Creating Diversity Within the Design Industry — Our First Steps.
One year ago, FutureDeluxe began thinking about how we could tackle the lack of diversity in our company, and the motion design industry as a whole. We started by setting up a Diversity & Inclusion team. Led by a group of our artists and producers, its goal was to do something meaningful, impactful and long-lasting towards creating equality.
We set ourselves the mission of inspiring and encouraging more young artists from diverse backgrounds to enter the industry and become role models for future generations.
To do this, we knew we’d have to create opportunities for these artists to access the industry. At first, this led us to universities and their students. We decided to partner with universities in London and Sydney, and give students from a diverse range of backgrounds the opportunity to be mentored by FutureDeluxe artists.
In London, we partnered with London College of Communication (LCC), which has a demographic of 70% women and 40% students from marginalised ethnic groups. Their BA (Hons) Graphic and Media Design (GMD) course prepares students for the “future of design and emerging technologies”, which aligns perfectly with our work at FutureDeluxe.
Our D&I team designed a comprehensive course for second- and third-year BA GMD students. Throughout the six-week course, 11 members of the FutureDeluxe team delivered presentations around creativity and design. Our artists also stayed on to answer student questions about career paths, design approaches, and application of technology.
We also set the students a creative brief, asking them to imagine ways in which audio inputs could be translated to visual outputs. The brief aimed to challenge and enable students to experiment with new approaches and technologies in their practices, which is something our artists challenge themselves with every day. In the final week, students presented their work to artists from our studio, talking about their approaches and processes, and our artists provided feedback and advice on how to consider pushing the work further.
We’ll continue to mentor LCC students and hope to extend our work with LCC into the next academic year. We have a similar partnership running in Sydney with Billy Blue College of Design, and we’re looking for additional uni partnership opportunities globally where we can reach a diverse cohort of students.
What’s next for our education strategy?
The university partnerships we formed were a positive first step for us. Next, we’re extending our focus to younger audiences who have raw creative talent but aren’t aware of the different paths they can take, and may not have the means to go to university.
At FutureDeluxe, our expertise is 3D motion design, which requires expensive computer hardware and software to produce the work we do. It also requires specialist training, which usually comes from competitive and unpaid internship programmes. All this makes it nearly impossible for people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to get into the industry.
In the immediate future, we’ll be working with local secondary schools and art colleges to set up inspiration sessions for those younger audiences. We’ll focus these sessions on practical ways for young people to enter the industry, and teach them about the types of jobs — and salaries — they can aim for.
In the future, we aim to set up partnerships with government and private sector organisations — bodies with secure funding — to provide computers and software licenses to young designers from low-income backgrounds. These will be used in tutorial courses on Cinema 4D and Houdini, which our artists plan to run.
We keep reminding ourselves that our strategy to change the shape of the motion design industry is a marathon not a sprint. We’re only a small studio (there are fewer than 50 of us) and we’d be fools to try and take on too much at once. Plus, a large part of what we do involves listening and learning with the young people we want to engage — this includes responding to their needs, instead of us simply assuming how we can help.
We hope that our focus on the education sector will influence and inspire more young creatives to choose the path of motion design, and to make a small change to our industry demographic. We’re committed to continuing these efforts and more, well into the future.
Written by Remi Abayomi, Managing Director, FutureDeluxe
