The Black Lives Matter (#BLM) movement is raising awareness, conversation and reflection for many disciplines, including ours.

Given the #BLM discourse, our organization began to look more deeply at this conversation. Too many times, businesses are stringent with research resources, and ultimately it leads to a disservice to the business and to the people we ultimately serve. There is a cost of “not doing” when we review resource-poor research processes. We are vulnerable to not only neglecting the Black voice, but entirely excluding it. Our discipline’s familiar practices are so reactive to money and time constraints that we have made compensating behaviors the norm.

It is our responsibility to re-examine and rectify our processes to ultimately improve our practice. So often, we are coupled with design practices, who are mostly focused on efforts toward solution-making. When it comes to conversations on racial inequities and systemic bias, we must acknowledge that we are beholden to the people we are tasked with understanding, not solely the organization. In this way, and by taking this responsibility on, we hope we can begin to address the problem and raise awareness toward improvements.

In this short talk, Meena Kothandaraman, co-founder of twig+fish research practice, will share reflections on the research process and where compensations fall short. Meena will review the twig+fish five-phase research learning process – and highlight compensations and possibilities for improvement. twig+fish is already actively implementing some improvements to help raise the awareness of behaviors that exclude when conducting research activities.