Methodology

What is Bearing Witness Design?

Bearing Witness Design is a new type of empathy-driven Human-Centered Design that emphasizes and facilitates experiential empathy in addition to traditional cognitive empathy, in order to develop highly impactful solutions that especially improve the human condition. Whereas in traditional design, the aim is to 𝒖𝒏𝒅𝒆𝒓𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒔𝒐𝒍𝒗𝒆 for people’s needs, Bearing Witness Design incorporates a non-judgmental experiential dimension prior to the solving phase that enables the designer to begin to π’†π’Žπ’π’•π’Šπ’π’π’‚π’π’π’š π’†π’™π’‘π’†π’“π’Šπ’†π’π’„π’† the needs of the subject.

Introducing an experiential component into Human Centered Design has been demonstrated in innovation efforts across industries and around the globe over the past three decades. In particular, Bearing Witness Design, inspired by the principles and practices developed by the Greyston Foundation, has generated innovative and effective solutions to combat housing insecurity, social injustice, recidivism, multigenerational trauma, systemic racism, and healing from genocidal conflict.

Bearing Witness Design is especially ideal for purpose-driven teams and organizations, as well as socially minded innovation projects. It is an experiential, holistic innovation process that leads the designers through discrete ideation phases intended to address:   

1. What is the current state as we see it today? (Objective Reality)

2. What is the desired/envisioned state? (Idealized Reality)

3. What is being experienced in the current state? (The β€˜Immersion’)

4. Revisiting #1 & #2

5. Facilitated Idealized Design from the Embodied Experience

Foundational Principles

Bearing Witness Design is especially ideal for purpose-driven teams and organizations, as well as socially minded innovation projects and it follows a unique customized format fit to each innovation project and organization. Expert facilitation is aimed at actualizing the foundational principles and generating the mindset primed for design. These foundational principles of Bearing Witness Design are:

● Mind of β€œNot-Knowing”. The most impactful innovations and most responsive solutions arise from a space free of preconceptions, judgments and biases. These include implicit ideas about who the β€œend user” is and what they need, and implied understandings of β€œproblem” and β€œsolution”.  

● Practice of Bearing Witness. Filter-free observation of the internal and external factors affecting the client community. This is best accomplished through an experiential β€œplunge” into the experience of the client.

● Responsive Design. When the imagination of a design team meets the experience of a client’s lived life, impactful and responsive innovation results. Innovations and designs that arise from Not Knowing and Bearing Witness are usually simpler and more direct. They are less likely to miss β€œobvious” design flaws that often arise from bias, preconceived notions, and reactive planning.