DAP Yearbook is here!

Each year during the month of August, Black communities, revolutionaries, and social justice advocates hold space to acknowledge, honor, and refuel the legacy of Black resistance and struggle against racial oppression, imprisonment, and injustice in the United States. For Black August 2020, Design as Protest created a series to share some of the historic August moments of riot, rebellion, and resistance as they relate to the Design Justice Demands and the current national uprising against police brutality and racial violence.

We cannot survive and thrive without immediate change toward an anti-racist model of design education and practice. Existing systems have not been able to transform away from centering and advancing whiteness, through their reliance on an implied dominant and racialized subject and audience. The impacts of that centering are widespread and can be felt in the inequities that global extraction, racial capitalism, and colonialism have created. The earth and the majority of its people have suffered tremendous harm as a result. Collective liberation cannot only occur within the confines of individual institutions—Dark Matter University is founded to work inside and outside of existing systems to challenge, inform, and reshape our present world toward a better future.

Over 3,000 letters have been sent to leaders across the design and architecture professions to ensure our field commits to the #designjusticedemands. In response, 103 pledges have since been made by 35 agencies, 10 universities, and one industry organization.

Architects and planners have an obligation to protect health, safety and welfare through the spaces we design. As the current protests reveal, we’ve failed.