Today on Experience by Design, we welcome attorney and professor David Johnson from Stanford University. David's early aspiration focused on becoming an oceanographer and student of environmental sciences. While the chose a career path of law and serving as a general counsel for high tech firms, he maintained his love and care for the environment. Now he is combining both to create a toolkit for activists, focusing on how big changes can come from simple beginnings. We talk to him about his career path and how it lead to his work today. We also talk about how to design change by motivating people to do what we can. Finally we talk about how lawyers are people too.
When confronted with all of the wicked problems that we are facing as a country, global community, and species, it can all seem pretty hopeless. The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass famously said, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and never will.” When looking at the challenges of these wicked problems, we can see power and profit, and the resistance to cede that privileged position, to be a foundational challenge to making positive change. It might seem that big challenges require big complex responses. However, at the same time, great changes also can have humble beginnings.
To continue our conversations around social responsibility and designing social change, we have Professor and Attorney David Johnson from Stanford University. David has extensive experience working as a general counsel for high tech firms in Silicon Valley. But before that, he got his start as a marine biology student with the intention to do environmental and oceanographic sciences. These beginnings led him to combine his legal experiences with his love and care for the environment.
We talk with David about examples of social activism that started small but resulted in big changes. David describes the design of a type of activism starter kit, highlighting inspirational stories of social activism to inspire and direct contemporary and future generations looking to make a difference. These tools are part of his search to identify what are the elements that need to exist for a single action to trigger a movement for effective change. Design and designers can help activists improve their actions so they have the best chance of making that kind of change possible. Ultimately, when you design things well, good things can happen. And when you design social change and activism experience well, you might just save a planet.