Proposal: the establishment of an intersectional body of experts in design-thinking and inclusivity to monitor and report on local and global policies and processes related to public services.

The globe has human rights watchdog organizations and assessment bodies, but what about when it comes to evaluating the design of policy which affects the everyday lives of people in a nation or across the globe?

Many existing national, regional, and global policies and resulting procedures have been proposed and designed by a body or participants not representative of the varied populations they are parts of.

As a result certain policies are the colonial imposition of dominant nations unto others, or even of dominant majority groups within a nation unto minority groups. Resulting procedural design is not representative and not intersectional.

This is a proposal to create ethical and socially inclusive design watchdogs nationally and internationally, similarly to the human rights monitoring organizations currently established around the globe (e.g. Human Rights Watch).

The purpose is to use principles and approaches rooted in design thinking (relevant to both physical and digital spheres, i.e. UX design), to ensure that social systems are designed for gender and intersectional equality and accessibility.

Recent US primary elections can be drawn upon to illustrate an example of how such a body could operate. New voting systems were introduced that resulted in / contributed to minority marginalization and limited people’s access to vote, and thus hampered the functioning of the United States as a proper democracy. In other words, the voting procedure design was not favourable for the fair democratic participation of all. For example one obstacle some women as primary caregivers may face when the time to vote rolls around is that they may not be able to spend long hours in line away from those they are caring for (or away from their jobs) and thus they do not vote at all and their voice is not fairly represented in the results. Poorly designed machines or apps that are not sufficiently user tested and which demonstrate faults during the actual process pose another example of poorly executed public process design. Public systems need to be designed with an intersectional accessibility and usability approach in mind.

Hence, an international, intersectional, feminist body of design and social inclusivity experts (with fair representation of women, LGBTQ+, and minorities), could be drawn upon to evaluate if a given public process or structure is fair and equitable in design.