I’ve been using a food analogy  in the design classes that I’ve been teaching for several years: I ask my students, “Can we cook up change?” What if making a change that mattered was as easy as mastering ingredients and combining them the right way? What if we could just open our pantry, mix up some ingredients, and make some change? Samin Nosrat’s cookbook, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat opens with the sentence, “Anyone can cook and make it delicious.” I’ve been a product designer and design educator for more than 20 years, and that’s how I feel about design and social change. Everyone can do this and make it good.

Here are three places to start cooking up change:

1. KNOW YOUR POSITIONALITY

If I give you flour and water and ask you to make something by adding a few more ingredients, chances are that what you make will be different from what I would make. I am from Trinidad and Tobago, and with those base ingredients I might make either “bake,” a type of bread with no yeast, or boiled dumplings. Depending on where you are from or the ingredients that you have on hand, you might make pizza, festival, chapatis, mandazis, sonhos, or even glue. You probably wouldn’t say another person has made the wrong thing just because they make something different from you; intuitively you know that different people will make different things with flour and water. You might even be curious to know what other people will make, because you understand that your identity, your worldview, and past experiences—in other words, your positionality—will affect how you use the ingredients you have.

Declaring your positionality is a reflective practice of thinking about who you are, your identities, your social position, and how these affect your work. I learned the importance of declaring one’s positionality while doing research as a graduate student. While there are some areas of research that demand that you be objective and not bring your history and identity into the work you are doing, other areas of research recognize that this is impossible and invite you to reflect on who you are while you do the research. Qualitative researchers (that is, researchers who collect data using qualitative methods like interviews and observation) often create a positionality statement so that the person who reads the research can understand who made it and how their biases might show up.

We don’t need to hide our identities from our work. Who we are shows up in everything we do, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. When we embrace our identities, our work becomes much richer as we bring these identities in. Who are you? Think about the diversity that is represented within you. Push back against the world that asks you to fit in, and reflect on all the complexity that has made you.

Writing a positionality statement can help us to see our complexity.

Reflecting on your positionality can help you see your own agendas and possible biases. It can help you reflect on elements of your identity that you don’t always see. This statement can help guide the work that you do. Come back to your positionality statement and reflect on it from time to time. Your positionality is also not fixed. It will change over time, as you age, as your abilities change, as your status changes. These changes will also impact the way you understand the world.

2. RAISE YOUR CRITICAL AWARENESS

Before I begin to cook, I clear a space in my kitchen. Sometimes I put on an apron. Often I open my fridge. I think about the ingredients in my kitchen or pantry. Which fruits and vegetables are about to spoil and need to be used? If I’m going to cook meat, is it thawed? Even though I’m not quite ready to cook, I am preparing myself and my kitchen for the work that is about to happen. This is a wonderful metaphor for how to prepare yourself to do work that creates change. In creating change, you must first take a look around and ask: Where is change needed? What are the issues? Who’s impacted? What’s the environment? In short, you must build critical awareness.

Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator whose philosophies have deeply informed my way of thinking. From reading Freire, I learned that the oppressions we face do not define us. Through critical reflection we can first learn to see that oppression, then choose to take individual and collective actions against systemic injustices. Critical awareness makes us ask questions about why things are the way they are and how we can make them different. The process of building this critical awareness involves seeing, listening, and asking questions. It requires you to be in dialogue with the people and the world around you.

Building critical awareness will make you see the world with different eyes and not take things at face value. It makes you see more clearly where change is needed. You will also see that you have agency and can play a role in changing the circumstances.

Change is constant, which means what we want and need also changes. When we have a critical awareness, we can learn to shift our goals so they are always working for change.

3. RECOGNIZE OPPRESSION

If building a critical awareness is like prepping to cook—putting on your apron and assessing your ingredients—then recognizing oppression is like the first step in the recipe. For me, that first step for all my savory dishes is always chopping onions and garlic—the base ingredients—even if I don’t know exactly what I want to cook. As I chop the onions and garlic, I reflect on the food I am about to make. In designing change, you start by understanding oppression, even if you don’t yet know what change you’re working toward. This is where cooking up change begins: When you can see the forces that oppress, you can see how to make change.

The word oppression comes from the Latin word opprimere, which means to force down, weigh down, or suffocate. These are apt images for the oppressive forces that weigh down people and groups in society and prevent them from thriving. When you have developed the stance of critical awareness, you can then refine your skills to see where people (including yourself) are being pushed down and prevented from thriving. You can learn to see oppression more clearly.

Learning to see oppression humanizes and liberates us. And since our positionality changes throughout our lives, we also need to learn to see oppression so we don’t step into the role of oppressors. For example, when people move into the middle classes, they sometimes lose sight of the oppressive forces that kept back the class they just left. So the ability to see oppression humanizes you as you try to make change. Merely wanting to have the same things as the oppressors—more power, money, status, and so on—does not create change. To achieve our collective liberation, we must each seek a better life for all—and for this, you need to build your critical awareness, see oppression, and learn to create the social action against oppression that leads to long-lasting change.

My parents grew up in worlds without white people. My mother says in Jamaica they weren’t part of the world she lived in. She just never saw them. However, my father says his town in Trinidad had many white people, but the town was segregated. White folks lived on The Hill, while Black families, like his, lived down in the village. Black people and white people led very different lives in the same town in the Caribbean in the 1940s and ’50s.

At one Christmas lunch, when we asked Dad about the different qualities of life for Black and white people, he said, “Well, we never actually questioned it. It just was the way things were.” Sometimes society is structured to prevent us from seeing the obstacles that prevent people from thriving. These obstacles may change from society to society.

DESIGN FOR EQUITY

There is no single recipe for creating lasting social impact. We can’t just download a recipe to follow step by step and then—tada!—we have equity and social change. Like the person who adapts a recipe to suit what they have available in their pantry, you’re going to have to adjust these strategies to suit the problems you’re addressing and the change you want to make.

With the tools described above, it’s possible to design injustice out of and design equity into everything you do.

Equity is a word we often hear these days. It refers to fairness and justice. As a child, I was trained to think that things were fair if everyone got the same. Early on in life, we learn it’s important to treat people equally. Sometimes, however, it’s necessary to distinguish equity from equality. Whereas equality generally means providing the same to all, equity means recognizing that we do not all start at the same place and therefore have different needs. Equity is focused on ensuring that people have equal outcomes, even if they need different inputs.

When working toward equity, we need to hold onto our critical awareness so we can see the obstacles that block our progress. There are historical, political, economic, and cultural obstacles in society. While equality and equity are both grounded in the same concept of fairness, one concept sees all of us as the same and is value-neutral, whereas the other concept recognizes difference. Equity recognizes the unique lived experience of each individual with regard to their historical, political, and economic context. So if we want equitable outcomes, we must begin by acknowledging that we are not all the same and that different obstacles and barriers prevent us from success.

This difference in perspective leads to different kinds of questions, asking How might we give people what they need to thrive? rather than How might we give everyone the same tools? For example, instead of designing and creating programs about distributing textbooks or computers to all students, someone in education seeking to ensure the opportunity for equal outcomes for all students might create programs that offer more face-to-face tutoring rather than just distributing textbooks. Some students may need different types of support to thrive.

To better understand gaps, inequity, and people’s needs, you have to learn more about their journeys, struggles, and joys. You need to find out what makes them tick, what will make them thrive. To do this, you need lots of empathy for the stakeholders, your teammates, and yourself.

DESIGN FOR JUSTICE

Justice is a concept in ethics and law that means fair, equal, and balanced treatment for everyone.

Injustice is the denial of justice. When you see inequity and injustice both in the world around you and in the work that you do, you must ask yourself what you can do to remedy it.

To transform society and create change, you sometimes need to treat people differently. You sometimes need to use “fair discrimination,” whereby you give preferential treatment to the groups that need more support to be able to thrive, making up for years of systemic injustice. You do this, for example, through affirmative action laws, intentional allocation of resources to underserved communities, and doing businesses with minority business owners. In seeking to create equity, you have to be discriminatory and reallocate resources to those who did not traditionally have access. By paying attention to gaps across differences, you will eventually achieve a level of sameness that is better for everyone. Achieving equity requires recognition that because some people have been denied access and benefits, they deserve greater accommodations in order to achieve equity and both bold goals and bold steps to reach them.

Your challenge, as you design products and services, is to find where the need is greatest. Who needs the leg up to get to equal outcomes? What systems and practices keep people back, and how can you design hurdles to equity out of your goods and services? Where is the need? Is it among people with children? First- generation homeowners? People within a specific age group? In your work, you’ll need to play the role of super-sleuth or detective and find inequities that are baked into products, services, and systems, then design them out.

To start to make change, you have to understand what oppression is, learn to see where it is happening, and identify real issues that are preventing people from leading full and thriving lives. In this first phase of the design for equity process, you can develop a laser focus on understanding what is wrong by learning to listen and see from many different points of view and focusing on equity and justice as you learn to question the world.

Reprinted with permission from Design Social Change: Take Action, Work toward Equity, and Challenge the Status Quo, by Lesley-Ann Noel, published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House.