Hi! My name is Jula Sanders, designer and sociologist

Professsional identity
The driving force behind my work as both a designer and a sociologist has always been: how can I make the world we live in more just and equitable?

My curiosity leads me further into the topic of complex societal issues: who faces them? Who gets to engage with them, and what might that mean for those who don’t? Working from sociological theories of meaning-making (ethnomethodology and socio-technical imaginaries), I am specifically interested in the interplay of macro- and micro constructions of reailty: the way people might imagine their reality and the specific actions and practices through which this happens. I use these insights and translate them into experiences that spark collective imagination and make people think beyond boundaries through my design.

Key to this is incorporating different stakeholder perspectives, while at the same time being critical of where the power lies within a certain societal challenge. In a design team, I prioritize being empathetic and proactive in engaging with all stakeholders and participants, involving them throughout the process by using methods such as co-creation and collective brainstorming. To translate this into a working design, I use my analytical skills in qualitative research and my designerly intuition.

I aim for my design to help generate more justice and equality by opening the floor to a wide variety of stories in a playful way. An important part of my design approach is experimenting with different prototypes through a process of making, while constantly reflecting and adjusting whenever necessary. During this process I pay extra attention to the inherent design qualitities I experience through this embodied way of making to create an experience inherent to the artefact. To me, design is not necessarily the answer to societal challenges, but more so something that can help us to envision other, more desired realities. Therefore, I leverage design as a tool to guide conversations and help people build narratives for better futures.

Vision on design

Increasingly many complex societal issues are on the rise. These issues, such as the climate crisis, housing crisis and the recent rise of right-wing politics all have the power to generate more injustice in this world (Adger et al., 2006; Nasrabadi et al., 2024 Meade, 2024). Designers should strive to counter these developments and help steer the world to a more equitable world that is beneficial for all people. However, the origin of these issues is complex and multi-faceted, and therefore I believe that designers should not tackle these issues on their own. Experts such as social scientists, activists, people with lived experience, artists and journalists among others have been working on these societal issues decades before design even dipped its toes into the social world in recent years (Chen et al., 2015). Therefore, I think designers should create in synergy with these experts to work for more social justice and equity within this world.

A quality that designers have that is unique is to render visible and tangible what is at stake, since design forces us to be concrete. This is how I envision what Manzini describes as “design giving form to a changing world” (Manzini, 1994, p.43): materializing alternative realities through design to better understand and research how we might imagine our future. Socio-technical imaginaries, and who gets to formulate them, are crucial to shaping policy and beliefs (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015). This means that imaginaries also have the power to drive transformation.

The power of good design therefore lies in its aesthetic invitation for the (re-)imagination of our society in a more equal and just way.

Still, we must remember that as designers, we are never neutral. In a way, designing for a better world is a constant imaginative negotiation of what a “better world” might be. Through an understanding of both the larger system and its stakeholders, as well as specific practices, designers can play a crucial role in shining light on the negotiation of alternative narrative through sparking imagination in a playful way.

My work
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