Interviews:
The Cost of Fitting In

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been listening closely to the voices that so often go unheard in design culture. Working-class voices. Regional-accent voices. Voices that come into the room are already identified as partial or judged through the lens of class bias.

The patterns are striking. According to The Guardian, young people from working-class backgrounds are still being blocked from entering the creative industries, which remain elitist and inaccessible (Harrison, 2025). This is not abstract. I’ve heard it in conversation, in studio interviews, in offhand remarks. The data lives inside people. Each story shows how bias, especially around accent, acts not through confrontation but through repetition.

It shows up in the pause before someone responds. In the polite chuckle at an “unusual” pronunciation. In a well-meant suggestion to sound more professional. These are the micro-moments where power operates quietly. What Bourdieu called symbolic violence, the invisible pressure to comply with what is considered proper, becomes visible (Bourdieu, 1991). In design culture, where voice is both metaphor and medium, that pressure often goes unchecked.

Tania’s voice stays with me. She is a soft-spoken, fiercely talented design student from a working-class background. In our interview, she told me she often feels silenced by classroom norms. In crits and seminars, she hesitates to speak. It’s like everyone else’s words just flow in this posh accent, she said, and then there’s me. When I talk, it suddenly goes quiet.

No one told her to stop. No one mocked her out loud. But she learned all the same. Over time, she started to pre-edit. Speaking only when she was absolutely sure. Mentally rehearsing every line. She was polishing away what made her voice hers. The design classroom, which should have been a site of experimentation, became a space of self-censorship.

What happened to her is not dramatic. That is why it is powerful. The weight builds slowly. Day by day. Crit by crit. Until a voice becomes smaller just to stay in the room. This is symbolic violence in practice. Not loud. Not obvious. But deeply effective. It relies on a shared understanding of what counts as the right way to speak. Tania’s story reminded me that exclusion does not always look like rejection. Sometimes it looks like quiet restraint.

I thought next of Johnny. A Dublin-born designer who moved to London for work. Bright, quick-witted, and generous with ideas. His talent had never been questioned. But in one meeting, a creative director casually suggested he soften his Dublin accent for clients. Johnny laughed telling me this, but it wasn’t joy in the laugh. Apparently my voice was too distracting, he said.

This wasn’t subtle. It was direct. Could you sound a bit less like yourself? Johnny’s voice, something as natural as the lilt he grew up with, had been reframed as an obstacle. In a studio that claimed to celebrate difference, he had to hold part of himself back.

He started to code-switch. Using a neutral phone voice. Holding his real accent for colleagues he trusted. At home, he caught himself practicing it. And felt the sting of it. A small loss. A part of his identity quietly removed to make his work palatable. The industry that markets itself as open had shown its rules. The politics of voice were already at work.

Professional. Polished. Neutral. These are not objective terms. They carry class, geography, race. As Cameron (1995) notes, speakers with Received Pronunciation are often assumed to be intelligent, competent, professional. Their voice does the work before they do. Regional and working-class accents, by contrast, are heard with hesitation or suspicion. Lippi-Green (1997) explains that people learn to adapt. Not because they want to. Because they have to. To be taken seriously.

Johnny did not lack confidence. But the system asked him to perform anyway. That detail matters. Even the most skilled and adaptable designers are not immune. He wasn’t asked to speak better. He was asked to sound different. That is not feedback. That is cultural correction.

His story helped me understand what I had suspected. Design culture still has an unwritten standard. Not just for work, but for voice. For presence. For belonging. It matters who gets to speak freely. And it matters who doesn’t.

I found myself returning to a single question. How many ideas have been left unsaid? How much creativity has been softened, edited, silenced before it even left the mouth?

These are not small losses. They accumulate. They shape who stays. And who doesn’t. And they call into question what kind of future this industry is actually designing.

The most poignant conversation was with Sarah, a product designer who grew up in Manchester. If Tania and Johnny are still navigating how much to adapt, Sarah has already been through that process. She told me that early in her career, she undertook elocution training to neutralise her Mancunian accent. She did it by choice, but that choice came after too many polite rejections and one interview where her “strong accent” was mentioned as a concern. Determined to succeed, she retrained her voice. She got the job soon after, in a well-known design firm, but the personal cost was steep.

I’ve lost parts of my identity in the process, she said quietly. Sometimes I don’t know if I’m speaking with my voice or the voice I was taught to use. Listening to her, I could feel the strain. The grief of it. This was the human side of what Judith Butler calls performativity, the idea that identity is not something we are, but something we do. A repeated act, shaped by the expectations around us (Butler, 1990). In Sarah’s case, the act involved changing her pronunciation, her tone, even her idioms, until she fit a particular image of what a “professional designer” should sound like.

It worked. She found acceptance. But it left her unsure of who she was when she spoke. She described catching herself mid-sentence to avoid certain phrases. Her natural humour, her slang, all paused by an internal monitor whispering not appropriate. She now navigates design meetings with ease. Later, at home, she sometimes speaks to herself in her original accent, just to remember the sound of me. That line stayed with me.

It reminded me how design culture, despite its progressive language, can demand a quiet form of self-erasure. The industry rarely says what the “right” voice is. But the silence around which voices are preferred speaks volumes. These expectations are rarely overt. There are no bans on dialect. No official rules. But the raised eyebrow, the awkward pause, the casual suggestion to soften or adjust, they accumulate.

Over time, they shape how someone sees themselves and their place in the creative world. This is exactly what Bourdieu meant by symbolic violence. A gentle, insidious form of power that works by making people internalise their own marginalisation (Bourdieu, 1991). Tania internalised the idea that her voice wasn’t suited for academia, so she contributed less. Johnny believed a “serious designer” in London didn’t sound like a Dubliner, so he softened his brogue. Sarah accepted that success meant leaving her accent behind, and now carries the ache of that choice.

These are not isolated stories. They are patterns. They reflect deep classed assumptions about whose voices are worth listening to. The Guardian recently reported that the system remains “rigged” against working-class creatives. Not always in policy, but in culture, in tone, in unspoken fit (Harrison, 2025). The rigging is subtle. It is felt in meetings and critiques, in what gets praised and what gets overlooked. It is woven into the fabric of who is heard and who is not.

As I listened to these stories, I heard echoes of my own. The times I shifted my voice without thinking. The times I stayed quiet to avoid standing out. But what stays with me more is their resistance.

Despite everything, Tania continues to make work that draws directly from her experience. Johnny mentors young Irish designers in London, encouraging them to keep their voices intact. Don’t let anyone dim your accent, he tells them. Sarah has started reclaiming her own. Not all at once, but piece by piece. She is considering bringing a little of it back into the studio. That choice, too, is a kind of design act.

Their stories have shaped mine. They reminded me that design is about communication, yes. But also about recognition. It asks us to listen. And if design only listens to one voice, one tone, one style of articulation, then it stops being design. It becomes performance.

Tonight, writing this, I feel both galvanised and grounded. Accent and class bias are no longer abstract concepts for me. They are present, named, and lived. My diary has become a place not just for reflection, but for a quieter kind of refusal. A space to hold what is, and to imagine what might come next.

Tania’s, Johnny’s, and Sarah’s voices deserve to be heard on their terms, in their accents, without translation. My work, both as a researcher and as a designer, is now tied to that commitment. To notice. To question. To design differently. Because when voice becomes the site of compromise, the creative field becomes smaller than it should be. And I want to help keep it open.

References

1. Bakare, L., Khomami, N., & Lumley, J. (2025, February 21). Working-class creatives don’t stand a chance in UK today, leading artists warn. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com

2. Bourdieu, P. (1999). On television (P. Ferguson, Trans.). The New Press.

3. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge.

4. Khomami, N. (2024, November 12). Young working-class people being ‘blocked’ from creative industries, study finds. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com