released, and creates impact in the world.

From that momentum, another issue takes focus, and the cycle continues.

I like to think of this model three dimensionally.

We are now in our 5th cycle of this process with FOH, and with each cycle, the relationships and trust deepen, which means our collaboration also deepens.

Feathers of Hope’s second forum was on the Justice & Juries system in Canada. Unfortunately I don’t have time to get into that project today, but I can say that the design process was just as profound, if not more so, than with the first report.

Child Welfare

After the Justice & Juries project, Feathers of Hope held a forum on the child welfare system in 2015. This is the system that determines if a child needs to be removed from their home and decides where that child is placed and for how long. This happens when there’s a situation of abuse or neglect in the home.

In Canada, Indigenous children make up a disproportionate number of kids in the system. Because the child welfare system originated in the residential school system, this should not surprise anyone. The same kinds of harms that happened in residential schools are still happening today. Kids are taken away from their families and communities and nearly all of them are placed with non-Indigenous guardians. Some of these guardians insist that the kids practice a religion that they didn’t grow up with, and are told that their communities are corrupt, their families are immoral, and that their traditional ways of life are backwards.

At the forum, young people in the system talked about the abuse they experienced, its impact on their mental health, and how many of them coped using drugs and alcohol. But they also put forward a vision of an alternative system, based in Indigenous culture, where the system addressed the root causes of the harms they’d experienced in their homes.

Quill Violet Christie-Peters

With the Child Welfare project, the design collaboration deepened in a couple really meaningful ways.

This time around, we would be working on a toolkit to support young people who were in the system. I knew I wanted to work with an Indigenous artist to create the imagery. It felt important that the aesthetic of the toolkit felt grounded in culture and also felt trustworthy.

This is Quill Christie-Peters, an Anishinaabe arts programmer and self-taught visual artist, and she brought a multitude of gifts to this project.

Just because Quill and I had technical expertise in image-making, it didn’t mean that non-designers and non-artists could not ideate effective images. In fact, all the youth advisors were either in the system or had recently aged out of it, and so they would know what kind of imagery would resonate with their peers.

So I wanted to open up the image making process to the advisors.

These are some of the images and ideas that the youth advisors generated in our image workshop. Fish in a stream, images of lost and broken connections, and people practicing their traditions, through dancing and hunting.

But in the end, this was the image the advisors chose. It was drawn by one of the youth who actually walked out of the meeting. I thought that maybe he wasn’t interested in participating, but when he returned hours later, he handed me this. He said he was feeling very triggered, but that being part of this was still very important to him.

I asked him to share this image with the other young people. When he presented it, he talked about how trees need strong roots to grow, and when they don’t have the support of those roots, they become weak and don’t develop into healthy adult trees. He talked about how the child welfare system cuts kids off from their roots, and that in order for people like him to thrive, they need to feel rooted.

The youth advisors connected deeply with this image. Again, there was immediate consensus that our image needed to be a tree.

Quill, the artist I was collaborating with, led a workshop with the youth to flesh out the tree metaphor and create a story around it that connected to their experience and their hopes for the future.

Quill then created the drawings.

This time, I brought the photography setup to one of the meetings and showed the young people how to make the artwork.

This is a photo of some of the youth photographing Quill’s artwork.

And this is the final image.

It depicts a young person holding a cedar tree. You might remember that cedar is one of the four sacred medicines.

The tree is wrapped protectively around them. The tree and the young person are bathed in light from the moon, and smudge from medicine.

These are the divider pages of the toolkit. It shows a young person who has been separated from their family. They feel scared and alone, but one day find a cedar tree.

The spirit of the tree comforts the young person, and keeps them connected to their family and their culture.

The young person grows strong with the support of the cedar tree.

Toolkits can feel impersonal and dry. The name “toolkit” doesn’t evoke a lot of comfort, but the youth advisors wanted this piece to be comforting.

[Read the text]

To extend this tone into the tools themselves, we formatted the toolkit as a conversation between a young person and Cedar.

The young person asks questions about living in the system, for example, Do I have to accept my foster parents’ culture or religion? And Cedar answers. Cedar reminds them of their rights under the law, and points them to resources that can support them when they need it.

This conversational approach mimics the traditional way that Indigenous youth have learned from their elders, through asking questions and being told stories.

There were unfortunately some long delays in the process of getting this into the world, so we are now getting ready to release this toolkit more widely soon.

Culture, Identity, and Belonging

In 2017, Feathers of Hope held the Culture, Identity, and Belonging forum. The forum dealt with issues I’ve already touched, like loss of tradition, language, spirituality and more, and the impacts that those losses have had generationally.

Chief Lady Bird

Kaia’tanó:ron Dumoulin Bush

Monique Bedard (Aura)

This time around, we were going to be creating a series of graphic novels. Also by this time, my studio had grown to four people. The lead designer on this project was my fantastic colleague Guadalupe Perez Pita.

Lupe and I invited these three incredible women to create the artwork.

Chief Lady Bird is a Chippewa and Potawatomi artist, illustrator, educator and community activist

Kaia’tanó:ron Dumoulin Bush is an Onkwehonwe/French-Canadian illustrator and visual artist

Monique Bedard (Aura) is a Haudenosaunee (Oneida) artist

As always, the youth advisors worked to identify key themes from the forum

What was different this time around that was that the advisors took those themes and translated them into storylines for graphic novels. Here is one group presenting a story idea.

This photo shows a large format worksheet that my colleague Guadalupe created. You can see here that we asked the youth advisors to identify text or dialogue, events, scenes, etc.

Whereas with the other projects, the youth advisors identified themes and provided feedback, this time they were creating the stories.

Elton Beardy

One of the youth staff of Feathers of Hope, Elton Beardy, took those story notes and crafted them into 3 scripts.

We then took sketches of the panels back to the youth advisors. This is them adding their feedback and revisions using sticky notes.

Here are some panels from the 3 graphic novels.

This one, called Blueberries, is about healing from the trauma of the child welfare system

Way of the Gentle Heart is about connecting with elders and learning from them about how sacred different gender and sexual identities are.

Manidoo Makwa is about finding your voice through ceremony and protecting the land from exploitation.

In these graphic novels, Indigenous youth and elders were depicted as heroes and adventurers. This kind of representation is sadly very rare in Canadian media.

Health & Well-Being

This last project is still underway. In 2018, Feathers of Hope convened the Health & Well-being forum. I’ve already mentioned some of the impacts that colonial violence and systemic injustice have had on Indigenous communities. The young people at this forum spoke on those issues, but also on how they might turn to traditional, land-based, and community-based ways of healing and wellness. For example, they talked about how they might bring knowledge of traditional medicines back to young people.

The Health & Well-Being youth advisory has been meeting throughout the pandemic. I’m particularly excited about this round of work with FOH because it’s the first time the advisors have been fully empowered to select the media we’ll be making together. I led a couple co-design conversations to generate and evaluate different ideas.

Story 1:

Jon listens to a podcast

Jon gets goosebumps when he hears his question.

He listens intently as they talk to their guest, another young person who has struggled with drugs and alcohol. The three of them speak honestly and openly, without shame or judgment. He’d never be able to talk to his friends or parents like this.

Jon feels like he has been welcomed into a community he never knew he needed.

*The End*

In the end, the young people chose to create a podcast. This is a slide from a speculative design activity, where I wrote a story to bring the podcast idea to life.

In a few days, I’ll be travelling to the first in-person Feathers of Hope meeting since 2019 to plan the podcast’s first season.

So that is *some* of the design history of FOH. There’s one project I didn’t have time to cover unfortunately.

DESIGN JUSTICE

Those who are impacted by a design outcome, or by an issue that is being addressed through design, must benefit from and be participants in the design process.

So I want to move on to a very brief discussion of the relationship between the design justice movement and FOH.

Here’s a very basic articulation of design justice that I put forward around 2015. This isn’t to say that no one else was practicing design in this way; its just that I hadn’t heard anything like this specifically in relation to design.

The only articulations outside of mainstream corporate design were design for social good, or social impact design.

This is what a lot of that looked like. This is a poster for a 2007 exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in New York. The name of the exhibit was “Design for the other 90%” and the image is a woman, presumably in Africa, drinking from a shallow pool of water through a design object. Although the object doesn’t have the brand name on it, you might recognize it as the life straw

Let’s look at this image for a second. Instead of me analyzing this for you, I have some questions.

Saviorism. Remember the missionaries. It was alive and well.

What assumptions and stereotypes about Africa and African people does this photograph reproduce?