Dr. Smiti Nathan

Transcript

Smiti: Welcome to Curiosity Meets the Past, a podcast for curious minds who love learning about the past. I’m Dr. Smiti Nathan, and I’m an archeologist and your host. In this episode, I’m speaking with Shanice Webb, a good friend and human-centered designer. She creates learning experiences to help people design lives and work.

That feel aligned with who they wanna be and the futures they wanna create. Shanice is a lecturer at Stanford University and she runs her own business rooted in creativity, curiosity, and intentionality. If you’ve ever wondered how engaging with our past, whether ancestral, personal or collective, can help us imagine and build more thoughtful futures, you’re in for a great conversation.

Shanice: The past plays such a huge and significant role when it comes to designing futures. Specifically, my work is centered around designing the futures of our own human experience. So navigating the past and taking the time to empathize with the past is so valuable to the human experience that you design for yourself.

Now, the past can be taken in a variety of different ways depending on. What you believe in. And so thinking about our own human-centered design, the past could be our childhood past, it could be our experiences and relationships with our parents and our peers, and our education. The past can also be ancestral thinking about generationally.

Who you come from and who your people are. The past can even be as woowoo as who you were in your past life, your past self, and starting with the past. When it comes to creating the future, the life that you really want for yourself helps you truly understand where you might wanna go in the future. It allows you to interrogate the stories you tell yourself about what is possible given the past experiences that you’ve had, either yourself or ancestrally or like woo woo astrologically or whatever you really believe in, but.

The past is, is so important in shaping where we go in the future, and it really shapes the stories we tell ourselves.

Smiti: Thank you for that. And you are a human-centered designer, and one of the methods that human-centered designers use is design thinking. And for listeners who might not be as familiar with design thinking, can you give us a quick crash course so we’re all up to speed?

Shanice: Yeah, so design thinking actually is a framework that’s traditionally used in product design where designers use to create better products, services, and experiences out there in the world. It can be applied to our own personal experience. It could be applied to systemic challenges.

It could be applied to any big challenges happening in the world. The reason why it’s called human-centered design is because it takes the human experience first. So the process starts with empathy, and then once you empathize with your human experience or the experiences for the people in which you wanna create or design something better for once you empathize, once you start with the human first, the next step is to define you.

Get really clear on the challenge and opportunity after taking a moment to pause and reflect. And to focus on where you wanna go in the future. Defining is so important after you empathize, because the way that you choose to see the challenges and opportunities in front of you, it’s gonna dictate the kinds of ideas and solutions that you bring to bear.

And then once you clearly define what you’re designing for, then you ideate. You come up with lots of wild ideas, you defer judgment. You go for volume, you collaborate with other people to come up with as many possibilities as possible. Design thinking has an essence of diverging before you converge. So we go broad first, and then we narrow in and we take some of those ideas that we come up with and we prototype them.

For me, that’s the key in design thinking and human-centered design is. Running these really small prototypes to test out the ideas that you come up with and be willing to take some action. The last thing to do is to test and to really honor those prototypes and notice if you need to iterate. If you need to go back to empathy and understand the challenge a little bit more, if you need to collaborate and come up with more ideas.

Testing really allows you to see where you are in your design thinking or human-centered design process. So it’s an iterative process. It’s very playful. And when you move through your life or what you wanna create or design for yourself in the future of empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and then testing, it allows you to come up with more innovation and more ideas for the things that you might begin to design and create within your life.

Smiti: Oh my gosh. Thank you for that. And as you were speaking, it just really reminded me of some of the processes that we do use in archaeology, including the scientific method, and you also work with scholars, creatives, and communities navigating big transitions.

In your experience. When people start seriously thinking about designing their futures, how often does their relationship with the past, whether it’s personal or collective, or however else they might define the past, how often does that come into the process?

Shanice: I mean, I’m sure you as an archaeologist know, like history repeats itself, so understanding where we have been as a society, where we have been as our own human experience is the starting point of understanding the stories that we tell ourselves around what we even think is possible. So it’s always a part of the conversation. It’s where I like to start the conversation and it plays such an important role in what we even think that we can create.

Smiti: So do you mind sharing an example from your own life where engaging with the past, however you choose to define that, shaped how you approached your future?

Yeah.

Shanice: So I could tell you I’m not an astrological girly by any means, but I do dabble a little bit and I am extremely woo woo. I used to live in New Orleans for quite a long time, and if you know anything about New Orleans, it’s the place where they say that Voodoo was created and there’s a lot of like psychics and a lot of really great energy around connecting with ancestral past and all the things.

So throughout my time there, I often found myself in experiences where there were psychics, and so I’ve never actually sought out a psychic, but one has always manifested in my life and in my journey and in my most, uh, recent reading. Um, a wonderful practitioner shared with me that in a past life that I was a warrior.

And from the moment that she told me that the way that I showed up. In my life shifted so significantly because the story that I tell the story that’s possible around if I used to be a warrior in a past life, like warriors are strong, warriors are willing to go into the battle. They have fear, but they also have the courage to get through the battle.

And so throughout my life journey. Taking a moment to empathize with that story of like you were a warrior in your past life, just helps me know that whatever I wanna design or create for my future, or for the future of my son or the future for my communities or the community that I live in currently, that I’m a warrior.

I’m capable of making change. I’m capable of doing things that are courageous. I’m capable of being strong. I’m capable of going against the grain. And so. That experience of being told a new story of who I was in a past completely shifted how I show up currently, and it makes me feel more empowered to go after the things that I wanna design for myself and my own human experience.

Smiti: So thank you for sharing that. And I know in the past, in our own personal conversations, we’ve talked about this idea of knowing where you came from or not knowing where you came from and how that factors into the narrative you tell yourself. Yeah. Do you mind sharing a bit more about that?

Shanice: Yeah. Like this idea, a lot of people say like connection to the ancestors. I never truly have been able to experience that because I don’t know exactly who my ancestors are. So this idea of not having any ancestral connection or being able to know where my lineage comes from until I was told that I was a warrior, it impacted what I believe that was actually possible for myself as a black woman, because generationally what I do know is my grandmother and my great-grandmother, and they were women who were products of their time and their environment who they didn’t work and they depended on their husbands and they had lots of babies and all the things and because that’s all I knew of my ancestry. I thought that that also had to be my life, that like I wasn’t gonna work and I was just gonna get married and have babies. And being able to learn more about the possibilities and learning that in past lives, not even like ancestral ancestrally, but like going beyond realms that I was a warrior.

That just changes the way that I even think about my grandmother. Like she was a warrior. She did what she could in the time, like she didn’t have the same possibilities. She didn’t have the same opportunities as I have. That was her being a warrior in that time. So it also helped me reframe how I see the ancestors that I do know that I do see that. I do know their stories, but the story that I, that I did know was hindering me. It was holding me back from. Thinking that I could be anything greater than what my, my mom and her mom and her mom’s mom have been. And, and I mean greater in terms of like making a huge impact on my community, not just my core family.

And so until I was told a new narrative, until I was told the narrative that you’re, you’re a warrior, and that you’re strong and that you’re brave. ’cause the stories that we tell ourselves. And the stories that are told to us about where we come from, they really do shape the futures that we create for ourselves.

Smiti: We hear you, and thank you so much for sharing that, especially so vulnerably and based on our interactions I love that, you know, we go about thinking about the past in very different ways, but then they also converge and align. And one of those mindsets that I think we both share is curiosity. Literally in the name of the podcast or in the name of the podcast. And I’m curious, how do you see curiosity playing a role when people start engaging with your past?

Shanice: So when I think about like the stories that are told in the history book, they’re not everybody’s stories. It’s not how everybody experienced it.

So if we’re able to really get curious about the past and not just think about the face value of what is told in the history book or the news headlines or what we see on social media, but truly get curious about the individual lived experiences that are happening during that time, it will allow us to see that no matter what’s happening in the world, we can shape our experience and how we, how we show up and thinking about the agency that we do have, even when chaos and ambiguity is happening in the world.

But if we just take the story for face value, we might not do anything different. We might not think that we have power or that everyone’s experience has to look a certain way. Making assumptions about an experience in the past is only gonna harm yourself. Get the data, get the information. Be curious.

Ask the questions because it’ll open up so many more possibilities that you would have never seen. So curiosity is the number one mindset to explore when it goes to the past and how it might connect to the future that you wanna create for yourself.

Smiti: Thank you so much for sharing that. And you know, as you were speaking, I was thinking in my own work as an archaeologist, I found that in engaging with the past, for me, it often means unlearning old narratives, rediscovering overlooked stories, and just this kind of iterative process of learning, unlearning, relearning. And in your experience, does engaging with the past sometimes involve a similar process of unlearning or rediscovery? And if so, how do you help people navigate that?

Shanice: Unlearning is actually removing something like a perspective or a belief that you once held and replacing that with something completely different.

You actually have to let go of who you used to be or what you used to believe, and so I teach people how to begin to unlearn just through this idea of reframing. Taking one idea, one concept, and looking at it not through one different lens or one different perspective, but many different lenses and many different perspectives sometimes.

It’s helpful to assign people different personas and look at it through actual different lived experiences to really begin to unlearn. Like, how would a baby think about that? How would a grandma think about that and how would someone who had a million dollars think about that? If you’re able to truly reframe and think about things through the perspective of another person who has a different lived experience than you do, you’re able to really begin to unlearn your own narratives, your own beliefs, and how they’re shaped by your own lived experience.

And there are many realities that can be happening at the same time too. So noticing that your reality isn’t the only reality and that there are many other realities that you could try on or consider, can help you really begin to unlearn and let go of some of the beliefs that you might have that are holding you back.

Smiti: Thanks for sharing that. And as you were speaking, I was just getting curious and thinking, has there been anything you’ve learned about the past, however you choose to define it, that you found to be quite inspiring as you’ve been designing futures or helping people design their futures?

Shanice: Just to, to answer that question a hundred percent authentically, when I think about the past, especially as being a black woman, the thing that inspires me the most is the movement out of slavery for black people collectively. And so to think about people like Harriet Tubman and about people like Martin Luther King Jr. And the people who really fought for black equality, it is inspiring to me to know that there were people who are willing to risk their lives so that future generations could have rights, could read, could vote, could make money, like, so that they were not the commodity. Yeah. So that’s so inspiring, but it also pushes me to, to do something too. Which is why I do the work that I do and who I do it with because there are people who have really fought the good fight for me to have the privilege and the freedoms that I have right now, and I feel like I owe that to them.

So I feel inspired to do this work. And to specifically do this work with marginalized communities, people of color, black people, people who have been counted out, people whose past may not feel inspiring, you know? But that doesn’t mean that we can’t create what we want for ourselves in the future. We can’t speak up, we can’t design, we can’t be intentional.

And that’s what my work in human-centered design is all about, is really keeping the human centered and creating the human experiences that we want for ourselves despite our past. Knowing our pasts are important and understanding them and learning the stories and then unlearning the stories and creating new stories is really important.

It’s a, it’s a huge part of the process, but. Despite the past, we can still create the lives that we really want for ourselves, or the futures that we want, or the society that we want, and the black movement movement from slavery to segregation to where we are now and knowing that this is the best time to be alive as a black person, and it’s still kind of shitty.

Just lets me know there’s so much more work that needs to be done and I’m happy to do it.

Smiti: Gotcha. So I’m wondering how do you encourage people to use the past or engage with the past, especially if they might have complex feelings towards the past for any number of reasons. How do you get them to engage with the past as a starting point rather than a stopping point when imagining new futures?

Shanice: I mean, one thing about facilitating experiences, people kind of trust you in this space, and so it’s never hard or pulling anybody’s arm to get them to engage with the past. It’s about how you approach it. How I get people to engage is through things like Play-Doh and all Legos and doodling and really beginning to build it out or to use visualization or visual thinking to really bring that past to life.

I just ran a session recently and the first thing I had people do is use Play-Doh to represent where they’re from. So they had one minute to use Play-Doh to build some kind of shape or object or whatever that represents where they’re from. Inviting people to engage in a very playful way, I think invites them to show up differently in that play as well.

It’s such a scrappy, more fun way to approach the past. I think sometimes I know when I think about the past, I think about like sitting down and talking to my therapist, or I think about like long hours journaling in my notebook. But I think that has its time in place and it really can be helpful for people.

But very rarely do we get to play with our past. And I really invite people to play with their past.

Smiti: I love that. And as an archaeologist, that’s the way I think about the past. You’re creating material culture, you’re creating artifacts through the Play-Doh, and that’s, that’s my bread and butter in all honesty.

Yeah. So if, if we think about designing futures as part of a bigger human story, how might engaging with the past help us imagine and build what’s next?

Shanice: So when it comes to design the futures, understanding how it’s been done before, what people have done before is a really great way to iterate off of what has already been created.

I think in my space I get to work with a lot of like entrepreneurs and people who wanna create things that never existed before. And I always share with my students that a lot of us are trying to be revolutionary, but what we really need to be focusing on, and most of the most amazing companies, organizations, and products and all those things, are actually evolutionary.

They’re an evolution of something that has happened or has been created or have been done in the past, and you. Create something new by putting your own unique spin to it, by bringing in your personality. And so understanding what people have done in the past can help you be evolutionary in your life and your experience.

We don’t all have to be reinventing the wheel or be revolutionizing the world, but understanding the past and taking small iterative evolution steps from the past can help us truly build a future that feels in alignment with who we are, who we wanna be as a society, and interrogating those pasts as well, and questioning everything about the past experiences that we have had can really help us design futures that solving real challenges and helping real people along the way and taking the time to pause and think about like, what are we even doing? And I think that’s what exploring the past is when creating and designing the future to pause. It’s a moment to reflect before you start building forward.

Smiti: And I’m wondering, what do you hope listeners realize about their own power to shape their futures thoughtfully?

Shanice: Well, one, it starts with your past and interrogating your past, because a lot of times what we think that we can design for ourselves or for the world that we want to see is dictated by the narratives that we tell ourselves about the things that we think are possible or impossible. So if we can stop and interrogate and think about the past, where did that story come from?

Is it true? Does it serve me, I think is the very first and most important step in creating new narratives and creating the life in the world that we really wanna see out there in the future.

Smiti: One of the biggest takeaways from this conversation is that engaging with the past doesn’t have to weigh us down.It can actually give us the insight and agency to shape more intentional and aligned futures.

If you’d like to learn more about Shanice’s work, you can check her out on LinkedIn. You’ll find a link in our show notes along with a link to a full transcript of this episode, and if you’re curious to dig a little deeper and learn Shanice’s number one tip for intentionally cultivating your sense of play.

She shares that in a Patreon exclusive video. Our Patreon is free to join and gives you access to all of our bonus content. Now, if you’re able to support the podcast monetarily, we’d of course appreciate that too.

Thanks so much for listening and cultivating your curiosity with us. We’ll see you soon.

Credits

Shanice Webb: Guest

Noor Hanania: Lead Video Editor, Theme Music Creator

Laura Riveiro: Podcast Cover Art Creator

Smiti Nathan: Host, Support Video Editor

Patreon Supporters

Thank you to our paid Patreon members for supporting the creation of this episode:

Nancy Fulton, James D., Giancarlo Annese, Thomas Martin, Stuart A. Griffin

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