Introducing LETS

A creative studio dedicated to democratic social innovation.

I came to the Bay Area by way of Ghana, Chicago, Arkansas, Houston, and Boston. Settling into San Francisco in my first job out of college, I was soon unabashedly proud to call this place my home.

But the more I fell in love with my farmer’s markets, bus routes, and neighborhood izakaya, the more I was forced to reckon with some of my city’s uncomfortable paradoxes. How is it possible that one of the wealthiest and most technologically-savvy places in the world somehow allows its teachers to live near poverty and its homeless to live on the streets? How is it possible that Black residents are continually forced to leave the city, priced out of homes they’ve lived in for decades or forced to flee toxic waste? And how can all of these shocking social inequities exist in spite of a multi-billion dollar city budget, and  and the overflowing bank accounts of venture capitalists and technology companies?

Despite the United States’ status as the “greatest democracy in the world,” most of its public-serving institutions (at the city, state, and national level) fail to be meaningfully accountable to the people they serve – including those in Bay Area. In our current system of governance, the people who suffer most are regularly shunted away from levers of power; public meetings are scheduled at times when no working-class resident could normally attend and use bureaucratic jargon that few understand. Running for elected office frequently requires abundant financial and social capital, and the political system they operate within optimizes for short-term gains and bipartisan ideologies. Meanwhile, the most pressing issues that our marginalized communities face – whether economic opportunity, public health, housing, or a whole host of other overlapping issues – make survival a constant battle, wearing down their souls and their faith in the institutions that are meant to serve them. It’s no surprise that trust in American democracy has waned significantly in the past few decades, alongside the decline of social and civic institutions, labor, and other important pillars of social democracy.

Current systems are not enough. Voting, while essential, is a mechanism that currently promotes a system (representative democracy) that distances regular people from agency over their lives, thus perpetuating unacceptable social inequities. Putting more resources into the patching up our social safety net would undoubtedly help, but it isn’t the whole answer. In order to know what to invest resources into or how those resources should be used, we have to seriously reassess how we make sense of the issues our communities face and create holistic solutions that genuinely address their needs.

This is a question of civic and democratic infrastructure: changing the rules of the game, such that we can co-create solutions for true social equity.

Social innovation through community empowerment

I've always loved a puzzle and honed my systems thinking and problem solving muscles via the robotics team in high school and working in cutting-edge bioengineering labs as a college student. During internships at IDEO and Microsoft, I discovered the joys of “human-centered design”, and felt like I’d found a toolkit for creative, collaborative problem solving that felt both natural and powerful. I joined Google as a product manager after graduation, and found that the same methods could be applied in the context of digital product design and strategy to see impressive results.

And yet, despite the flashy promotional videos and billions of dollars of investment, these modern paragons of human-centered innovation coexist with increasing poverty in the places they operate. When it comes down to it, human-centered design (and the design practices that emerged from it) was a methodology originally conceived to meet the needs of corporations and boost the bottom line – not promote social equity.

Beyond that, these methods are frequently inaccessible to the average person, and often reject forms of creativity and innovation that are illegible to them. Meanwhile, communities across the country regularly organize themselves to meet their own needs. Silicon Valley rose alongside incredible movements of collective determination, whether the free breakfast programs of the Black Panther Party or the Latino Task Force’s health equity programs in the face of COVID-19. These forms of social innovation directly address the needs of those who are most vulnerable and in need of support.

If we’re serious about creating a world where all people can thrive, we have to find new methods and structures that shift power – in the forms of agency, capital, and otherwise – to those who have been historically disenfranchised. Humans are naturally creative, resilient beings, and when given the resources, incredibly imaginative solutions can come to bear.

Evolving from the original methods that brought me here, I see community-centered design (alternatively, codesign) is a key part of the answer to creating that thriving, equitable world. There are many definitions of this term orbiting around, but I’ll distill it to a few central principles:

• Representative participation: Assembling participation by different slices of the community, whether by race, gender, socioeconomic status, etc. to create solutions that genuinely work for everyone.

• Moving at the speed of trust: Trust – both between members of the community and the organizing entity – is essential for a deliberative process to move forward in good faith.

• Uplifting local wisdom: The people who live in a place have knowledge of their lived experience, and the stories they tell can give great insight into local problems. This local wisdom can coexist with computational methods of sensemaking (e.g., quantitative data analysis, microeconomics, etc).

• Encouraging civil dialogue: Both sensemaking and active creation require people to actually talk to each other. The process of dialogue yields insight and mutual trust / understanding.

• Community ownership of process: Shifting residents from consumers of public services who are simply consulted to being co-owners of their shared future and community resources.

For what it’s worth, this is nothing new. Many of these principles will sound familiar to community organizers who regularly engage local communities to understand their needs and advocate for new solutions. Designers of all disciplines have likely started to see this kind of language drip into the mainstream (though the extent to which mainstream practice has actually changed is meager at best).

This kind of bottom-up coordination is as difficult as it is important. We’ve seen the social infrastructure in our country devolve to the point that we rarely know our neighbors, much less how to participate in local decision-making. Bipartisan political strategists spend copious amounts of time identifying issues polarizing enough to form voting blocs, deemphasizing the importance of cross-cultural dialogue and reinforcing a “winner take all” version of politics. At its core, it is nontrivial challenge to make sense of issues that affect different people differently, and to navigate the interests, values, and goals that individuals hold dear.  In order to reinvigorate our civic infrastructure – the tools, spaces, methods, and norms that help communities coordinate themselves to a better future – we need a new and interdisciplinary approach.

We have to see ourselves as a community before coordinating like one.

LETS: A community-centered design studio

With this framing, I’m excited to announce the beginnings of a new adventure: LETS, a creative studio dedicated to democratic social innovation. (In case you’re wondering, LETS simply comes from the conjunction “let’s” – literally a call for collective action.)

I believe we should all feel a sense of collective ownership over the decisions that affect our daily lives. In its ideal form, LETS will host spaces in cities – both physically and digitally – for communities to gather and organize themselves towards solutions to urgent challenges in the places where they live. In doing so, LETS will play a role in making civic awareness and participation a part of the culture wherever it operates – a habit, rather than a biannual duty to go to the polls. There’s little reason why engaging in productive dialogue shouldn’t be as common as going to a local bookstore or coffee shop, or as joyful as a block party; we just have to put effort into figuring it out.

LETS will have an intentional emphasis on the urban community. While dispersed communities (whether interest-based, diasporic, or otherwise) are still important, where we physically conduct our lives remains what is most present in our daily lives. The streets we walk on, the services we rely on, the food we eat, the air we breathe are the true determinants of our lives. It follows that the people who share those spaces with us (as well as the public institutions that govern them) make up our primary community, and make a huge impact on our lived experience.

Ultimately, I believe that immense creativity and wisdom exists in each and every urban community. LETS asks: how might we channel these gifts into solutions – programs, policies, and other interventions – that allow every person to live comfortably regardless of background or identity?

Community Engagement Strategies

In its first iteration, LETS will operate primarily as a community engagement firm, supporting existing public-serving institutions (i.e., government and nonprofit organizations) in developing more effective strategies for engaging their residents. Many of these organizations include some form of community engagement as part of how they craft their policies and programs; however, due to lack of awareness, capacity, or expertise, they often fail to conduct this process in a way that builds trust with the community or realistically improves their conditions in the long term. With strong relationships and tested principles, LETS will serve as a creative partner and organizer, setting up the container for productive dialogue and community-driven solutions.

In practice, this could look like:

1. Facilitating civic dialogue (especially across different subcommunities or interest groups) through workshops and other events

2. Deploying digital tools that support more holistic participation by residents (such as surveys, communications tools, or even tools to illustrate consensus like Pol.is)

3. Planning end-to-end community engagement strategies, creating the scaffolding for creative collaboration and sensemaking around crucial issues

These services feel like a callback to (and an evolution of) the “human-centered design workshops” that I used to lead. They build off of my own experiences in San Francisco, whether organizing housing demands with the San Francisco Reparations effort or developing a community engagement strategy with the San Francisco Chronicle’s SF Next initiative. LETS stands on the shoulders of those who have led the way in community-driven social innovation, including CivicMakers, Neighborland, Designing Justice Designing Spaces, Greater Good Studio and others.

Community Programs

I believe in setting meaningful restrictions, and making LETS a place-based studio is one of those: for now, LETS will heavily prioritize projects based in the Bay Area. I want to ensure that everyday residents see LETS as a local fixture, not just another community engagement firm that dips in and out to “conduct research” (an extractive practice that often leads to deterioration of community relationships in the long term). Even if LETS’ impact extends beyond the Bay Area, it should always feel like a friendly, creative neighborhood institution, reinvented in every place that it expands to. Ideally, I’d love to experiment with community ownership, where revenue and decision-making is shared with local residents that engage with the studio (Nathan Schneider’s idea of “exit to community” is important here).

This introduces an additional component of our work: community programs. LETS is already exploring a few experiments here, including:

• Developing a collaborative, equity-centered design curriculum alongside local civil servants and organizers

• Hosting neighborhood assemblies to help organize neighborhood visions and priorities , and that are joyful, imaginative, and inspiring

• Participatory public art projects that build familiarity and cohesion across various identities

These projects are not just a way to build trust – crucially, they reaffirm LETS’ commitment to the place we live and operate in. I have been blessed to live the last five years of my life in a region that possesses such natural beauty, unbelievable resources, and richness of culture, and commit LETS to making that place as good as it can possibly be, guided by and through the wonderful people that live here and are committed to its wellbeing.

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Candidly speaking, it’s a little wild to write all of this out. LETS has been a dream of mine for years, ever since reading Design Justice and learning more about the idea of participatory and community-driven design. Since then, I’ve had hundreds of experiences and conversations that have further refined the principles, my conviction in the idea, and emphasized the urgency of the task at hand.

There are too many people to thank for supporting me to get to this point, but I’ll still name a few:

• Rahmin Sarabi, Deborah Tien, and Rithikha Rajamohan, who all helped me realize that I wasn’t alone in dreaming these dreams of civic infrastructure.

• Connie Moon Sehat, who let a bright-eyed new grad (me) help out with the Credibliity Coalition and continued to be an inspiring mentor and collaborator over the last five years.

• Andrew Warren, whose cool, collected leadership at Recidiviz gave me the tools to take on this challenge with an clear head.

• Aditya Bhumbla, for helping to refine my political consciousness early in the Bay, and was the first person who helped it feel like home.

• Shuya Gong, my original design inspiration and consistent co-conspirator, whose ideas continue to force me to think differently.

• My parents, who always encouraged me to be confident in my own path.

With that… let’s get to work! If you live or work in the Bay Area and want to collaborate, feel free to reach out to me at humphrey@letsstudio.org and I’ll get back to you soon. Those working on novel democratic innovations (e.g., citizens’ assemblies) in a less place-based context are also encouraged to reach out. Otherwise, if you just want to follow along, I’ll continue using this Substack to provide updates on LETS programs and projects.

Humphrey

Founder, LETS Studio

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