Thank you for visiting our temporary landing page. We know and apologize that this site is not accessible. It serves as an interim solution while we collaborate with Jessica Oddi, our Disabled Web Designer, to rebuild our site.
About us
Pause and Effect is a collective of visionary practitioners guided by a shared vision for inclusive, decolonized, and liberated futures. Rooted in principles of relationality, we view design as a vehicle for liberation and regeneration.
Our services include transformative, application based learning experiences, consulting for research and design teams, and the Liberatory Playground.
At Pause and Effect, we believe that transformation begins with what we practice. We lean into discomfort by examining our own complicity within systems of harm. We learn to get intimate with our restlessness, fragility, and fear of the unknown. We create intentional space for chaos, and embrace it as an essential process for liberatory dreaming. We emphasize authentic relationships with each other and listen with all senses of the body, mind and spirit.
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The Team
Pause and Effect is community made. We express gratitude and recognize our past team members (Jasmine, Yvette, Cherrie, Jacquie, Clementina, Teshyla), our co-conspirators, the land, and our teachers for nourishing our practice.
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Our Philosophy
Human Centered Design is Dead.
Our Relational Design framework challenges the colonial limitations of Human Centered Design, and invites us to shift towards practices which cultivate responsibility for our collective and individual impact on people, land, and systems.
Through Relational Design, we uproot human-centric, privilege-dominant and extractive ways of doing research and designing our products and services.
“This has been a journey of unpacking and critiquing what Anglo/Euro-centric research typically looks and feels like. It has involved expanding our understanding of the many ways research could be by looking to different perspectives and the land for guidance and teaching. It’s been a journey towards figuring out how I can "shift the needle" in my practice towards more liberatory, caring and relational ways of researching and treating data, recognizing both my power and my constraints.”
Current Learning Experiences
Reimagining Research is designed to stretch your imagination beyond colonial paradigms and constructions of research (often characterized by extraction, power imbalances, and the commodification of knowledge).
If you're curious about ethical or responsible research, or you're drawn to topics of care and trauma-informed practice, this five week program will take your learning to a whole new level.
It will challenge you to think expansively about your role as a researcher, the work you do, and the agency and responsibility you have to care for yourself and your participants. Our goal is to offer you tools, examples, and provocations that encite rich dialogue and reflection, and transform your practice.
“In every other research course I've taken, it's been drilled in me to have this mechanistic approach to research. To get what we need, and get out. Be unbiased. Be professional. And this course really challenged me to see what it could look like, sound like, and feel like to engage in research with a depth of care and humanity I honestly had never seen modeled in my career. It truly challenged me to question everything more and see the downstream effects of our actions with greater clarity and understanding.”
Liberation is an everyday practice
Liberation Maasis is a living archive of decolonial, abolitionist musings and practice.
As a cherished patreon member, you can expect exclusive access to spicy written and video content, reading recommendations, and virtual chai chats with community.
Stay tuned for our launch announcement!
The Liberatory Playground
What world do you dream future generations will inhabit?
The Liberatory Playground is an experimental community space for unpacking, reimagining and repatterning our relationship to dominant cultural norms and “ways of being”.
Working with the body and mind, this is a space for processing our associations and experiences of being steeped in a culture shaped by whiteness and coloniality, and for cultivating deeper connection to self, others and the land.
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Requiest this service
“The Liberatory Playground was a care-fully curated space that truly met each participant from wherever and however they arrived, lovingly took them by the hand, and offered a glimpse into other ways of thinking, doing, being, and knowing - which often felt like re-membering and reclaiming ways that felt lost or forgotten at times.”
Testimonials
The Pause and Effect team designed and executed a thoughtful audit of our product development process. They were able to summarize many trends into a cohesive report, helping us concretely identify and name gaps we previously felt but couldn't quite put our finger on. Their audit helped us begin important conversations on how we can create a more inclusive customer experience at Outschool. We were so happy with the audit that we are continuing to work with Pause and Effect to address some of the product, research and marketing gaps they identified.
- Jing Jin, Outschool
System changers are often faced with a tension between: 1) making changes within existing systems, or 2) deconstructing the systems to rebuild new ones. I've always leaned towards the first approach. Until I sat in a session by Pause and Effect that challenged my approach and made me reflect thoughtfully on my impact as a researcher. I highly recommend following Pause and Effect if you're interested in research methods that are truly decolonial and inclusive.
-Anonymous
Sometimes a webinar can make you cry because of how transcendental it feels.
Like a breath of fresh air. Like stepping into a room full of people who, like you, refuse to uncritically subscribe to the common delusion that this current way is the only way to do research and design, to build economy, to treat our planet.
-Anonymous
Pause and Effect is our first choice as a product design consultancy. Their approach aligns deeply with our values in bringing greater inclusion to STEAM. Their team partnered with us to develop our member journey maps through an inclusive lens, and built relational design workshops for the youth. Both have truly set us on the right path towards making the impact we desire.
- Anthonia Ogundele, Ethos Lab
Pause and Effect is located on Coast Salish territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh Nations. As uninvited, displaced and racialized settlers on Turtle Island, we commit to confronting and unlearning practices that maintain the oppression, cultural genocide and harm towards Indigenous peoples, their knowledge systems, lands and waters. This land also carries remembrance of the millions of enslaved Africans who tended to it, and of the thriving Black neighborhoods and economies that have been destroyed under white supremacy.