Our conversation about our book, The Black Experience in Design, with Saundra Thomas, facilitated by OHNY Stacks.
Participants:
Design Leadership: Now What?
Design Leadership: Now What? Suggestions for How We Begin to Achieve Equity by Design
By Jennifer Rittner
Co-authored by: Anne H. Berry, Jacqueline Francis, Ricardo Gomes, Alicia Olushola Ajayi, Ajay Revels, Jennifer Rittner, Raja Schaar, David J. Walker, Kelly Walters, Michele Washington
Recently published in Design for All Institute of India December 2021 Volume 16 No. 12.
Leaders in the design community have expressed their desire to work toward equity within our industry, posting across social media the #BLM hashtag and affirming their support for inclusion. At the same time, many of them are asking, “what can we do next?”
The “what next” is possibly the most challenging facet of this conversation. For every suggested “next step” there are dozens of other paths that might have been taken. Each outlined path risks erasing or negating other marginalized communities and contributions. Each new suggestion implies that none have come before. Many have.
Many designers and design educators who identify as BIPoC, disabled, gender queer, religious minorities, or immigrants from the southern hemisphere have been doing the work of demanding equity in our industry for decades. We thank all those who came before us. We acknowledge everyone who is doing this work quietly, in the shadows, without credit or compensation. We are grateful for everyone who tried but then stopped because the work was hard and it became overwhelming to do it alone. We appreciate everyone who supported that work, even if from a distance, providing emotional support and encouragement to our colleagues as they risked their own careers and health in the fight for change.
We see you.
We will also continue to celebrate our brothers and sisters who have achieved success by designing their own paths and platforms. In truth, we honor and admire them. They have thrived against the odds. At the same time, too many of us are laboring in states of isolation and anxiety.
The Cities Summit: Designing a Better Future
Presented by 92Y, The Cities Summit explored a myriad of ideas on how we as a collective unit can inspire positive changes to renew our cities and how to seize the chance to rise anew from crisis.
Beginning at 2 hours and 25 minutes, Ifeoma Ebo, Jose Ortiz Jr., and I discussed building equity in our spaces, eradicating inequality, and the role of intersectionality.
I’m grateful for the insights that Ifeoma and Jose offered about equitable design, workforce development, and transdisciplinary practices. I’d like to share some of the resources they mentioned:
Watch the full summit below.
A New Kind of Museum Tackles The Design of Policing
Design isn’t just the product of an output; it is also the way in which we understand the structures of things.
The questions of design in policing are not just about outputs, or “What are we making?” It is the weapons, it’s the spaces that are constructed specifically for policing on behalf of police…and some of the ways in which we have created structures of thought, value and being that are impacted by and that inform how policing happens.
We don’t need better handcuffs or better jails; we need better systems that prevent people from having to interact with police, in situations that would put them into handcuffs and into jails.
The Intersection of Design and Policing
The Policing Issue of Design Museum Magazine tackles the challenges between design and policing, including an exploration into the root causes of using design as oppression, the history of design, and how it intersects with policing.
This was the topic of conversation in The Intersection of Design and Policing podcast. Sam Aquillano and I talked about how I chose the contributors and the role that policing plays in design. We were later joined by Timothy Bardlavens, who co-wrote the piece “Designed for Harm: How Products of Policing Enforce Extra-judicial Practices of Control and Submission” with me for this issue.
Listen below to hear how we dove into this intersection and rethinking of the current structure.
Look at How Remarkable We are: Ask Artists with Julia Travers
Everything we do in this world beyond survival and self-destruction is art. We’re driven to art-making because it’s how we make sense out of existence and create order out of the chaos and randomness of life. It’s the objects of creativity, the processes we embody, and the mediums we employ that feel particularly salient to each of us, including the medium of language.
Designing the Future: Approaches to Community-Led Justice
What does community-led justice look like?
Communities defining change outside of whatever a leader, power, or stakeholder defines.
It is not conditional support of change — e.g. “I support change if…” or “I support change only if…”
It is support for change that the community defines themselves.
What role can designers and researchers play?
Watch the discussion between the members of this public panel (including myself) hosted by Public Policy Lab.
The Failures of DEI
In the Fall of 2020, the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York hired a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Director, the first of its kind at the school, hired at a time when Black racial politics were top of mind for the institution. Among the most pressing concerns the new administrator was hired to address on his arrival was a powerful student protest amplified on social media over the summer of that year, which named some of the abuses Black and PoC students had experienced at the hands of faculty and department chairs, and their general concern over the school’s lack of urgency in addressing historical racial inequity.
The student protest, being public and perhaps therefore most embarrassing for the school, rightfully took precedence over other concerns. As the most vulnerable population at SVA, student concerns should absolutely have been prioritized and handled with the utmost care.
How Colonialism Has Shaped the Design World
An interesting piece by Stefanie Waldek about how colonialism influences today’s perspective of design.
Recommended Reading: Hearst makes major cuts, Farrow & Ball's new owner, and more
Read more on The Policing Issue by Design Museum Magazine under Recommended Reading in this article by Caroline Bourque.
The Policing Issue
The Policing Issue of Design Museum Magazine does not call for designers to fix the problem of policing by collaborating with existing bureaucracies.
We are hoping to reveal some of the ways in which models of dominant-cultural supremacy frame design practices, and have entrenched some of the same oppressive inequities produced by policing.
This issue unpacks the current state of the system, exposing the creation and design of systems that perpetuate racism.
It is a call for change.
As guest editor, I organized the entire process of preparing this issue with Jennifer Jackson, one of the most competent and patient colleagues I’ve ever had the pleasure of collaborating with.
Read my Letter from the Editor here.
A copy of this issue can be purchased here.
SVA MFA Fine Arts
We begin by acknowledging that while we are all dispersed in our various homes, cities and countries, SVA, the institution hosting our studies, sits on land historically stewarded by the Lenape people for thousands of years. New York City is still home to over 115,000 intertribal people who work and create culture on the island of Manhattan and beyond.
Decolonization for indigenous people and communities is not a metaphor or an abstraction. It is about reclaiming sovereignty against an oppressive government that negotiated in bad faith and has continued to break treaties that might otherwise have enabled tribal nations and native communities to build equity for communities across this land.
"Black, Brown + Latinx Design Educators”: An Interview with Jennifer Rittner
Black, Brown + Latinx Design Educators: Conversations on Design and Race by Kelly Walters is a collection of personal interviews with design educators of color who teach across the US and Canada.
The following is an excerpt from my interview.
My mother is Brazilian. She came to the United States in the 1960s when the civil rights movement was happening, and was unfamiliar with Blackness in the specifically US context. She had her own experience with being Black and marginalized in her country, so because of how and where I grew up, that conversation was very much a part of my life. I recognize the ways in which I live on the margins of the conversation as well. I’m biracial. My mother is Afro-Brazilian, not African American, but I grew up in a neighborhood that was marginalized and artificially redlined as a Black neighborhood. The conversation around Blackness and marginalization as an African American story is what I grew up with, and so I felt that it needed to be centered in the design space.
Decentering Whiteness in Design: Restorative Design Conference from Greater Good Studio, Oct 2020
Greater Good Studio, Chicago, hosted a conference to explore how we approach design justice in pedagogy and practice. I was fortunate to participate in a conversation with Lesley-Ann Noel and Sadie Red Wing about “de-centering whiteness.”
Black Lives Matter Instagram Carousels Are Changing the Shape and Longevity of Protest Graphics
Protest movements shift minds long before they lead to action. This is by nature and design. The welling up of anger within a community brings individuals together in collective motion around a unified thought: “We’re fed up, things must change.” What begins as expressions of anger can, through protest, lead to catharsis, as individuals consolidate in collective voice, and step in syncopated rhythm to affirm each other’s demands for attention. Those calls are heard through the chanting of mantras that penetrate our consciousness. “Black Lives Matter!” The resonance of that phrase conjures history, carrying forward the pain of ancestors to demand a new future of our own making. “No Justice, No Peace!” Voices coalesce to will thought into matter. “What Do We Want?!” Call and response models our desire to turn anger into dialogue, and dialogue into active change.
But these moments of protest risk being just that: moments. The mantras seep into our consciousness. The marching exorcises pain from the body. Signs and banners amplify personal or branded messages that provide visual evidence: we are here—we were there. But then what? The power of a protest—witnessed either from the safety of COVID-mandated isolation or on the front lines of a protest march—is in its performance of solidarity, but that same performance risks becoming an empty or one-time gesture unless it is coupled with sustained action.
2020 NYCxDesign
I moderated a panel for NYCxDesign titled Making Room for Joy. What’s missing from the title is the larger context: Making Room for Joy in Times of Crisis. At this moment, crisis might be implied, but it’s an important framing in the discussion. Panelists: Ari Melenciano, Sloan Leo, Emilie Baltz, and Allan Chochinov.
Core77 2020 Design Education Initiative Jury
It was a pleasure participating in the 2020 Core77 jury this year alongside Allan Chochinov, Liz Ogbu, and Timothy Bardlavens. Thanks to Allan for distilling our hour+ long conversation into a short video.
Featured on Design Milk DMTV Milkshake
Design Milk invited me to participate in the inaugural episode of their new series DMTV Milkshake, in which I was sent a handful of questions, asked to place them in a vessel of my choice, and then record myself answer one at a time. The topic was design and equity, representation, and protest.
How We Crit
The AIGA Design Education Committee adopted my teaching tool on Design Critique for their Summer 2020 Portfolio event. Published as a Google Doc, the guidelines are an open source tool for all educators, who are invited to critique the guidelines, add their own thoughts, and evolve these ideas.
Design & Politics 2018: SVA PoD
“Design is intrinsic to politics,” argue faculty Jennifer Rittner, Marc Dones, and Andrew Schlessinger. “In fact, the entire Democratic experiment is a product of design.”
In the Products of Design program, an opportunity to investigate the direct relationship between design and politics occurs biennially with the U.S. elections. This year, it was all about the Midterm Elections—when politicians compete for seats in the U.S. Legislative branch (Congress), as well as in State and Local political races.
The opportunity space for the 3-day workshop was Messaging. In a tense political climate, mixed groups of first- and second-year PoD teams investigated how design can mitigate the negative impacts of political messaging, and develop design strategies that fully enfranchise citizens in the democratic process. They then took their work out into the streets of New York City.