Real Conversations

Service Design

2024 (10 months)

The Real Conversation series started with a conversation with Stephanie Dixon, and me as we are both connected to a not-for-profit organization. As we both identify with having a disability/being disabled, the conversation surrounded how we both experience ableism in our day-to-day lives. To challenge this, I came up with the idea of creating a podcast to bring disabled voices to non-disabled audiences and share our experiences around ableism. Stephanie then brought the idea to our organization which agreed to support this initiative. Please read further to see how the design came to life.

It is important to mention that this project was co-designed by a team of persons with disabilities/disabled persons. Elisabeth Walker-Young from Inclusive Experiences was contracted to be the accessibility consultant. Due to her wonderful experiences, she became a vital part of the design team to bring accessibility to the forefront as well as her creativity, experience, and knowledge with anti-ableist activism. In addition, four youth with disabilities/disabled youth with a variety of intersecting identities and experiences were brought on to be guests. These amazing individuals also contributed to ensure their thoughts and ideas were incorporated and they felt comfortable and consented to all aspects of the project. This collaboration was crucial to all elements of the project!

With my Industrial design background, I helped shape Real Conversations from a design perspective. In addition to coming up with the idea and co-hosting, I helped facilitate the pre-production work. For example, I designed each conversation topic and questions around each guest's experience, knowledge, and interests. It has been a pleasure using my product design skills for service design in this position while collaborating with my amazing team.

Initial Design

As stated previously, the organization loved the idea for the podcast and wanted to use it to share with their members on their private platform. Stephanie and I then went to work on designing and hosting this series which started with a project outline. This rough document created the groundwork of the project including:

What are these conversations about?
What are they for?
Who they are for?
Scope; and,
Accessibility.

One key turning point of this project was to turn it from a “podcast” into a “conversation series”. We decide to take this “design detour” to make the series more accessible (with video recording, etc.) and engage the audience more intentionally.

Accessibility

As the design team is comprised of persons with disabilities/disabled persons, accessibility was essential. Elisabeth led the team to explore and develop accessibility features such as:

Audio and visual content;
American Sign Language interpretation;
Transcription; and
Clear audio quality.

Due to the nature of the series, the team had to research, learn, reflect, and adopt ways to include as many people as possible. There were many lessons learned that can be used in other web-based inclusive projects.

Community Agreement

This conversation series covers many difficult subjects and personal stories around ableism. We wanted to acknowledge that these conversations would be hard for both speakers and listeners. Hence, it was crucial to take many ethical considerations into account to protect all members and create a community that is as safe as possible. Hence a Community Agreement was co-constructed among all members of the project team which involved information on:

Project information;
Project community;
Confidentiality;
Accessibility and inclusion; and,
Acknowledgments and Gratitude.

Drawing from Trauma-Informed Practices and Indigenous Knowledge, the Community agreement was extremely impactful for many aspects of the project. Due to the safe (or safe as possible) space, guests shared that they felt comfortable opening up about personal experiences. This made the conversations authentic and meaningful. From a design perspective, the agreement helped drive the project. Collaborating on the agreement made the project into a product that everyone is incredibly proud of! A key learning outcome from this process was that not everyone has the same opinion within the disabled community. We use wording like “persons with disabilities/disabled persons” to respect the preference of person first and identity first language. The design team encourages the use of similar agreements when working on any projects, especially when working with marginalized communities.

Conversation Design and Implementation

Once the initial Community Agreement was drafted, the team met to discuss it and our interests in the topic of Ableism. This led to the design of four different episodes (with interview questions) featuring different guests. The questions were then provided to each guest for approval.

Conversations were scheduled to be recorded on Zoom while respecting the team’s external commitments. Time was allocated for set up, recording, and debriefing which accounted for “Crip Time” by adapting schedules around the needs of persons with disabilities/disabled persons. Guests were also provided with the option of additional debrief time/funds for support. Compensation was given to all team members for their contributions.

After the recording was completed, transcripts were co-created for ASL interpretation and Closed Captioning purposes. Other marketing and supplementary information was created for a November 2024 launch!

Dedication

Real Conversations is dedicated to persons with disabilities/disabled people who passed away at a young age. Their lives will not be forgotten and their work to make this world an inclusive place will continue in this project and in future work.