As part of Team Toolkit’s collaboration with the MITRE Social Justice Platform, we are excited to announce the equity-lens update to ITK PAINstorming!

ITK PAINstorming helps improve your team’s understanding of a user’s behaviors, pain points, assumptions, and needs. This worksheet helps focus your team on addressing actual user preferences, and it can also help explore assumptions or unknown gaps about users.

The updated ITK PAINstorming worksheet adds new questions to help your team better understand your ideal user. In addition, the embedded equity lens helps your team broaden their perspective to consider what else may have historically occurred or be contributing to today’s current status quo. Collectively exploring these additional questions will help your team develop deeper insights about your ideal user and identify more opportunities for innovation.

PAIN stands for Persona, Activities, Insights, and Needs – the four main research topics explored in this structured method for gathering insights about users or user identities.

The Personas block sets the scope for your team’s discussion by asking who or what you’re innovating for, as well as which situation is being considered.

The Activities block asks about what the user is trying to accomplish. The embedded equity lens takes this further to ask what led this user to this activity. This question encourages your team to explore what may have been occurring not only at an individual level, but at the systemic, institutional, environmental, and possibly intergenerational level.

The Insights block asks about workarounds that the user has invented or employed to help them better achieve what needs to be done. The embedded equity lens broadens your team’s perspective by asking why the workaround was necessary in the first place and how it came to be. In some problem-solving situations, your team may be focused too narrowly on the symptoms that are in front of them rather than seeing the larger, inequity problem that surrounds them. By addressing the true root cause of a problem, more lasting equitable outcomes can be created.

The Needs block asks about the activity and role-specific pain points that the user experiences. The embedded equity lens again broadens your team’s perspective by asking about what previous conditions have enabled or created today’s pain points. Similar to the Activities block, this question encourages your team to consider not just individual impacts, but also systemic, institutional, environmental, and possibly intergenerational impacts.

Lastly, we updated the tool instructions to reduce harmful terms such as “target user.” Since some groups have truly experienced unfair targeting, the use of this term may reinvoke painful memories or perpetuate harm to this group. Instead, we use “ideal user” or simply “user” throughout the instructions.

We hope you find the updated ITK PAINstorming worksheet useful, and let us know what you think in the comments below!

Interested in learning more about other ITK tools with an embedded equity lens?

• Check out the updated Problem Framing canvas and the accompanying ITK blog article which explains the equity lens
• Check out the new Stakeholder Identification canvas and the accompanying ITK blog article which explains the equity lens
• Check out the new Quickstart Stakeholder Engagement canvas and the accompanying ITK blog article which explains the equity lens
• Check out the new Stakeholder Power Categories and the accompanying ITK blog article which explains the equity lens
• Read more about Team Toolkit’s equity-driven efforts here
• Click on the “Equity Driven Design” category on the right to filter relevant blog articles
• Sign up for our listserv to get the latest updates as more tools are released!

Today’s blog is from Jonathan Rotner

Learn more about ITK’s newest tool and the equity lens embedded in it.

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On first glance, this new tool might look like yet another 2×2 grid that helps your team prioritize its outcomes and actions. But this one comes from Team Toolkit, in collaboration with MITRE Social Justice Platform, so you know it drives outcomes and actions towards impact and equity.

Giving voice and a vote to those who are affected by an effort leads to more impact.

The ITK Stakeholder Power Categories tool prompts you to consider which stakeholder groups to prioritize, and it explores ways for you to integrate them into your teams. Using this tool can help your team adjust its goals, so they reflect the needs of those who will be most affected by the effort. It’s not walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, it’s walking that mile together!

Or, restating the goals of this tool in a more systems-engineering way, stakeholder engagement can be time-intensive, and this tool helps your team quickly categorize and assess which ones to engage, based on power and impact. For this activity, power over the effort refers to the ability to influence or control the behavior of people. Power comes in many forms: individuals have power, history has power, systems and the status quo have power, laws and norms have power, ideas and values have power, money has power. Impacted by the effort refers to the many ways that outcomes can affect an individual or group’s first-hand experiences.

Another goal of this tool is to highlight impacted stakeholders and to ideate on how to elevate their roles on your effort. Oftentimes, collaborating with those that are impacted will result in their endorsement of your effort and better outcomes for all. Deferring to those that are impacted may be the best way to ensure that the work continues and transitions to an engaged and invested community after your team moves on.

Direct participation from those who are overlooked or excluded leads to more equity.

A team’s assumptions about data, people’s behavior, potential uses, and the environment all shape an effort’s outcomes. These assumptions stem from team members’ own, often subconscious, social values, and they can be replicated and encoded into what the team designs. Unfortunately and unintentionally, those with the greatest need (i.e., those groups at the margins) often aren’t part of the design team; and so the final solution mimics the design team’s experience, rather than the lived experience of those with the greatest need. Therefore, the Stakeholder Power Categories tool asks how your team might increase participation, ownership, and self-governance of those who are highly impacted by the effort.

Direct participation by those at the margins is critical to reducing gaps in equity. These stakeholders can provide real context and experience in the domain where the effort will operate, and they can share information about how previous attempts to address their issues fared. These stakeholders can also help your team understand the different needs of different communities and how different approaches might distribute harm.[1]

Education and exposure are powerful tools. Sharing decision-making power has powerful outcomes. Equity-driven design thinking shows that when teams design for those at the margins, everyone benefits.[2]

So how might your team use the tool?

Start with the “when.” This tool is best used after you have identified a comprehensive and representative set of stakeholders that are relevant to the effort. (Or revisit this tool as the effort evolves, to ensure that the right set of stakeholders are still involved.)

The activity starts by helping your team get a better a sense of what the stakeholder landscape looks like, through the lenses of power and impact. The instructions first ask you to consider how much each stakeholder will be impacted by the effort. This section is intended to expand collaboration beyond the usual players.

Next, the instructions ask your team to consider the amount of power each stakeholder has over the effort. This part of the exercise helps your team think through the many ways in which inequality and internal assumptions can creep into the design, despite everyone’s best intent.

The “Notice and reflect” section promotes equitable outcomes. Before grappling with changing course or shuffling priorities, look at the 2×2 grid you just filled in. Read the quadrant descriptions and notice the patterns that have emerged: Are there any quadrants that are over- or under- represented? Did the team miss anyone?

The ITK Stakeholder Power Categories tool offers four questions that prompt your team towards different ways to make change. These questions suggest that those with lived experience (having personal knowledge or first-hand experience of the problem) are key contributors to a proposed solution. Answering these questions will not only help your team assess who should join the effort, but also help your team start to think through how you’ll invite them to do so.

And like all ITK tools, the final part of the tool reemphasizes that you act on your insights. What did your team discover after going through the exercise, and what will it do next?

Seriously, tell us! Team Toolkit can’t wait to hear about it.

Interested in learning more about other ITK tools with an embedded equity lens?

• Check out the updated Problem Framing canvas and the accompanying ITK blog article which explains the equity lens
• Check out the new Stakeholder Identification canvas and the accompanying ITK blog article which explains the equity lens
• Check out the new Quickstart Stakeholder Engagement canvas and the accompanying ITK blog article which explains the equity lens
• Read more about Team Toolkit’s equity-driven efforts here
• Click on the “Equity Driven Design” category on the right to filter relevant blog articles
• Sign up for our listserv to get the latest updates as more tools are released!

[1] “The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership.” Facilitating Power Engagement approaches. Community Commons. Accessed June 29, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/facilitatingpower/pages/53/attachments/original/1596746165/CE2O_SPECTRUM_2020.pdf?1596746165

[2] “Design for the Margins: City Accelerator Guest Commentary.” YouTube, July 16, 2014. [Online]. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7O9etlevyw