Rosenverse

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

The Unspoken Complexity of “Self-Care” with Deanna Zandt
Thursday, July 21, 2022 • Civic Design Community
Share the love for this talk
The Unspoken Complexity of “Self-Care” with Deanna Zandt
Speakers: Deanna Zandt
Link:

Summary

At the July Civic Design Community call, hear from Deanna Zandt (she/her).  The term "self-care" is thrown around a lot these days but there's a more complicated picture than just taking a bubble bath and hoping for the best. In this call we talk about what's missing from our conversations about self-care. We also discuss how human experience is fundamentally messy, but designers (and coders) like to make everything clean and neat. We've got to start reckoning with that. Our goal is that you walk away with a sense of the care structures that you have and need in your own lives, and a sense of what designing care into our systems could look like. About our speaker: Deanna Zandt is a writer, artist and award-winning technologist living in Brooklyn, NY. She spent 15 years working at the forefront of social justice, technology and media; after she burned out for the third time, she realized that maybe that work didn’t suit her particularly well. Currently, she spends her time: supporting other very impressive people and organizations behind-the-scenes with their technology; writing & drawing when she feels like it; walking and playing with her two dogs and their friends; connecting with humans near and far; and figuring out how to exist with meaning, fulfillment and as many giggles as possible. We’ll be talking (and very likely giggling) about her zine that traverses the constellation of self-soothing, self-care, community care and structural care.

Key Insights

  • Self-care and self-soothing are distinct: self-care supports long-term wellbeing, while self-soothing addresses immediate distress.

  • Community care acts as a vital bridge, allowing individuals to support each other's capacity for self-care and self-soothing.

  • Structural care involves systemic reforms that enable sustainable wellbeing beyond individual or community efforts.

  • Capitalism’s exploitative nature fundamentally conflicts with genuine care systems.

  • Communities of color often embed care practices into social movements more deeply than mainstream white-led movements.

  • Burnout is tied to outdated values of sacrifice and hustle; newer generations prioritize healthier integrations of work and care.

  • Activism encompasses diverse roles—direct action, support, financial contributions—and no role is insignificant or lesser.

  • Toxic optimism oversimplifies human experience and can hinder authentic coping and systemic change.

  • Movement-building includes practices like grief work, body movement, and relational culture to sustain activists holistically.

  • Long-term collaboration, like Deanna’s 17 years with Jim Hightower, demonstrates how relationships and joy sustain social justice work.

Notable Quotes

"You can never be sick enough to help the sickest people."

"The hustle does suck, and Gen Z is doing this other thing over here, arranging in healthier ways."

"Self-care became a commodity where buying things was mistaken for healing and support."

"Everybody does better when everybody does better."

"If we don’t do the work, the world won’t be on fire—it already is."

"There’s no insignificant work in activism; all roles are critical."

"The design of our systems should make room for messy, complicated human realities, not just positive illusions."

"Movement building requires healing, grief work, and physical movement to sustain people."

"I finally started saying, I understand your budget, but I have one too, and I deserve to be paid."

"Sometimes significant change happens in a heartbeat because one person said something unexpected."

Ask the Rosenbot
Rob Mitzel
The Tale of Two Companies: Building a Successful UX Practice in a Century-Old Enterprise
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Alba Villamil
Stereotyped by Design: Pitfalls in Cross-Cultural User Research
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Alana Washington
(Remote) Service Design: A Transformation Case Study
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Peter Merholz
The Trials and Tribulations of Directors of UX
2023 • Enterprise Community
Cassini Nazir
The Dangers of Empathy: Toward More Responsible Design Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Ari Zelmanow
Dark Side of Democratization
2023 • Advancing Research Community
Jennifer Strickland
Adopting a "Design By" Method
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
JD Buckley
COMMUNICATE: Discussion
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Josh Clark
Sentient Design, AI, and the Radically Adaptive Experience (1st of 3 seminars)
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Uday Gajendar
From AI to Zeitgeist: Theory as the design antidote to AI hype
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Chris Govias
Perspectives on Civic Design
2021 • Civic Design Community
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Nicole Bergstrom
AccessibilityOps: Moving beyond “nice to have”
2024 • DesignOps Community
Rittika Basu
Age and Interfaces: Equipping Older Adults with Technological Tools
2023 • Advancing Research Community
Ariel Kennan
Building a Design Culture
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Anupama Dhareshwar
From blueprint to bot: Designing resilient AI-powered services
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Conference

More Videos

Marc Fonteijn

"Respondents who feel very connected are twice as likely to say they’re making a significant impact."

Marc Fonteijn Ru Butler

Increase your confidence, influence, and impact (through a Professional Community)

December 3, 2024

Victor M. Gonzalez

"Universities in Latin America are doing a very bad job providing practical UX research training."

Victor M. Gonzalez

Practicing Learners and Learning Practitioners

March 10, 2021

Elana Chapman

"Accessibility is really just improving the usability for everyone, not just for people with disabilities."

Elana Chapman Li Wen Huang Divyen Sanganee Annabel Weiner

Getting started with accessibility research

February 20, 2025

Karen Pascoe

"Consumers are clamoring for payment to be embedded in their devices because payment can be a pain point in digital commerce."

Karen Pascoe

Developing Experience Teams and Talent in the Enterprise

June 8, 2016

Dawn Ressel

"Designers’ medium is code; until your great design is in production code, your design is a figment of your imagination."

Dawn Ressel

Full-Stack User Experiences: A Marriage of Design and Technology

June 9, 2016

Gretchen Anderson

"That’s the kind of feature that never would have made it to the top of anyone’s backlog without design."

Gretchen Anderson

Scaling the Human Center

June 8, 2017

Mila Kuznetsova

"If a group session with middle schoolers goes off the rails, one-on-one sessions can save the research."

Mila Kuznetsova Lucy Denton

How Lessons Learned from Our Youngest Users Can Help Us Evolve our Practices

March 9, 2022

Sam Proulx

"Disability is a normal part of the human experience."

Sam Proulx

Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate

November 16, 2022

Nathan Curtis

"Allowing teams to override small things like button color may be justified if it delivers business value."

Nathan Curtis

Design Systems for Us: How Many One-Source(s)-of-Truth Are Enough?

January 17, 2019