ANTONIO: Well, how does innovation intersect with being human? It’s that second part, something that’s widely adopted and creates significant value, because for it to be widely adopted, people have to care about it. They have to genuinely want that innovation as part of their life or work. And the only way to better guarantee that whatever it is you’re innovating on matters to people is it has to meet some need, and not in a superficial way.
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ALIDA: Welcome to Care Work, a podcast about what it means to offer care for a living. I’m your host, Alida Miranda-Wolff. For most of my career, I’ve been a diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging practitioner focused on teaching, love, healing, harm, and scaling belonging. In my books, Cultures Of Belonging: Building Inclusive Organizations That Last and The First Time Manager: DEI I explored what care inside of organizations means. Join me as I continue this journey with guests who take meeting the needs of others on as their colleagues both inside of organizations and in any other way.
How can creators innovate to instill more humaneness into their designs? Despite being at the root of almost every interaction we have day to day, design can often forget get what humans need in its development. That is the subject of my conversation with Antonio Garcia, an executive design leader, illustrator, podcast and educator who in the Chicago design community has been a colleague of mine for six years and advocates for human centered design in every aspect of his work and life.
In today’s episode, he shares his perspective on where design is actually meeting and exceeding standards, a positive view for once, and where it has a ways to go. In particular, he advocates for a design code of ethics. And if you take nothing away from this episode, it’s that we really should make and adopt one.
Hi Antonio. Welcome to the Care Work podcast.
ANTONIO: Hello. I’m glad to be here. Thank you.
ALIDA: A lot of this podcast centers on folks who are healers,
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who are dealing with grief, who are dealing with disability advocacy. And one of the central arguments of carrying labor is it’s really anything where you have to meet the needs of others. And so I’ve been looking for people to talk to who are in these more technical spaces, to learn more about their theory of care work and how they see themselves. And so with that in mind, I thought maybe the place we could start is for you to talk a little bit about who you are and specifically how you are a care worker.
ANTONIO: I love that definition, too. It’s so simple, but it’s so true. Meeting the needs of others. I’m a husband and a father. When I’m at work, I am Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer at a software consulting firm here in Chicago. In the past, I’ve led large design teams, upwards of 15 to 20 folks, and have worked in, you know, small studios where there’s just six of us.
And I think in those capacities, both as a husband and partner and as a father, that’s a form of care that I see as, like, the most obvious, right? Like, I’m keeping two little humans alive and trying to teach him how to be better people in the world. And all of those sort of things you normally associate with caregiving of children.
And then in the professional capacity, it’s been as a mentor. If I’ve had direct reports, it’s been care that goes into other people’s careers and professional growth and development, but also just being another human in a work setting where the needs aren’t necessarily about the tasks at hand, but are just about being people.
Maybe it’s most clear when you talk about COVID for example, or the social justice and unrest we saw after the murder of George Floyd, where you had people who were still coming to work and still trying to make a living, but who were not okay. These were really challenging times for a lot of people. And so the normal things you might help somebody with, like helping them put together a case for a promotion, for example, seemed really small compared to the help I think everybody, myself included, needed to just get through the day. And so I think that’s the time that I maybe felt, oh, this thing called leadership, in these sorts of times, extends far past what’s normally expected of a manager or a C-suite executive or a leader that way.
ALIDA: I’m interested, with the role that you’ve taken on now and really overseeing innovation, what that means in the context of being a human, because often innovation and humanness are not placed together.
ANTONIO: Too bad, right? [LAUGHTER] Isn’t it? Yeah. I got my definition of innovation from Gravity Tank, where I cut my teeth in consulting, and the innovation process, design thinking, human centered methodologies. And it’s quite simple. It’s doing something new that’s widely adopted and creates significant value. And that value can be social, that can be economic. Ideally, it’s both. And again, maybe like your definition of care on the surface, it’s like, yeah, sure, that makes sense, you know. Doing something new, widely adopted, creates value. Got it. But actually accomplishing that is not so clear. Not always easy. And I think to do it well, at least tying it back to your question of, like, well, how does innovation intersect with being human?
It’s that second part, something that’s widely adopted and creates significant value like that other half of it. Because for it to be widely adopted, people have to care, uh, about it. They have to genuinely want that innovation as part of their life or work. And the only way to better guarantee that whatever it is you’re innovating on matters to people is it has to meet some need, and not in a superficial way, but in a way that only comes from spending time with those individuals to understand, you know, just a little bit their lives and work and make sure that the thing we’re all working hard to make and put out in the world is meaningfully different from whatever was there before, including nothing. Right? Like, if you’re willing something to be that hasn’t existed before, it’s got to be markedly better for people to genuinely want it and adopt it and integrate it into their lives and work.
ALIDA: I think that last part of what you’re saying is perhaps the most salient, because there are a lot of conversations about whose needs don’t get met by design or who we don’t design for. So, to your point about innovation has to be widely adopted to be innovation, we do have innovations that are widely adopted that don’t support a lot of humans or their needs.
And so I’m wondering, from your perspective, one, if you could talk a little bit more about what human centered design is, and then also talk about who is the human we are designing for. In a lot of these cases, I’ll.
ANTONIO: Tell you what human centered design should be. Whether or not it is all the time is another question, and I think, hotly debated and it’s those kind of poor examples that are brought forward when people argue against design thinking or declare human centered design is letting us down and design thinking is dead, and these kinds of spicy proclamations. It’s usually when they give examples like the worst possible example you could find. It’s like, sure, yes, if it was all that way, I’d be right with you telling the world that design thinking is dead.
But there’s as many cases, I think, on the other side of, of those that are exceptional, and they’re probably not talked about because they’re serving audiences that quite frankly, a lot of people don’t care about. And so it’s not widely known, human centered design in its simplest sense, and this is going to sound like really reductive, is what it says on the tin. It is putting people at the center of design activities, you know, the sort of deliberate planning and making of things, right, design strategy, and making sure that those are centered on the human beings that are part of whatever that is.
You know, the origins of human centered design, for me, they borrow a lot from anthropology. And to quote Martha Cotton and others, the work that we do is applied ethnography. It is designed to produce new products and services. I’m not going to say that that’s not often what it’s about. But the more you can embed yourself in the community with people that are the intended audience, the better your understanding will be and the closer you are to making something that matters.
I think the best thing to do would be to bring those people into the process and make them members of the team, if not decision makers in the team. So if I was designing a product with an aim to be visually accessible to people, I might add a member of the team who was blind and used screen readers and other adaptive technologies. Because they have the closest firsthand experience. Their lived experience is nothing like my own in that way. And who better to give us some ideas on where to begin, you know, improving a product than someone who uses a product every single day and it’s part of their life? And so I think you can see how these things might fall out of orbit when they’re sort of rote and, you know, a box checking kind of activity. Yeah, I think we lose sight of that often in commercial work.
ALIDA: What do you see as an ethics of design that we should be holding ourselves to?
ANTONIO: Yeah, I’ve done a bunch of research and workshops around this with my dear friend and colleague Theresa Slate. You know, our premise for some of the workshops and things that we’ve had given with students and other communities, design communities. You know, you look at professions that have a lot of academic requirements before you’re even allowed to be one, right? Attorneys, engineers, physicians. Years of study go into that. And certification, accreditation, all of these things, right, before you’re even allowed to practice. Then each of them has a method or a mechanism for when somebody screws up, right? You could be disbarred, you could lose your license to practice, et cetera. And it’s because that work is seen oftentimes as life and death, right? You screw up, you could sentence someone to life in prison, right? You screw up, you could kill a person during a surgery, right? You screw up, a bridge could collapse. Thousands of people, you know, die in some accident, right? All of those because the stakes are high. And because we’ve decided that those are pretty important jobs we’ve built mechanisms and accountabilities in. And there’s a code of ethics that you write the Hippocratic Oath, for example.
And design up until recently, didn’t feel very life or death. It was aesthetics or it was, um, advertising. Or you could just explain the work very differently. It’s purely commercial. Increasingly, things that people do as designers result in life or death outcomes. That designers studied the components and behavior of gambling addiction, right, and infused that into products, social media products, other things like that. And they borrowed. They borrowed from those same game mechanics, and they folded them right into a product. Had nothing to do with gambling, but everything to do with addiction, to keep people scrolling.
And If that content is, again, for example, showing young women unreasonable ideas of beauty and working into their psyche, certain body image notions, right? That is changing how they live and causing depression and at times, death by suicide, I’d say that’s a life and death decision that somebody made, and it was happening in design.
You’ve got accountabilities there that weren’t present before that are very obvious to me now. And there’s no mechanism, there’s no accountability for a designer who’s involved in something like that. You can’t lose your design license. There’s actually nothing that says you have to do anything special to be a designer. And I’m not suggesting some form of gatekeeping keeping people out of design. But I do think that the rigor should be there and the accountability should be there, and there should be some responsibility, some oath, some code of ethics that practicing designers are held to.
ALIDA: Can you think about what it would mean to design love into what we make, as opposed to just being driven by a profit motive or incentive?
ANTONIO: Well, first you have to dismantle capitalism. No big deal. That’s first job one. And let me know when you got that part done and we can really talk about this. I’m just kidding. I love that idea of designing and making love one of the design principles of the work that you do. There’s a lot of talk, maybe ten years ago, empathy was the word. It still is. You still see it floating around LinkedIn and other things. But Brené Brown’s work, I think, popularized this idea, and other people kind of started to bring that into the work.
And it fits right in line with, you know, human centered design and this idea of having empathy for end users and putting yourself as close to the kind of challenge or problem state as you can be and embedding yourself in whatever that space is to take one’s perspective on as your own as much as you can. And that’s kind of where these conversations have stopped. It’s like if we bring empathy into our work as designers, then it’s considered.
But maybe it could be elevated even further to something like compassion, which I think is a level or two above empathy and I think that’s getting to what you’re talking about. That idea of deeply caring for who it is you are serving with your skills as a creative person, and to do it driven by love.
I think it probably makes a lot of sense in some obvious spaces, you know, healthcare, to me, comes to mind. Plenty of room to design with compassion for all of those settings. But I love a higher calling. I love a call to action like that and maybe that’s it. Maybe it is just forcing the question as part of a design process, making it one of your team’s principles to just ask, like, is there space in this work that we’re doing right now for this client, for compassion? Can we imbue our processes, our practices, the product itself, with some, something we could point to and be like, yeah, that there, that detail, or this idea, it’s very compassion driven, that’s, that’s where it was born from and why we included it.
ALIDA: I would love to wind our conversation to this experience that you’ve had as a caregiver, the time that you took as a designer, focusing also on what it means to “dad well”, and how that coincided with your move towards diversity and inclusion in the design community.
ANTONIO: Let’s see. You mentioned Dad Well, which is a podcast I made just about four years ago. Three seasons worth of shows interviewing men who have both thriving, entrepreneurial, independent creative practices and who are also, in my mind, great dads, to understand how they reconcile those two identities. And also because so often that conversation of career and family is. It’s always posed to women, it’s rarely posed to men, and I thought, there’s a story here that I’m personally curious about, especially at the time I was turning 40. My second child had just been born. Maya was just born. A lot of introspection, these significant milestones of age and family. And I was also largely dissatisfied in my career and wondering, what is all of this designed for?
So I quit everything. I quit teaching. I quit not long after that, my involvement in AIGA. I quit things that I was volunteering and freelancing on. I quit my job just to hopefully have a clear mind about it all, and ended up taking a year off from industry and making this show.
And for me, the idea of making the show was very much a selfish research project. I was trying to understand how to be a better dad and also not sacrifice all these creative, you know, pursuits and passions I had. And I didn’t understand how I could do both. In my mind, it was very binary. I’m either going to be a great dad at the neglect of my creativity and work, or I’m going to keep doing that, and I’m somehow going to neglect my kids in some way and not be present.
So I wanted to talk to people who, uh, I thought were doing it better than me, and that kind of turned into the show. And I think it’s because you could probably weave care somewhere in there, right? Like, I wanted to be an excellent parent, I couldn’t imagine not giving 110% to my kids. And I also just like creating work is a form of self care for me, getting ideas out and expressed in all kinds of medium is very much something I do to feel good. And I knew I needed both of those things.
To kind of circle it back around to my involvement in the DEI efforts. I inherited a bit of work within the AIGA chapter, the Chicago chapter, led largely by Helene Lopez. It was looking at ways that we could make this professional association of design a really, really historic one, more inclusive in Chicago, and how could we bring more indifferent people into the fold and learn from them?
And so I became the first VP of DEIB for the chapter and set about trying to figure that out. I think we made some good progress. I think I had a lot of good starting points again from folks who had come before me and had done work in maybe, you know, an unofficial capacity. At a certain point, I got really tired. [LAUGH] And even though I know how important it is and how critical it is, I got really tired and I kind of stopped. And I’m saying that because I don’t have, like, I don’t have a great end to my work as VP of DNI. And then we introduced this thing, and it changed the chapter, you know, there’s this crowning moment where this thing happened, and it fundamentally changed the way we relate to the design community in Chicago. I think I, I raised a lot of questions and made a lot of connections and presented a broad summary of the current state of things with some strategic objectives for where I thought we could go next.
And then the world started coming apart in a real serious way. And I was promoted from my role as VP of DEIB to President of the chapter, Co-President. And I did it for like, 90 days. And then I quit everything, like, I quit the chapter entirely. It wasn’t anything that the chapter itself did. I think the people running that group are quite extraordinary, but I was just really worn out, and I wasn’t doing a good job of caring for myself, which made it impossible to care for other people. And it was dark days, Alida. Like, I was suicidal, I was profoundly depressed, and I was like, I can’t lead initiatives like this in my current state, this is not good. And so I got help and I did the work, and I’m still doing the work.
And so I tell the story not because I had this awesome success on the other side of like a DEIB role in a really interesting creative professional association. I tell this story because at a certain point, if you don’t put on your own mask, it’s hard to take care of other people right as the plane goes down. And so I’m not proud of that time because I achieved something profound. I’m proud of that time because I got my shit straight and I made moves that were about taking care of myself and getting myself right so that I could be a great dad and a husband and kind of resume my role as a caretaker stronger than I was at the time.
Which was a years worth of therapy and meditation and meditation and a lot of really long runs. And, you know, I think I’m in a far better place today, but I just want anybody who’s kind of at their limit to ask themselves, is now a good time to pause, to take a break, to reset myself, to get things right so that I can come back even, you know, bolder and stronger? Because this kind of work is, it’s exhausting, whether you’re taking care of it, you know, kids or an aging parent or a family member or just your team, like, it’s a lot of work.
ALIDA: Well, I appreciate you so much sharing that story and what you did to come out of that place. For one, I think many of the people that I’ve spoken to on this podcast, certainly myself, have been through that period. I’ve been really vocal on this show that 2023 was the worst year of my life in a variety of ways that made it really, really difficult to see any possibility into the future.
So, with that in mind, this question of rest is sometimes so difficult because, one, rest feels like a privilege. And I have to say, rest is resistance. And the Nap Ministry movement has been really important, at least for me, in being able to say that the idea that rest is a privilege is actually not coming from a good place, but from a place of hyper-productivity and accelerating the means of production. Everybody has a right to rest. Everybody has a right to close their eyes and not do anything if they want to or need to.
And just hearing you talk about quitting, quitting everything all at one time, there’s something so radical in it that I think other people listening might say, well, I wish I could do that, but I don’t know. I don’t know how I could ever get to that place. And even being able to hear from you that it came to the responsibilities and the love you had for other people to be able to recognize that you needed to be responsible for yourself and love yourself, I think that that is a really important framing, especially in a culture that emphasizes what we give to others, not what we receive.
ANTONIO: That’s right.
ALIDA: What’s one thing that if you’re listening today, you would want that listener to take away from this conversation?
ANTONIO: The point I just made, that it’s okay to rest, it’s okay to take your foot off the accelerator for a second, you know, pump your brakes, and use that time to recalibrate and reflect. And just ask yourself, am I, am I still doing the thing that is most important? Am I still doing the right best thing? And if you’re not to make adjustments, and if you are to take a deep breath and then dive back into it.
That can take lots of forms and any duration, but it’s really important. And when you see people on the Internet who appear as though they never sleep and are just perpetually achieving, and hustling, and launching the next thing, and on the surface meeting all their goals and objectives and just setting the bar higher and higher, like, recognize that that’s a myth, that is a facade, that is not real.
That is the highlight reel of what that person selectively curates and chooses to share. And that comparison kills. And if you spend too much time measuring your proximity to other people in terms of achievement, you’re actually never going to get to whatever the perception is of done or excellent or next level, you’re going to run yourself ragged, and you’re largely going to be dissatisfied with the results and pretty unhappy with the time you invested chasing somebody else’s ideas.
And that, that rest and that distance from examples like that is actually really, really powerful and helpful. And it allows you to focus again on what matters most, to the people closest to you, where you can have the most impact, what brings you joy, how you help and build other people up.
And to me, I think, and maybe this is just with some distance of years, at 45 years old, this is starting to become very clear to me in ways that the first half of my career were spent doing other things. And so I’d like to think that the next 20-25 years of what I have left to sort of other half of this, is spent more in the kinds of activities I just described and in helping other people do that kind of thing. Because, like, the saddest thing in the world to me is regret. I don’t want anybody’s sort of final days to be like, oh, I wish I would have, dot. dot. dot. Right?
So if you take anything away, it’s kind of like, double check that. Make sure that you’re still on track for what that is. And if you find yourself out of line with those things that are most important to you and those values, it’s completely appropriate to, like, reset and to start over and to give it another go.
ALIDA: Well, Antonio, thank you so much for your wisdom and guidance on today’s episode. I so appreciate you. Last thing, where would you like people to find you after today?
ANTONIO: I think you can get to all the things I’m up to at my website. It’s amgarcia.com. That, uh, would be the best place. I think there’s links to all the things that I do.
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ALIDA: Thank you for listening to care work. Please share this podcast with your community to help uplift and advocate for more caring cultures everywhere. This podcast is a collaboration between Ethos and me, Alida Miranda-Wolff. I’m also your host. Theme music vibing introspectively was written and recorded by Logan Snodgrass. Audio editing and post production assistance was provided by Organized Sound Productions. If you want more of me, be sure to order my books. Cultures Of Belonging and The First Time Manager: DEI.
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