Crediting, honoring, and valuing the work that preceded you.
As a designer, I have taken job opportunities with lower salaries, limited power or lower-tiered job titles and free work under the rationale that I’m just lucky to be in the room. For a long time, I thought it was something that I chose to do. That I’d rather do the work because it needs to be done and no one else wants to do it. I’m trying to unlearn and disconnect myself from this false logic. It’s harmful to myself, and more importantly, it’s harmful to others. The risks I take on are due to the privileges that afford me that risk; no college debt, a partner with secure job and salary, and over a decade worth of professional experience I can now leverage. I can’t expect others who do not have access to these variables to assume the same risk that I take on, but in the design industry, we uphold these unrealistic expectations. By doing so, we perpetuate cycles of oppression that marginalize the voices, ideas, and labor of people with less access to the power and authority to be able to be seen and heard. Furthermore, it grossly limits who gets to participate in and shape the design conversation.
In my forever journey of consciousness toward anti-racist design practice, cultivating a culture of attribution is what I want to work toward both personally and professionally. The goal is to not only give credit where credit is due but to give power where power is due.
I’ve spent the last 13 years as a landscape architect and urban designer. Over those years, I participated and was complicit in white supremacist culture; it dominates all aspects of our work, both inside the office and through the projects we build. While firm missions claim to harness the power of design to build a more equitable future, the mobilization of grassroots organizations such as the Design Justice Network, BlackSpace, Design As Protest, and the Architecture Lobby demonstrate how much work there is ahead. And these design activists have been busy with this work for a long time, not as a result of their design education, but have persevered in spite of it. Those that center issues in design justice had committed themselves to this work before they called themselves designers. They are contributing radical visions for change that no existing academy could previously inspire.
In my own path of sense-making, processing and forging connections between the complimentary things I read and continue to learn about, and I’d like to share how they apply to my work and forever process of unlearning the harmful design practices that have moved me through my work for too long.
This is not blank slate territory.
Design culture champions the individual, not the collective; a single individual, a single firm, a single object, a single idea. They become figureheads and symbols that represent a larger body of work made possible by many different hands, minds, labor, counsel, and sources of inspiration. Sasha Costanza-Chock wrote about this concept in-depth in “Chapter 3: Design Narratives: From TXTMob to Twitter” in their recent book, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices To Build The Worlds We Need. As Costanza-Chock notes, it does a substantial disservice to the expertise, skillset, and labor for the vast majority of design professions that remain undervalued, unrecognized and also powerless to combat these injustices.
I don’t believe that blank slates exist, but especially not here. This current movement has been built and sustained by the vision, energy, and labor of local and national activists and community leadership; they are the creative visionaries in these spaces. They live and breathe this work without being compensated or recognized for their efforts.
Ideas are power.
Here, I refer to George Aye’s definition of power in his piece, “Design Education’s Big Gap: Understanding the Role of Power,” as “the ability to influence an outcome.” And that “when you have power, the chances of you affecting a particular outcome is increased.” Given that, power must be attributed to Black designers, educators, and activists who have been doing this work for a long time. In practice, crediting and attribution are minimally enforced for the sake of design “inspiration.” In a system that has been designed to prevent Black people from accessing power; denial of wealth, housing, property, education, health, and safety. Co-opting of creative capital is yet another manifestation of marginalization and exploitation of Black people through their creative labor that is already undervalued, unrecognized, and uncompensated.
Access to that power is controlled and limited.
How can someone be heard if they don’t have access to the powerful mechanisms that are required to be seen in our industry? Where we do recognize and attribute, it’s one-directional or granted to a select group. Recognition and credits currently advantage the most visible and powerful in our professional community. And as Constanza-Chock makes clear in their design narratives chapter, that advantage is built by design. “The typical capitalist firm is arranged in a pyramid structure so that resources (time, energy, credit, money) flow from bottom to top.” Without that power, you can remain invisible. In conversations with peers during my grad school search, the primary driver of enrolling at the perpetual number one and two ranked architecture school is their access to networks to market themselves and their work, which are otherwise impossible to access. Students are willing to put up with the debt, microaggressions, racism, sexism, and classism in exchange for the recognition and amplification of their own ideas and their work through these channels. These institutions function essentially as expensive PR agents. These prove to be highly successful mechanisms that distribute power to a few, but also create substantial barriers for everyone else who can’t claim these same distinctions.
So yes, this is about power. And those who have it will need to give it up.
That may include some or all of the following; your money, your relationships, and your ego to reallocate resources, time, and space. At a minimum, it is our responsibility, with our respective areas of power and privilege, to source, cite, and recognize, an already well-established body of knowledge and work and the origins of our design “inspirations.”
In a webinar hosted by ACSA, “Developing Policies and Shifting Operations for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion,” Theresa Hyuna Hwang reminded me that the work ahead of us is deeply personal. It starts with the self and how you plan on showing up in your everyday life. And it’s also about a shift of the designer mindset toward a culture of generosity and attribution — it’s how the individual plans to show up to strengthen the collective. As my MDes colleague, Keesa V. Johnson says, “I was born to change the world, so I’m here to change myself.”
Thank you to Kendra Hyson, Maisie Hughes, Colleen Clark, Truly Render, and Keesa V. Johnson for the time and space to write and talk through these thoughts with each of you. A special thank you to all of BIPOC designers, scholars, and experts who have given so much of themselves and their brains to help push us forward. Let’s honor this work by building upon what’s already built and make sure everyone knows who got us here.
