Making equity a fundamental part of good business!
Diversity and Inclusion are only the beginning. Our belief is that businesses play an important role in challenging and innovating how society considers access and equity for all people.
Building a more inclusive future
Schoolab San Francisco has worked to engrain diversity, equity, and inclusion into the fabric of our DNA.
We define diversity as numbers and statistics, inclusion as impact and initiatives, and equity as solutions and their outcomes.
With design being a fundamental aspect of our work, we have been working on a methodology that seeks to engrain inclusion and diversity to produce equitable outcomes in innovations.
Equitable Design Lab (EDL)
Our program brings together industry leaders and students, the future changemakers to tackle real-world challenges and create a more inclusive world. Participating companies identify a challenge they are facing to achieve inclusion and equity with their products or services.
The realities of inequities are embedded in the cultures, systems, and dynamics of both education and corporate environments. For this reason, it is imperative designers adopt inclusive frameworks as a means of shifting the paradigm and providing better access to innovation and consequently more chances of success for excluded communities. By centering on the importance of equity in the design process, our framework promotes a radically-inclusive innovation model to develop new solutions.
By emphasizing empathy and systemic thinking in the customer discovery process – we seek to collaborate with students, startups, and corporations to build a future where equity and inclusion aren’t just a social good but also great for business. In order to foster this value, we believe in a multi-generational and multi-disciplinary approach.
In 2021 our team has built coalitions with two organizations missioned in promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workforce and business; CEO action and the Bay Area council. By collaborating with these organizations we will work to build our expertise and partnerships in the coming years.
Design Fiction
Design Fiction allows us back-casting from scenarios of possible futures into the present while equipping us with a flexible mindset towards business strategy and innovation thinking. In using such narrative elements to envision and explain possible futures for your business, we suspend the disbelief about change and make it feel present and urgent.
For example, working through benefits, challenges, and opportunities of a new technology or market development might unearth a whole new short and long-term vision for your organization.
