Design as Transgression: Activism for Racial Justice at the 2017 Black in Design Conference

• In Event: 1184 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 15. Activism and Alternative Organizations

Abstract

Design professionals have a rich history of mobilizing for activist causes in their work (e.g. opposing prison design), their institutions (e.g. fighting for gender equity among licensed practitioners), and toward the state (e.g. collectively opposing travel bans). Though not yet applied to the design field, studies of social movements and the sociology of professions and organizations can help us better understand the kinds of political power that design professionals can harness toward equity and justice causes. The Black in Design conference convened in 2017 by student members of the African American Student Union at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design offer important lessons for ways design professionals (and pre-professionals) strive to mainstream racial justice causes. I conducted participant observation and unstructured interviews with conference sponsors, organizers, presenters, and attendees. My intention with this approach was to understand ways participants at Black in Design framed their activism. My objective was to learn how activist practices and discourses are framed and then leveraged by design professionals. The Black in Design event conflated activism at three scales of architects’ work, their institutions, and the state. Furthermore, a shared desire to transgress institutional barriers to justice was mobilized. By conflating the transgression of disciplinary boundaries, scales of work, and institutional barriers, the conference disseminated discourses and practices of political empowerment that imparted participants with a language through which to articulate activist desires and the coalitions necessary to act upon those desires.

Author

• Shawhin Roudbari, University of Colorado-Boulder