About Me
I am a designer, researcher, educator, and leadership coach who focuses on participatory, community-oriented design and imagining futures for racial justice.
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I started out as a professional design researcher, moving between Tech companies like Yahoo, and consulting firms like IDEO. When I was laid-off from a start-up in 2013, I started my own strategic research firm called Winnow.
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But when I had a chance to think about what I really wanted to be doing, I realized I wanted to go back to school to study design + social justice. I completed my doctoral studies in 2023, developing Social Design Dreaming as a tool for amplifying the long-term visions of racial justice projects.
What I do
Design Roles
Designing, with its skills for turning amorphous, ambitious concepts into material forms that can be shared, iterated, diverged, and expanded, offers justice advocates new methods, tools and opportunities to describe their visions for a better world.
Coaching is like a secret super-power for leaders. I create a bi-weekly space for designers to pause, reflect, and plan. Together we set new strategies to get to where they dream of going.
Strategic research, co-design, and prototyping approaches that connect to the paths of people, in context, to deliver new perspectives on current and future experiences.
Publications
1 / Framework for prefiguring future visions
Designing Equitable Worlds: Six Orientations to Evoke the Future
by Hillary Carey
Design Issues, Summer 2024
2 / Barriers to long-term visioning
by Hillary Carey & Alexandra To
Journal of Futures Studies, Vol. 28 No. 3 March 2024
3 / Visioning for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Radically hopeful visions:
Futuring for institutional anti-racism work
by Jessica Meharry & Hillary Carey
Futures Journal, Volume 156, February 2024
4 / Vision Framework for Design Leaders
Communicating Visions for Design:
the STOVE Framework
By Hillary Carey & Mia Blume
DMI:Review, 05 June 2023