Soft Skills is guided by the intelligence of living systems. The Earth does not optimize. It listens, adapts, collaborates, and is resilient. This is the methodology.
Soft Skills believes that to design well is to explore what already exists: sitting with the holistic landscape of a project's history, its people, and the present moment.
Soft Skills understands the work of translation: between worlds / people, and what is known / unknown. This approach to design is inherited from our ancestors who understood that the Earth holds knowledge, and that systems speak if you learn to listen.
“Soft Skills” is a capitalist, colonizer term for the most human parts of labor: the ability to make others feel seen, heard, and understood. Soft Skills in turn, appropriates these words in an act of reclamation built on the belief that this work is natural, necessary, and inherent to collaboration and communication. Success can only be measured by the vitality of the communities we serve, because none of us flourish until we all do.
Soft Skills is committed to the communities and organizations doing the hardest work in the world and to ensuring their work reaches the people it is intended for. In the same breath:
You are on Native land.
Soft Skills actively seeks partnerships with artists and organizations committed to uplifting Indigenous peoples through land acquisition and community empowerment.
The goal is to do good work, not just for our generation, but the seven generations to come; and to liberate the existing systems with love and kindness.
Soft Skills is Amy White Eyes Doermann.
Amy is an Oglala Lakota and Xicana indigenous designer, writer, and communicator.
With over fifteen years of experience in marketing and technology, she is also a clinical herbalist at a trauma-informed clinic, is certified in Mental Health First Aid, and serves as a Vigil Fire Keeper at Seventh Sense, a home for the dying.
Mail:
hello@softskills.studio