Every designer faces an interesting dichotomy when approaching a project. The first is hubris. After all, to think that you can and will design something better than what it will be replacing takes a certain degree of chutzpah.
Yet any designer worth his or her salt must also bring to each project a certain amount of humility. Creating something for someone else’s lived experience requires us to be students of their condition and careful listeners to their stories.
With this as context, I often marvel at how heavy-handed design can be when it comes to social change. People barrel in with new ideas in education, health, and housing with little respect for what has occurred before. Our attempts at humility are stifled when we are confronted by someone’s social or political worldview that is drastically different from ours.
It has been said that you can’t convince anyone of anything, but you can help someone convince themselves. One way of doing this is to create tools that allow for their own personal discovery and empowerment. In other words, give them the questions, not the answers.
Sociologist and author Nicholas Christakis once told me that the mark of a good scientist is building their own tools because this allows them to see and discover things that previous scientists could not. The same is true for designers.
Case in point: in our work with nonprofits, foundations, and governments we have consistently come up against a design challenge that required a solution chock full of humility with just a pinch of hubris.
The hubris lay in the challenge itself; how to redesign the narrative around the American Dream. The humility was in realizing that people have deeply held beliefs when it comes to how we achieve our dreams in America.
The idea of the American Dream is central to our national character. The belief that if you work hard enough you can achieve anything is something you can imagine every parent telling every child born in the last hundred years.
Yet we know that while hard work makes the American Dream possible, it does not make it probable. There is a whole host of influences that impact where we end up in life—from our family, education, health, and social network to where we grow up and the kind of services we have access to and the luck we encounter along the way.
The problem with a belief so firmly rooted in the idea that hard work alone is sufficient is that while it provides much-needed hope for those on the bottom, it also can limit our national will to support those things that we know help people move towards the top.
To put it in plain terms, you can look at a broken school and always point to a few kids who made it out. So some, rather than fixing the school, simply point to the kids who made it and ask why the other kids didn’t work as hard as the others did to “make it out.”
The social sciences have pointed out the psychological underpinnings of this phenomenon. The term fundamental attribution bias refers to the idea that people by and large think they are the primary drivers of their life, largely discounting the environment around them. Other researchers have concluded that we are more likely to remember the headwinds that serve as barriers to our success than to appreciate the tailwinds that push us forward. And yet more studies show, surprisingly, people who have gone through a certain struggle are less compassionate towards people currently going through that same struggle—largely because they fail to remember the support they had received and instead have their own personal will reinforced by others who congratulate them for their victory in overcoming.
The silver lining is that separate research demonstrated that when you carefully remind people of what has helped them along the way, you can increase gratitude for the help they received, compassion for those who have not had similar help, and support for those factors that can help make that hard work pay off.
This knowledge increased our confidence that we could design something to help people reflect on their own journey towards the American Dream.
But humility dictated that we first talk directly to people to hear how they saw their own life. Traveling around the country talking to people about their dreams, we asked each person to bring in an artifact that embodied their dreams. One young woman carried a picture of her grandparents and lamented about how the family used to gather around the dinner table for a good meal and great conversations. Another person, recently homeless, held onto a sales trophy as a reminder of when he was on “top.” In their own words and stories, they told us about the limits of their hard work and the limits of the help they received. One mother noted that while she appreciated the critical support they received via food stamps, she would never see it as a tool for upward mobility. Instead, she referred to them as handcuffs that held her back from pursuing higher-paying jobs that would threaten her much-needed benefits.
Following this tour across America, we conducted a national survey to test our hypothesis. Hard work was indeed what people saw as the primary driver of success, while things like your friends, luck, and the help of government were at the bottom of what people perceived as essential to success. In one telling question, we asked which of these two thirteen-year-old children would be more successful—one who had a strong family but lacked ambition or another who had a strong work ethic but came from an abusive home. Seventy percent of Americans said the child from the abusive home would be more successful. This result was consistent across political parties and defies everything we know about the impact of abuse on later life outcomes.
The key to disrupting deeply held beliefs is not to directly disrupt them at all. We often use very volatile and aggressive language in design, terms like disrupt, break through, revolutionary, and challenge. Yet we know that when we directly confront someone’s beliefs and values, it creates defensiveness, and those values, rather than be disrupted, become more entrenched. The alternative is to instead go deeply personal, to share something of ourselves, and out of respect and vulnerability invite others to do the same.
With this in mind, we launched an online platform called Moving Up: The Truth about Getting Ahead in America. Each chapter reflected a factor that research showed was critical for helping people succeed. But rather than leading with the research we instead shared personal narratives about my own life and those of others. We asked people to reflect on how that factor might have affected their own lives. The content was serialized in Fast Company, and soon we had a newsletter offering weekly reflections that has grown to over two thousand subscribers.
Soon other organizations became interested in this work, and we received funding from the Ford Foundation and a media partnership with PBS’s flagship station, WNET, to design an extension that would allow people to quickly reflect on what factors may have helped or hindered their own efforts to succeed.
Your American Dream Score is an online quiz that asks thirteen questions about your life. Each question represents a factor that research shows correlates to social mobility and/or happiness in life. Similarly, all of the options within each question are based on scientific research related to mobility or positive life outcomes. Once completed, you receive a score and a list of factors that show what you had working for and against you. The higher your score, the more you had to overcome. The lower the scores, the more you had working in your favor. With your results you are also given a song that represents your journey, an invitation to learn more about each factor, and calls to action on what you can do moving forward.
Within a month over 375,000 people had found their score, with over 1.2 million page views showing that people were interested in learning more. Importantly, as we looked at the comments behind the scores, people were responding just as we had hoped. Many said how they have a better understanding about their life, expressed appreciation and gratitude towards others and the supports they had, and are encouraging their friends to find their score and discuss.
In building the calculator we scrutinized every element of design. The order of questions and the order of options within each question were critical, as the wrong word or sequence could provide a “psychic trigger” that could turn people off. For example, we started by asking people about their character and ended on public services. Within public services, we made sure to put student aid at the top and food stamps towards the bottom. How we dealt with questions of race and gender were especially sensitive. Each question was carefully vetted with both experts on that topic and social scientists to avoid any negative framing.
Perhaps most critical was the name itself.
Initially, some instinctively thought to call this a privilege calculator. While there may be elements of privilege in one’s background, it doesn’t capture the breadth of factors and more importantly, the word itself is a nonstarter for some. For instance, while being white in general is an advantage, try telling an unemployed coal miner that he or she is privileged.
The volatility of this word was confirmed when one press article opted to include privilege, against our objections, in the title of an otherwise thoroughly positive review. As we could have predicted, it set off a firestorm of comments and coverage among more conservative sites that immediately shut down any possibility of those readers being open to the true intentions of the American Dream Score. Which leads me to our final lesson in humility.
Shortly after launching, we were monitoring traffic on our site and saw a big spike associated with a post on PBS’s Facebook page. As the numbers climbed, I was excited that more people were participating. But as I began to read people’s comments I was given a poignant reminder of what was really happening.
These were real people taking five minutes out of their lives, looking for something. Some received comfort, gratitude, and compassion. A few were agitated or frustrated by what their score represented. One woman who had one of the highest scores I had seen (meaning she had almost everything working against her), wrote, “That was amazingly depressing.”
It was a stark reminder that design is the beginning of a journey, not an end in and of itself. I wanted to reach out to that woman and assure her that her journey was not over and there were ways in which more factors could be put to work in her favor. I wanted to connect with those people who had issues coming out of their score.
And so that is what we are doing. Jumping into the fray of online comments is not an easy task, but it is what is required to square the circle of hubris and humility. Hubris is thinking that you can change a conversation; humility is realizing that a conversation is between two people.
The response to these microconversations has been the most fulfilling part of this journey. In some, you can see a shift in attitudes or a slight softening of position. In others, we just agree to disagree. But as one person wrote to me, “I still take some issue with where you’re coming from, but at least I know your heart is in the right place.” And so was his.