Legacy
2020 was a year of learning for many of us.
A few months into our Railyard experience, we encountered some valuable learning moments with our clients. These moments made us reflect individually and collectively on some of our own assumptions, biases, powers, and privileges and how they had influenced the work we were putting out into the world. We also identified some gaps in our design process where we could have exercised the principles of justice, equity, diversity, decolonization and inclusivity.
As a part of our 2020 cohort’s legacy, we decided to share some of the gaps that we encountered, not to scare future Yardies about what could go wrong, but to encourage them that the work they’ll do can and will create a positive impact if they commit to intentional reflection.
We didn’t consider what kind of symbolic connotations our logo could have.
There was a lack of representation from the Black and Indigenous communities in the personas we created.
The tagline we selected was too similar to an important cultural movement.
JEDDI
We came together as a team to figure out how to learn from these experiences and help future Yardies & the Dossier team be more mindful of their choices while going through the design process.
After some internal discussion, we decided to focus our legacy project on creating a JEDDI-focused design framework and resource hub for approaching both internal and client facing work. Our intention was to create mindful check-in opportunities and ongoing conversations regarding JEDDI based off of our experiences internally as a team, with the Dossier team, and with our clients.
Since 2020, Dossier and Railyard have made a commitment to do work that centres the principles of justice, equity, diversity, decolonization and inclusivity. We are committed to intentionally reflecting on our actions regarding both how we work, and the work that we create. We also acknowledge that this is a learning journey. We’re all at different stages and that’s ok. What’s important is that we learn how to approach our work with greater empathy and grow our understanding of how the work we produce impacts others.
