Hello and welcome to the Digital Alchemy podcast brought to you by the International Communication Association Podcast Network. My name is Moya Bailey. I’m an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and the founder of the Digital Apothecary Lab. For this episode, I’ve invited Miya Osaki to join me in discussing Digital Alchemy and how it applies to her work in the Design for Social Innovation MFA program at the School of Visual Arts. I'm so happy to have you, Miya, here to talk on the Digital Alchemy podcast. I wanted to start with just a little bit about who you are, how you got started. And with that, I'm also asking what is your work, and what brings you joy in relation to your work?
I am so honored to be here, first of all. We had a very serendipitous, unexpected meeting. And I've just been thinking about you. So my name is Miya Osaki. I use she/her pronouns. I am in Brooklyn, New York right now. But I am a California native. I'll tell you a little bit of background on me and how I identify. I'm a designer by background, an educator-advocate of care. I am a third generation Japanese-American, which means that my parents were incarcerated during the internment of the Japanese during World War II. So I was raised with a really deep-rooted sense of justice that the world could be better. It comes with a lot of baggage and feelings to unpack in my own background. I would consider myself having a background in activism, anti-racism, human rights, feminism, and I'm also a parent and navigating that world as well. So I am concerned about the future. That is really where my work centers. I have a deep-rooted interest in health because I feel like it is integral to all life. I'm very deeply concerned about how to preserve the health of our systems. I feel that my exploration and care has been a part of that. So I've been spending a good portion of my current thoughts these days thinking about care and really teasing that apart to really understand how care shows up. What does it mean to care? I feel like I’ve been questioning if care always defaults positive. And that's really allowed me to expand some of my thinking on how do we center more care in everything that we do?
Oh, I love that. And that is such a design question because I think there's an assumption that care always lands positively. So I wonder if you could say a bit about your design background? And how design got you to care? Or do you feel like those two things are separate?
I've been a designer for over 15 years. I studied human-centered design. I feel very lucky to have been in the early days of exploring what that meant to actually do deep research in a participatory way. And that got me into healthcare. I ended up working at Johnson and Johnson's design office in 2006, to look at the role of design in health care experiences. So I probably also defaulted to care being a positive thing, just in my early days of working in health care systems. And the longer you work in systems you realize that they're not so healthy. There is a lot of care that needs to go into making a system healthy. It's related to my work in social innovation now, which is really to look at systems and understand how they work. Who's involved, who's not involved? Where are they supportive for people? And where are they lacking or even carrying along oppression and trauma?
Yes. That's just a lovely segue into this question about your work as Chair and how social innovation is part of the work that you're doing in the academy. Can you say a bit about your program and how social innovation is key to that?
Yeah, and that's also related to my feeling of joy these days. The program’s called MFA Design for Social Innovation. It's at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. It's a graduate design program in social innovation, and we practice social design. And what that means is whereas design is often thought of as looking at things or objects, we really look at the design of relationships, of thinking through the conditions around our systems, and taking a health lens to everything working in an ecosystem. Whether that's through service, through the relationships that we carry, through the communities that are upheld, our work centers around how can design be in support of that. And sometimes that means that as designers, we have to get out of the way of design. Health has always been critical in social innovation. Innovation for innovation’s sake is not the future. We really do look at the connections. Once we had often thought about the social being “social between people and humans and human systems,” but it's all the more critical now that we consider nature a part of everything that we do. So I started teaching at School of Visual Arts in 2016, and through the work there, just was realizing how important health was to every system that exists. In 2019, I was asked to become Chair, and it was right before the pandemic. So I got a department at a time when nothing was the same. And in a way, that was a real gift. I really feel like it allowed me to step back from my role as Chair –take all the thoughts that I had of what it meant to be Chair and said, “Let's think about what's important right now,” because other things started to come into focus: how we did this work. How is design education supporting practitioners as they finish their degrees? Where were the students coming from? How do we address things like burnout and connections within our own department? For better or for worse, taking on a department during the pandemic was life-changing for me. It's brought me so many possibilities and impossibilities that has just opened up my world.
Oh, I love that. It has me thinking about healthy systems, like what it takes to have a healthy system and that nature always gets abstracted as something outside of us or outside of the city, even though we're all in nature. One of my comrades was saying this at American Studies, too. How do we deal with the fact that all of these systems perhaps need some attending to? And with that in mind, I'm thinking about the digital media and the internet as a space of care, and how that connects to how you're thinking through what systems could need some support in the health that they're creating (and the digital very much being one of those). I have this adage that when I'm thinking about Digital Alchemy, I'm thinking of the ways that black women and women of color transform everyday digital media into valuable social justice, media magic, by turning scraps into something precious. And I'm wondering if you see Digital Alchemy, or the digital as one of these systems that has been useful to you in terms of your own work, or even in how the people who are in your program are thinking about where they should be putting their energy as it relates to design?
I love what you're doing, first of all. It's so critical that we hear different stories, new stories, seeing our history showing up in different ways. And I do think that the digital space has allowed us to access and have spaces that previously were not seen or not heard. So I am a technology lover, but I'm also a pretty deep skeptic. I would have to say, it might be my age, my background. One example, my students laughed because I told them that when I was in graduate school, Wikipedia was new, and we didn't think it was going to last. There's a lot of critique about would this thing actually be able to survive. I loved it at the time. This is a space that is so unique, so collaborative, so open yet also interesting ways of being able to look at information and build community. So my love-hate relationship with social media has been that there aren't enough spaces. If we think about a system, a system needs a lot of places to go and a lot of places to thrive. If things aren't working, a system relies on other channels. A river is a great example of this. If a river is blocked, water will find another way around it. I'm concerned that the way that digital is structured right now that we haven't allowed for enough openness, transparency, and agency within these systems. I think we feel like we might have some agency, but really, it is very constraining. There's a lot of literature around how technology has created more individualism. Again, it's a system that we've created that's creating these ideas. An example, in my own background, I didn't start off as a designer. My early days, I was in the music business at a time when digital was just coming up. Everyone was shocked. People thought it was the end of the music industry as we knew it, and I came from a very underground independent music scene where everything was real DIY and pre-internet. I think that what happened were players came up in the music business that weren't content creators, right? They were systems that were outside of the music industry that didn't benefit the musicians. Musicians weren’t included in a lot of those discussions, and it just washed over the industry. And I hope things have changed. But still, we’re still left with who owns the music, who benefits from the music. So something as universal as music: really looking at it from that digital lens, I think we're in a really different place now. Similarly, I ask my students about Web3, and I'm like, “Is this the internet that we really want?” If we think about the future environment of digital, what kind of future do you want? What kind of future are we laying groundwork for the next generations?
I feel like that's part of why we need to question and speak back to the digital, maybe even your point that technology like social media has made us more individualistic than even the creator's intended. The idea was that you're creating something that would be networked and connected. But individualism is very much on the rise. Do you feel like there are spaces of intervention? And do you see your program perhaps being some place where students are at least getting to think through some of these ways that we can unblock the river or create more space for things to flow?
I hope so. I know that these questions are so important to have, and these conversations are really important to hold around ethics, power, accountability, and even as simple as data, right? Data is so important to social innovation. We need to know whether or not we're making the difference that we imagined. But the data can also not be good. The sources are questionable. Who's involved with that data? Where's it coming from? Whose data is it? These are really important questions for us to look at critically and engage with because we've gotten to this stage now where it is everywhere. When I was doing some of my early work in research, everyone was very skeptical about releasing their data and were very worried about privacy and security of data. I've just seen a shift over the last year or two years, probably because we all went online. But a real release of, “Well, it's already out there. There's not much we can do about it. I don't know, I hope I'm going to be okay.” And that makes me so nervous for the future that we're hoping we're going to be okay. So I do think it's a place for design to at least share in some of those conversations.
For sure. I think we're in a similar place. And the question that is on my heart is where do we put our energy at this moment? There have been reports recently that humans have 50 years of potable water left, the way that we're doing things. There's so many particular challenges that we're facing, and design definitely seems like an important way for us to reimagine what this future could be. So I'm asking you, how do you prioritize where you put your energy as you are working towards helping us get to the world that you want–we want–that is obviously not what we're existing in now?
I think that there are so many places where we can easily get distracted, myself included. I'm very much a person that likes to hold many things in my head at once. I have decided I wanted to dedicate towards health more broadly. So not just in our healthcare systems, but interesting places, and maybe unexpected places that care shows up: unpaid labor, youth workers, LGBTQ+ communities, people of color, indigenous practices. I just think that there's people doing really good work. I feel very lucky in my department because we get to access incredible people doing innovation in all corners of the world, big and small. I feel like, at a point, social innovation was growing in scope, and everyone was talking about global perspectives. How is this scalable, and the return to a moment where we could think about communities and connection, which I think is one of the things that came out of the pandemic, allowing us to prioritize the care of even the closest person next to you. Supporting the people in our small networks to build community when we didn't have community, just showed a different dimension. And so we got very interested in our department at Design for Social Innovation to think about community. We had some great practitioners who came in and helped us understand within design communities, other communities that were doing work (healing justice, restorative justice, liberatory design) that there were different ways of doing and holding this work. I always asked my students, “How is this going to impact the health of a person, a system, an environment? What are the capacities of care that are in your work so that we can really just keep that in our focus?” Because without that, we're at risk of letting go of a lot of things. I love Adrienne Marie Brown’s quote, “There's a million paths, and many of them are transformative for the future.” I feel like I'm a pathway builder. I love the idea of world building. But these days, I just feel like if we can create some more paths forward, alternative systems, different ways of doing and connecting the work together, I think that's where my focus has been.
Oh, I love that. I think it's so helpful to re-orient ourselves to think about pathways as opposed to world building.
Both are important.
Yeah. But I think it's about scale. And when you were talking about community and thinking too about just what can we do at the scale of community, and the people who are next to us is a much more achievable scale than at the level of the nation-state, the level of a city. There are things that are so much more possible with the intimate communities that we sometimes take for granted when we're thinking about those pathways forward.
Yeah, and I think we've kind of forgotten how powerful community can be and community builders knew this, that so much happens at the community level. With digital too, I think it's interesting to think about more things happening. There was so much talk about big data at one point, but where are the micro communities? I think that there's a way for us to stay connected more broadly, while also maintaining that connection.
Absolutely. So again, both the local and the global, but maintaining the connection in that balance. Is there anything else that you want to add or say?
I was curious, actually, for you and the podcast, and where are you going to go with the podcast and your work?
I was asked by the International Communication Association to do the podcast and was really excited to bring in people outside of communication because I feel a little bit like an interloper. I joined Northwestern’s communication faculty a year and some change ago. As someone trained in women, gender, and sexuality studies and digital humanities, communication wasn’t my background–so wanting to build and bring into communication conversations that are important to me and how digital alchemy as a practice is something that I think could be useful to communication scholars. That's how I was approaching the podcast. A lot of the people that I talk to aren't squarely in communication, which is actually reflective of my department. A lot of the people who are in the department don't have a communication background, but that frame is capacious enough for us all to find space in the academy under that umbrella.
Yeah, I love that you've just made a space where there was energy and thinking, and I love that possibility. I hope that moving forward there's more of these. I dream of having a network of these amazing people that are doing this work. I've connected with ice cream makers, rooftop farmers, designers, and disabled advocates. It's amazing to me that we have connections to each other as we start to explore that. I'm starting to see more stuff arise in more places, and that's so heartening.
It is. It's bubbling up. I feel like things are coming to the surface. It's been such a pleasure speaking with you, and I am so grateful. Digital Alchemy is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. This series is sponsored by The School of Communication at Northwestern University. Our producer is Dominic Bonelli. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Matt Oakley. Please check the show notes in the episode description to learn more about me, my guests, and Digital Alchemy overall. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks so much for listening.
