Who is Antionette Carroll, M.A. ?
The designer who asked: What if design wasn't just about solving problems, but about shifting power? When Antoinette D. Carroll applied this thinking to community development, the result was award-winning community-led innovations that traditional top-down approaches had failed to achieve for decades.
This is the work of Antoinette D. Carroll, serial social entrepreneur and President and CEO of Creative Reaction Lab (CRXLAB) and the Institute of Equitable Design and Justice. As founder of the Equity-Centered Community Design (ECCD™) framework, Carroll hasn't just adapted design thinking, she's redefined it to centre equity, justice, and lived experience.
Where traditional design often centres efficiency, aesthetics, or what's workable within the status quo, Carroll's ECCD™ framework, recognised by Fast Company as a World Changing Idea finalist, confronts the uncomfortable truth that many systems - education, health, finance, policy - were never designed for everyone. So she asks: Why are we still using those same design principles to try and fix them?
Carroll's approach moves beyond post-its and empathy maps. It begins with co-creation, shifting power, and naming harm. It recognises that design without deep accountability can be extractive, that innovation without equity can replicate inequality at scale.
Her impact extends far beyond theory. As a former AIGA Design National Board Director and founding Chair of their Diversity and Inclusion Task Force, she launched the Design Census Program with Google and the Racial Justice by Design Initiative. She's an Echoing Green Global Fellow, TED Fellow, and The Aspen Institute Civil Society Fellow, whose work has been featured across NPR, Bloomberg, and Fast Company.
This approach holds deep resonance for anyone working at the intersection of innovation and inclusion, because building fairer systems means more than including voices. It means sharing power, recognising trauma, and valuing lived experience as expertise.
As Carroll puts it: "If we're not designing with people, we're designing on them."
For those of us in fintech, this isn't just a design framework. It's a fundamental challenge to how we approach financial inclusion, beginning with asking: Who's at the table when decisions are made, and who was never invited?
