Hello. This is Kate.

I am Kate McEntee, a social design researcher and strategist.

I am passionate about learning from people. I seek to design for human awareness and social connection. My strength is taking on difficult to understand subject matters and making them understandable and applicable. My work creates tangible outcomes: communication for understanding like this, opportunities for engagement like this and this, and strategies for action like this.

Equity + Design
Equity + Design was a research project and workshop series focused on developing critical capacities around race, privilege, and identity with human-centred design practitioners in Melbourne. This work was a response to concerns around designers, using 'human-centred' methodologies, to create products and services with significant impact and influence on our social and political systems with insufficient critical awarenesses. Design today is involved in projects connecting citizens to government services, shaping national education systems, reimagining healthcare delivery and working to change the state of policing.

This research recognises the influences of structural racism, colonial power and bias ingrained in systems (and ourselves). It explores tools and processes for design to go beyond being simply human-centred, and build greater awareness of equity and inclusivity directly into the design process.

How might we be more aware of our own identity and the relative positions of power that derive from that identity?
How do we understand and structure our relationships with those we are designing for/with? What power dynamics are implicit in these relationships and how might we make that clear?
What processes and tools might we develop to address equity throughout the design process?
Does this help us to become better able to design with diverse groups and achieve inclusive design outcomes?

Through this work, we ran a series of workshops with industry practitioners around understanding equity and recognising ways our human-centred design processes participate in systems of oppression. If you are interested in this work, please contact me: [email protected].

Collaborators
I am very grateful to my collaborators: Myriam Doremy Diatta helped co-create workshop content and serves as an ongoing critical friend and Stephanie Lukito helped create all the visual material. This research was supported by WonderLab at Monash University.

Influencers
There are many folks doing excellent work in this area. A few organisations who have inspired and supported my work include Creative Reaction Lab and K12 Lab at Stanford d.school.