A Conversation with James Howard, Perpetual Optimist
I was eager to sit down for a series of conversations with Prof. James Howard because he embodies an important tension that feels at the core of design thinking and social innovation: clarity about the enormity of challenges we face as a society with faith in the capacity and goodness of humans to create better futures. James wears more hats than one can count: award-winning designer, beloved professor, tea house owner, school founder, champion for Black inventors, and self-described perpetual optimist. As an adviser to Princeton University’s Tiger Challenge, James taught me both design instruction techniques and also how to build a program’s personality.
What follows is a condensed version of a series of conversations in 2020; in them, James shared experiences of racism as well as experiences of encouragement. While dismantling white supremacy will require myriad tactics at individual and systems levels, James illustrates how he uses perpetual encouragement as a foundational pedagogy towards building boundary-breaking communities.
Prof. Rafe Steinhauer: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk. It’s 2020. We’re in the midst of COVID, a reckoning on racial justice, political upheaval and violence. How are you doing?
Prof. James Howard: I’m well. What fuels me — and the core of my pedagogy and teaching — is something I adopted from home many, many years ago: this notion of perpetual optimism. It is an interesting time. But I’m always optimistic about every challenge that confronted me, and I am perpetually optimistic about the future of mankind.
The way I am able to do that is to believe there is this moral center in every person which can fuel good deeds and good acts and good works. Granted, in today’s time it is challenging to have this philosophy. Wow, it really is. But through uncertainty comes great opportunity, fueled by people’s moral center meeting their creative capacity. For example, I’ve been writing recently about this opportunity to reshape what we mean by “classroom”. [Our society has] a precept that the classroom means “inside space”. This is an opportunity to expand that notion and that identity of what “classroom” means. I’ve suggested an “H3” or “Hybrid-3” approach, combining indoor, virtual, and outdoor. Outdoor space — for colleges like Princeton or Entrepreneurial U as well as for younger kids — will bring students, especially in chilly weather, into creatively thinking about our built environment while staying safe.
Rafe: Your most recent entrepreneurial endeavor is the Black Inventors Hall of Fame. What led you to start this project?
James: The contributions of Black inventors have helped shape this nation. When their stories have been told, they’ve been brief, they’ve been intermittent, and they have always been sequestered. There is space in some national conversations for Black contributions to social progress; there should also be consciousness of contributions to progress through discovery, through design, through technology, through entrepreneurialism. For example, think about our current moment: how many people know it was a Black slave, Onesimus, who sparked the eradication of smallpox in America? As someone who has been both an inventor and teacher of history, I started to feel an obligation to immortalize stories like his.
It’s also worth mentioning that The Black Inventors Hall of Fame is not alone. When my partner and I started this, we quickly discovered others working on similar projects , but when we reached out it seemed many were no longer active. This speaks to the need for partnership to make it last. The idea, the need, the energy — these aren’t unique. But what will get it to take root?
Rafe: You also founded the first professional school in the U.S. dedicated solely to teaching social entrepreneurship and design thinking, Entrepreneurial U. Can you tell me more about the school and your vision?
James: In one word: Community. Entrepreneurial U is a community-minded school that embraces the idea that everyone within the community — everyone — can benefit from design thinking. One of our core missions is to instill creative confidence to everyone in the community, one mindset at a time.
As humans, we’re not built to think outside the box — the brain is wired to keep us safe. So while humans are morally good and have an insatiable desire to have a purpose, we need something like design thinking to help us step into new futures. Design thinking isn’t a panacea, but it can add a pep-to-our-step. It’s like STP motor oil: a fuel-additive for communities tackling the issues they face and finding purpose along the way.
Entrepreneurial U does a few things. The core offering is a five-week certified career transitioning program, funded by the state of New Jersey. These are individuals who, in some cases, have been in telecommunications or social work for 10–15 years and now want and need something different.
The five weeks begins with students becoming master storytellers. Then builds to understanding and building empathy for others in the cohort: understanding their stories, feeling their stories. This builds community, which is essential for where we go next: to the nuances of design thinking, opening students to opportunities and optimism. This is not optimism that’s misguided; it’s optimism that is an awakening to what’s possible. We use provocative operations to open up this thinking, and then we look at challenges they see as worth addressing. I only use unique teaching modalities; you can imagine the impact of [career transition programming] that goes deep on identity, community, possibility, and problem-solving.
Rafe: What is an example of a provocative operation?
James: It’s re-framing a question in a way to inspire creative ideas and action. In Project 480 — our project on opioid addiction — the default might be to focus on addicts and potential addicts. Our provocative operation was, “How might we shift the concept of pain? What does pain mean?” When you hear that question, it forces imagination and creativity to snap into gear, to start to imagine different ways of approaching the problem and the future. It begs the question, “how?”
Rafe: You’ve been a mentor to four teams in Princeton University’s Tiger Challenge program. Princeton is a 275-year-old Ivy League. Entrepreneurial U is a 3-year-old professional school. How do you think about teaching design thinking in these two contexts?
James: When it comes to innovation, I think not just about inclusivity but about community ownership. And I think about the optimism that avails itself from seeing how innovation arises out of community ownership. Community is where you need to look to for innovation, not institutions. I know that social innovation programs at name-brand schools — Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Princeton, MIT — grasp that message intellectually, but I think there is still a lack of true belief — and responsibility — that innovation happens by including communities as equal shareholders.
Ironically, at the community college at which I taught and at Entrepreneurial U, students have more optimism even though — some might say — they have less reason for it given the roadblocks they’ve faced. Incidents and roadblocks like I faced. At Princeton, however, I’ve observed that students are less optimistic even though one might say they have more reason for it. Including communities as equal shareholders would increase everyone’s optimism and capacity for innovation.
Rafe: How did you become interested in design? How did you overcome the “incidents and roadblocks” you mentioned to achieve success across a wide range of endeavors?
I tell my story a lot, because at Entrepreneurial U we discuss how important it is to tell your story as a design thinker.
As I said, I am a perpetual optimist. I think this comes from both the support I’ve had — people seeing and encouraging me — and from being fueled by negative experiences, what I call the big “pain points” in my life story.
I was the seventh of eight kids in my family. There was a four or five year gap between the older set of four and the younger set, and my mom was smart: she literally assigned one younger sibling to one older sibling. I was assigned to my older sister Doris. Doris was the person who encouraged me: I could draw a stick figure, and she’d tell me I should enter it into a contest! This constant praise prompted me to fill all my time with drawing. As my older siblings had kids, I would take their baby photos and turn them into drawings — stuff like that. And Doris kept encouraging me and encouraging me. When I was 9 or 10, she encouraged me to enter a Peanuts contest and I won $5. In tenth grade, our school newspaper had a competition to come up with the school newspaper’s name and logo, and Doris told me to go for it, and I won that too. By the time I was a senior, I had won four competitions.
I went to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) to study graphic design. But I didn’t meet the GPA requirement for graphic design my first year, so I was told to major in industrial design, which didn’t have a requirement. So you could say that I stumbled into industrial design, but I have no regrets — that’s when I started flourishing.
There were also what I call the “life pain points” that fueled me. At 17, I was the youngest African American person at a printing company, and everyone ditched on me — I mean it was really bad. So I took my issue to the president, the guy who had me fetch his coffee. And he looked at me and said, “James, you’re just going to have to suck it up.” So I quit and went to have a beer with my dad. My father said, “You did the right thing, James — respect knows no age.”
The second pain point that fueled me was in college. It’s 1976. I’m a freshman, one of six African American men in the design program at Illinois. The largest group they’ve ever had, up from one or two. Over the ensuing four years, the chair of the department referred to all six of us as, “Jim.” And I was the only James in the bunch. So up until that time, if you wanted to shorten my name to, “Jim,” it was no big deal. But ever since, I’ve insisted on going by James.
There were many more “life pain points” in school and in grad school and in my career: racism under and above the surface. But I also had people encouraging me too, like Sy Steiner — head of the industrial design program at University of Illinois-Chicago. I had a disgusting experience with a faculty member there who was assigned to be my graduate school adviser. He told me I ranked a zero when compared to the other grad students, and that I did not deserve to be in the program. Two years later, my thesis project won an international design award, and the rest, as they say, is history.
At Entrepreneurial U, a lot of people have experienced their own life pain points; they’ve experienced disrespect and worse. That’s a part of people’s stories. My teaching philosophy is that perpetual encouragement can help fuel perpetual optimism.
Rafe: Since George Floyd’s murder this past summer, many design conferences have focused on racism in design. You’ve spoken at conferences about your experiences throughout your career, but what have been your experiences speaking at conferences — being asked more frequently to comment on race and design?
James: I’ll tell you a quick story. I was on a panel about diversifying design, and I immediately felt out of place. When we were preparing, an organizer said that the design community is “looking at this issue as privileged white educators.” So here I am saying, “Well, that’s not me. Should I be on this panel?” I’ve been a participant of that conference’s community for a couple years — a Black professor at a small professional school — and yet in a conference addressing exclusion, the group is defined in such a way that I’m not included.
Rafe: Your experience reveals the interplay between representation and implicit bias. Here’s a well-intentioned person who had a default model of who the “we” in design is, no doubt born of years of Black under-representation in the communities that this person (and I, as white educators) have been part of. And that default model came out even in a conversation about how we address it.
James: Yes. There was a comment made in a conference that we don’t need reflection from white educators, we need action. But I think we need both. We need reflection. But in reflecting, it’s not about guilt. Embracing the feeling of guilt is okay. But, Rafe, what follows the word “guilty” in the courtroom? Prison. And we don’t need people imprisoning themselves (unless the sentence is community service, that’s okay!). But we have people acting more now because of more conversation and more reflection and more awareness. Under-representation and implicit bias reinforce each other. So do action and reflection.
Rafe: This piece is on a Medium publication called, “Future of Design in Higher Education.” What comes to mind when you hear that phrase?
James: A better world. A better world in two ways: both that the world of design in higher education is better. But also that design — as taught and advanced in higher ed — creates a better world. Those will happen only when community is paving the way. When we create a truly inclusive classroom environment: not just inclusive by identities represented, but by reaching out beyond higher education and embracing communities working together to design a better world.
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You can read more about Prof. Howard’s work at www.eu2designthink.com, www.bihof.org, a James Howard | LinkedIn
