Designing for Dignity, Safety and Belonging with Diletta Legowo
Designing for Dignity, Safety and Belonging with Diletta Legowo
Diletta Legowo shares her wiggly path from fine art to social innovation, exploring how the concept of 'home' became the lens through which she designs culturally competent collaborative processes. We dig into facilitation tactics, power literacy, joy, suffering, and why creation is the antithesis of consumption.
Designing for Dignity, Safety and Belonging with Diletta Legowo
Show Notes
Welcome, Country Acknowledgment, and the Arc of the Episode
Jessica opens with an acknowledgment of Country and frames the show's three-part structure before introducing guest Diletta Legowo — designer, yoga teacher, and creative director focused on culturally competent collaboration. The conversation sets up a journey through Diletta's career, a deep dive into one pillar of her practice, and how she cares for her own feelings.
The Wiggly Path: From Fine Art to Social Innovation
- Notable quote: "I've had such a wiggly path" — and finding TACSI's "social design… sounded a lot like me."
- Actionable takeaway: Embrace the nonlinear career path — each branch illuminates what's authentically you.
Diletta traces a nonlinear path from fine art to graphic design and brand, entrepreneurship, and ultimately social innovation at the Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI). Using a "tree" analogy, she describes discovering authentic branches of self while seeking meaningful impact beyond "snack packaging," influenced by global upbringing and questions of privilege.
Home as a Design Lens: Freedom, Dignity, and Outcomes
- Actionable takeaway: Use the question "Does this feel like home?" as a design criterion for both process and outcomes.
Having moved frequently, "Where is home?" became a core inquiry that now informs both process and outcomes in her work. Drawing on Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom, Diletta frames home as conditions that enable safety, dignity, and participation — and brings that into projects by broadening what success looks like and how people feel in the work together.
Making Co-Design Culturally Safe: Meet People Where They Are
- Notable quote: "Listen as if you are wrong but prototype as if you are right."
- Actionable takeaway: Before any workshop, map your stakeholders — including who isn't in the room — and be transparent about why.
Diletta shares two facilitation lenses: prepare to meet people where they are (including who's not in the room), and "facilitate thyself first" by attending to energy, presence, and power dynamics. She emphasises power literacy — naming roles, history, and decision rationales transparently — to reduce unspoken tension and foster trust.
Joy, Suffering, and the Inner Work That Ripples Through Systems
- Notable quote: "It's less about removing suffering but expanding our ability to sit with it."
- Actionable takeaway: Start systemic change in the "me zone" — personal awareness and capacity ripples outward.
Centering lived experience, joy, and pleasure requires acknowledging suffering and expanding our capacity to sit with it, supported by mentors, psychotherapy, yoga, and somatic practices. Referencing Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach and Adrienne Maree Brown's Pleasure Activism, Diletta explains how change scales from "me" to teams to systems — echoed in her studio name, Small and Scale.
Challenging the Industry: Hustle, Western Defaults, and Owning Positionality
- Notable quote: "I thought… I had to fit into the archetype of the strong, outspoken white man — until one day I looked in the mirror and… that's not me."
- Actionable takeaway: Reflect on whose methods and modalities you're privileging in your practice — and why.
Diletta critiques design's hustle culture and overreliance on Western, often white and male, modalities — admitting she once tried to fit that archetype. A powerful moment: in Aboriginal cultural safety training at TACSI, an activity only for white colleagues surfaced her own internalised narratives and clarified the need to "own where we're rooted."
Designing for Emergence: Practical Tactics and Cross-Silo Connection
- Actionable takeaway: Create space in workshops for emergence — the best outcomes often come when you let go of the rigid run sheet.
Within real constraints, Diletta suggests mapping stakeholders (including who isn't in the room) and opening sessions with brief shares on what the project means to each person. Allowing plans to flex — "sitting in the gray" — creates the conditions for real problem-solving and collective creativity, while aiming for systemic outcomes (policies, resource flows, mental models) beyond deliverables.
What Makes Workshops Work: Start with Deep Understanding
- Actionable takeaway: Invest early in context and relationships to enable everything else.
Reflecting on projects, Diletta notes that success correlates with having time to deeply understand the problem and where people are coming from.
Rituals, Embodiment, and Resilience: How She Sustains Her Practice
- Notable quote: "I exist in a body" and "It's not about getting rid of stress, but opening up my capacity to experience stress."
Diletta shares grounding rituals — a "proxy commute" with her dog, coffee, yoga, meditation — and the wake-up of realising she was "plugged into the matrix" post-COVID. Regular silent retreats help her build capacity for stress rather than trying to erase it.
Whole Selves and Authentic Safety: Beyond Token Gestures
- Notable quote: "Use that sense of safety… to create safety for others."
The hosts discuss boundaries and bringing multifaceted identities into professional life. Diletta names dance as part of her wellness and links a felt sense of privilege and safety to social justice, alongside practical room elements (temperature, furnishings, cultural signals) that must be backed by real inner work to avoid tokenism.
Designers' Responsibility, Creation Over Consumption, and a Compassionate Call-In
- Notable quote: "Creation is the antithesis of consumption."
- Actionable takeaway: Make space for creation in your own life — beyond your job — as an antidote to the attention economy.
- Small and Scale
- TACSI — The Australian Centre for Social Innovation
- Amartya Sen — Development as Freedom
- Martha Nussbaum — The Capabilities Approach
- Adrienne Maree Brown — Pleasure Activism
- Priya Parker — The Art of Gathering
Diletta challenges the "industrialisation complex" and calls out design's role in attention-shaping (e.g., the inventor of infinite scroll "doesn't sleep at night"). She suggests reclaiming agency through creation over consumption — cooking, mending, movement — and closes by inviting listeners to a gentle self check-in: be critical and compassionate, practising "calling in" rather than calling out.
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