Readings Takeaways 302 PDF

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Takeaways from the three readings...

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Design Thinking is a Rebrand for White Supremacy by Darin Buzon -

After reading Darin Buzon’s Design Thinking is a Rebrand for White Supremacy, I was left in awe of how embedded white supremacy is in the design thinking process. I’ve learned that design thinking is fundamentally conservative and preserves the status quo. This particular organizational practice is doing a fair amount of damage in the classrooms, businesses, and organizations that are located both in the United States and internationally. Using design thinking is essentially serving to concretize racial and social hierarchy, support shareholder wealth, re-embed corporate monopoly, and detriment marginalized communities, which ultimately leads to the idea that design thinking does the opposite of design justice.

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I am aware of the thinking process and how it has a set of design methodologies that are used to resolve problems within the design discipline. With our recent experiment, I noticed that our professor Rebecca Mushtare was implementing five steps of design thinking: empathize with your users, define the problem and interpret the results, ideate, prototype, and test. This experiment involved us listening to and empathizing with a specific audience, then use what we learned to define the problem we seek to solve. To truly design one must acknowledge these issues and push forth to a better solution. We should focus on challenging this status quo and uplifting communities to truly seek change and create design justice.

Dismantling White Supremacy Culture within AIGA by George Aye -

By reaching out to a person of color for the sole reason that they need a POC for their event to appear more diversified is a great example of a white supremacist culture. AIGA wanted to use a person of color (in this case George Aye) as their token and to be merely used for optics and the organization’s benefit. I truthfully just do not understand that if diversity has been such a major concern and a priority for designers then why is design still white?

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AIGA is made up of white supremacy and I noticed that during the BLM movement where they proclaimed solidarity with the movement, however, they did not credit those within their own organization. Maintaining power should not be more important than introspection and change, these major organizations need to realize that their culture is filled with white supremacy, and need to respond accordingly. I’ve realized the urgency in which we designers need to decolonize these design thinking and organizations because of the simple fact there is a lack of diversity within the field. We POC designers are extremely underrepresented in the industry and in order to combat this racial injustice is to empower marginalized communities and dismantle white supremacy.

Design Education's Biggest Gap: Understanding the Role of Power by George Aye

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Now I understand why we are conducting interviews so that we are aware that another group has needs different than our own, which is the basis of empathy or at least the starting point. By introducing us to different groups we are gaining a better understanding of different social classes and backgrounds that can interfere with the way they percieve things. By teaching us this and letting us become aware of this issue it is giving us the opportunity to share this among other people which in turn gives us more power.

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Wow, I never heard of the term power asymmetry and now that I heard it I felt like I’ve experienced this my entire life. I would love to be on top of my work at times in college however, the time frame for majority of my classes overlap and the workload can be exhausting. I’ll be left to a point where I don’t want to do any of it because it just seems like it’s being done on purpose which becomes infuriating. I have yet to stop and think what power I hold and see how my actions can make a difference both in the work environment and in the real world. I feel like I’ll always be on the short end of the stick given the power dynamics that are already employed in the workplace and school but now I understand my relationship to power.

Racism and inequity are products of design. They can be redesigned by equityXdesign -

I realized that the forces of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriacracy have always had the upper hand and we designers just let them have it for the longest time. By creating this sort of equity-centered design community, we designers of all backgrounds can begin to focus on equity, humility-building and addressing power dynamics, in order to create innovative solutions to these real-world problems that was spoken about in the past few articles.

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Many people were and are directly impacted by the design process and what we need to do is help reduce that harm. By doing so we should redesign, and design for equity, we need to remove the current innovation that is only accessible to the powerful and priviledged and replace it for those who are marginalized and experiencing oppression. Which leaves me with the question as to how can we create and design for greater equity?...