Field Notes on Design Activism: 2

Published by Place Journal, featuring Brandi T. Summers, Jeremy Till, Peggy Deamer, Jeffrey Hou, Daniel A. Barber, Dahlia Nduom, James Graham, Nora Wendl, Cassim Shepard, Andrea Roberts, Sara Jensen Carr, and David Theodore. From their website, “This is the second installment of a narrative survey in which several dozen educators and practitioners share perspectives on […]

Field Notes on Design Activism: 1

Published by Places Journal, featuring Simon Sadler, Adnan Z. Morshed, Aneesha Dharwadker, Ozayr Saloojee, Thandi Loewenson, Anya Sirota, Adam Arinsky, Matias Del Camp, Germane Barnes, and Irene Cheng. From their website, “This is the first installment of a narrative survey in which several dozen educators and practitioners share perspectives on the intensifying demands for meaningful […]

Design Activism: A Dialogue on Protest, Policing, and Demanding the Future We Need

“On February 9, 2021, Niki Franco moderated a conversation with Ivy Climacosa, Dustin Gibson, Annika Hansteen-Izora, and Liz Ogbu around the new protest movements that have arisen in reaction to the ongoing scourge of police brutality in the United States. As designers and activists, the participants were invited to talk about their own creative practices, […]

Presentations from Part 1 of the 2020 LAF Innovation + Leadership Symposium

“On June 16 and 18, 2020, the 2019-2020 cohort from the year-long LAF Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership presented their projects at our virtual symposium. This unique fellowship program provides a $25,000 award that supports working professionals as they develop and test new ideas to bring about impactful change to the environment and humanity and […]

LAF Fellow Joint Opening Statement

Held on June 16 and 18, a two-part virtual event showcased the work of the 2019-2020 LAF Fellows on design activism, heterogeneous futures, working landscapes, indigenous knowledge, resiliency, and landscape as foundation for revolution and resistance. Recordings will be available to the public in July. Beyond their presentations, the fellows were compelled to address the […]

Race, Architecture, and Tales from the Hood

In this Tedx Talk, “Bryan Lee talks about “design justice” — the idea that race, culture, and architecture are inherently connected in a way that links art to racial equity and design to cultural space.” Watch it here.  

Colloqate Design

“Colloqate Design is a multidisciplinary nonprofit Design Justice practice focused on expanding community access to, and building power through, the design of social, civic, and cultural spaces. Our mission is to intentionally organize, advocate, and design spaces of racial, social, and cultural justice throughout the built environment. Through programming, planning and design projects, Colloqate seeks […]

Design as Activism: to resist or to generate

This article seeks to address a couple of common critiques of design activism: that activism is primarily about stopping or preventing things and that activism raises awareness but doesn’t actually accomplish anything. The author argues that designers have the ability to practice a more generative and pragmatic kind of activism by creating positive disruptions that […]