What do you do after you watch a video of a police officer shooting a civilian?

How do you process your outrage, confusion, and grief?

Could we use these energies creatively, to design a future in which such a shooting never occurs?

After a summer of conspicuous police violence and mass protest, the conversation around law enforcement reform has reached a fever pitch. Body-worn cameras (BWCs) have been hailed as an antidote to bouts of police brutality. But initiatives have failed to address the critical human factors issues preventing greater BWC adoption, and the underlying sociocultural and racial issues involved in community-police relations. Before we move forward, we have to look deeper

What would it be like to reimagine how communities and law enforcement interact? Can we distill principles of peaceful protest, community engagement, and law enforcement accountability that result in safety for citizens and police officers? How can we design a future in which community and police meetings end in not harm but harmony?

In this 90-minute talk, we’ll bring together theory and practices of human factors engineering, design thinking, strategic foresight, and community organizing to collaboratively answer these questions. We’ll review the design takeaways from a Bentley User Experience Center consulting project with a leading BWC manufacturer, and discuss learnings from police officer interviews and dialogue in community forums. We’ll draw upon the frameworks of the futures field in a design workshop, and collectively build practices of intervention and safekeeping that we can bring back into our respective communities and organizations.

Join World Usability Day founder Elizabeth Rosenzweig, experience design strategist Yo Deshpande, and foresight strategist Madebo Fatunde to explore how we can collectively shift the dynamics of community and police relationships with creative action.

Yo Deshpande is a design consultant and experience strategist based in Boston, focused on experience design that supports underserved communities. He’s currently working with the Massachusetts Court System to improve experiences for litigants and attorneys, developing an interfaith dialogue program with Bentley University, and researching prison architecture to inform rehabilitative design. Yo previously lived at Buddhist monasteries and retreat centers abroad, where he trained in meditation and helped run silent meditation retreat courses. He’s a Masters candidate in the Human Factors in Information Design program at Bentley University, and holds a Bachelor of Arts from George Washington University.

Madebo Fatunde is a foresight strategist and a writer, building a practice at the intersection of arts, technology, and culture. His passion is using storytelling about the future to empower better decisions today. Some current projects of his include “The Blackchain”, a speculative future which imagines a world around a Pan-African blockchain network, and working to weave a foresight network for the continent and its diasporas at The Institute for African Futures. He is a member of the Foresight Practice Group at Autodesk and a founding member of The Guild of Future Architects. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

Usable Angst: A UXworkshop on the futures of community-police interaction