09 Create Anti-Racist Models of Design Education, Training & Licensing

Design Justice demands we challenge existing models with radical, anti-racist models of design education, training, and licensing to reflect histories of spatial injustice and ground our work in the service of collective liberation.

The existing systems of design education, training and licensing continually center and advance whiteness through their reliance upon an implied dominant, racialized subject and audience. Within academic institutions, this manifests as hegemonic pedagogies, canons, and epistemologies that exclude Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian forms of ancestral and local knowledge from design education. This exclusionary culture is also reflected in the limited racial diversity amongst the people who study, practice, and obtain licensure as designers which is often perpetuated by the high cost of design education, hostile academic and professional cultures, and inflexible models of success. 

As design students, educators, and practitioners we must operate within and outside of existing systems by demanding accountability and centering anti-racist and decolonizing models of design in order to move towards collective liberation within our design professions. We must work together across siloed disciplines and centralized institutions to create distributed networks that extract from those who have extracted, collate resources, and lift up marginalized voices. This work must acknowledge and reflect the history of spatial injustices and be grounded in communal knowledge formed through lived experience. With this foundation, we can speculate on future radical efforts of racial, social, and cultural reparations through the process and outcomes of design and work beyond the preconceived boundaries of our fields to strengthen the capacity and resilience in communities.