Designing a Liberatory World
When trying to create a “better world”, it’s necessary to look critically at the ways oppressive systems, in particular white supremacy, are enmeshed with the things that get designed and built.
An interview with Post Growth Fellow, Pierce Gordon, Ph.D.
At the State of Black Design Conference in 2021, Pierce shared his ideas about how an educational environment can bear witness to its deep and complicated relationship with oppressive systems, including white supremacy, and start to build a space made specifically to design alternatives to those things. His article, ‘Design’s Ledger of White Supremacy: Constructing a Critical Race Pedagogy to Shape Design Futures’, outlines a course to do just that — and the article is featured in a new book, An Anthology of Blackness: The State of Black Design.
In this interview, Pierce explains how design methods relate to white supremacy, how the course he designed can be applied to transforming other systems of oppression, and offers suggestions for ways you can apply these insights to your own liberatory endeavors.
Post Growth Institute: How did your personal and academic experiences inform the creation of this course?
Pierce Otlhogile-Gordon: I wanted to find work with a soul. Doing so meant leaving a profitable and defining career in applied physics and aerospace engineering. I realized, as I had the opportunity to start a PhD in research across any collection of fields, that it mattered less to be seen connected to a profession, or to be the one to address specific and complicated technical problems; instead I wanted to make sure my work in some small way materially helped folks who desperately needed it. So, I started building a career most defined by its pivots — by, for instance, diving deep into the world of human-centered design for International Development, working in a constellation of innovation practice, participatory appraisal and design, evaluation capacity building, the evolution of innovation in Botswana, and serving as the director of the Equity Innovation Studio for a US-based consultancy. What matters to me most is figuring out how I could use that work, research, or community engagement to help understand equity and innovation and their intersection better, and also to materially support, across contexts — environments that make creative, justice-centered transformation possible.
PGI: Can you share some examples of manifestations of design supremacy?
PO-G: I actually wrote an article about this called A Hundred Racist Designs, in which I explore the ways our world has built — by intention or by proxy — racist objects.
Some designs were crafted to achieve racist goals, (e.g. city highway divisions chosen to isolate largely Black neighborhoods). Some designs have racist histories built into the invention process (e.g., HeLa cells, used as culture cells for generations but were collected from a dying Black woman who never consented — nor materially benefited — from the stolen cells,). And some designs weren’t intentionally racist, but intersected with broader cultural elements that affect how they’ve been used for racist ends (e.g., Halloween costumes that aren’t race-oriented, but are certainly used to celebrate racist Halloween parties).
There are obviously many more examples, and even more people who balk at the idea of racism in objects. A direct quote sent to me in response to my article is here:
“Several other ideas, like the highway bypass, are implemented all over the world to solve the problem of routing highways through cities without disrupting city life. What would the ‘anti-racist’ design recommend in this case? That we not have highways? Or we not have cities, because racists live in cities or they use highways?”
The truth is more complicated. If humans had a part in making a thing, any thing, it intersects with society and its dressings — and white supremacy, separation, exploitation, and all of its other cultural signifiers will shape that object once it leaves the designer’s hands. This question is actually a red herring for a deeper fear:
If we can’t control if our objects are seen as racist, why create anything in the first place?
Designers with privilege fear losing their agency to create an oppressive system they believe they don’t have a stake in. Because oppression, the system, is also created, it’s important to unpack these fears as we move forward. We cannot turn back the clock, but we can learn from how our world enmeshes with objects so that we can build healthier things for the human condition. That’s what the class is all about.
PGI: How do the design methods that shape products, services, experiences, and policies relate to the transgression of white supremacy?
PO-G: Herbert Simon created a powerful definition of design that I love offering as a case study. He said the definition of design is to devise courses of action and change existing situations into preferred ones. So, how we as an industry and a culture practice the field of design in a bubble feels like the moral, valuable, and appropriate way for humans to wait to make their mark on society.
There’s a problem, however: all parts of valuable design are considered valuable if they are built by a small minority of accredited professionals: a) how the design is created; b) who’s considered capable of accomplishing it; c) what types of design are “preferred”; and d) what “preferred” actually means. In this way, fields like Design Thinking, user experience, industrial design, graphic design, architecture, design research, and many more operate within a hierarchy of creativity. Design professionals build their value system and decide what artifacts should expand to the rest of the world, and what shouldn’t. Conversely, there’s an important cultural difference made between design, as a discipline that shapes our world, and craft, a label attached to local, indigenous, and communal forms of creativity — no matter their genius, their contextual practicality, or their community engagement.
This dichotomy is fractalized throughout society: prevalent designs, designers, and design methods are spread as the universal creative leitmotif. However, artifacts bleed through these categories by bisociation and cultural spread across time and space in very interesting ways. Examples are everywhere: that are eventually recognized as beneficial and useful for the rest of the world — think, for instance, of eco-harvested Indigenous plants that researchers intellectually protect for drugs and regulated herbs.There are also many types of high-tech design interventions spread all around the world — including the most remote areas of the globe — that marginalized folks obtain and repurpose for many uses — for instance, the ubiquitous cell phone. Although designs shape our relationship with the living world, the hierarchy maintains itself: rich, white, educated, male, Western people audit which objects can be appropriately subsumed into capitalist logics, and the rest of the world, who’ve been designing for millennia before any version of academic canon, build assets that are considered unvaluable and proto-modernist.
A core part of liberatory design means breaking these hierarchies, and relearning how folks can learn from unique and ever-lasting forms of creativity.
PGI: This is something another Fellow, Arpita Bisht, recently alluded to when speaking with us about resource use and architecture. In the Global South, buildings that draw on local or Indigenous materials and practices are labeled “vernacular” or “traditional”, whereas in the Global North they’re known as “heritage”.
PO-G: See? It’s too simplistic to say that these artifacts are merely against racism, sexism, class and the like (though some of them are!). It’s more useful to see how these artifacts hold or share power in the contexts of which they’re used. These patterns rhyme across cultures. At every single level and scope of current human existence, these trends sustain themselves, and the quicker you can see the patterns, the faster you can work to build things that try to break out of them.
PGI: What does success look like for course participants, in your view?
PO-G: Let’s get one thing straight: Building any one thing is hard.
Making it sufficiently successful to live by itself — outside of your meticulous crafting — is even harder.
For many others, it feels impossible to reach the next step — to build a thing affected by the social and political systems that permeate our society.
However, I believe white supremacy as a thing to design the past as an opportunity.
Many people are building resources and communities for designing a more justice-informed world: from Design Justice, Extra Bold, Hospicing Modernity, Design after Capitalism, and many more. Still, liberatory-informed, justice-informed, speculative, or decolonizing design, or the intersection of any of these topics, are deeply under-theorized, under-studied, under-practiced, and rarely considered important in our society.
So, I believe the students should define success for themselves in this space; it’s too premature to limit what success must look like in spaces like these. But I can suggest two outcomes as a start:
(1) that they a redirecting and expand their of their imagination, and
(2) that they become impassioned to spark a fire in them to look for liberatory ways to create, iterate, and collaborate in our world.
However, these successes aren’t the final grade, but but a springboard. Success might mean students build something they didn’t think would be possible. It might mean they build relationships to help construct alternatives in the future, or see how they can find a life in this work. A space like this has the opportunity, like its designs, to be generative: to find success by taking the journey to where creativity takes you, instead of assuming you know what you’ll find.
Some types of success I might not even expect — and I wrote the article! That’s the beauty of design.
PGI: What are the key challenges for teachers of this course, and why?
PO-G: Many! There are pedagogical/philosophical challenges, and practical/strategic challenges.
For the first set of challenges, teachers have to avoid believing themselves to be the final knowledge-giver — “the bank of liberatory praxis”, to honor Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. If they do so, they lose the wisdom and creativity the students can bring into the unique spaces of design classrooms. None of us has ever seen a truly liberatory world, and building an environment that replicates supremacy culture — by hierarchizing, dividing, and exploiting — is against our goals. Every opportunity to build this space is a new chance to plant seeds, to harvest your knowledge, to connect with other people and figure out what the world can look like. So shut up and let the students teach you.
For the second set of challenges, teachers much recognize the limits of teaching environments that keep them from building ideal artifacts and artisans. First of all, this is a survey course: it goes broad rather than deep. So if students are interested in a specific type of design artifact or skill, students must search for the artifact outside of the scope of the course, or cultivate that can’t be covered in the course structure due to time restrictions. Second, it’s hard to find examples of liberatory design that supports the student’s search, as they have been devalued, invisibilized, and are lost to society. Ensuring students and teachers have examples of what the world can become is essential but difficult.
Third, this course might not obtain the appropriate support from traditional academic environments: as a transdisciplinary space focused on deconstructing white supremacist designs, academic environments might very well be the systems under deep scrutiny. Fourth, design classrooms might replicate academic oppression by prioritizing the students’ learning journey over the material consequences the students might have on the projects they build. When they build with communities, many of those projects are left decaying under the weight of broken promises and exhausted community members — because students care less once the course is over. . We can’t do that if this work is going to be successful.
PGI: How can the course be applied to transforming other systems of oppression?
PO-G: Oppressive systems are an evolving, tenacious, many-faced, beast that works to centralize power and exploit everyone else. Personally, I consider white supremacy as the skeletal hierarchy by which all other oppressive structures organize themselves. That means the structure of the course: patterning racist creation, researching, building, and reflection — can be used to investigate other systems.
Race, class, caste, nationality, ethnicity, size, age, education, neurotypicality, religion, sexual orientation, indigenous heritage, gender, mental health, housing, wealth, language, formal education, and more all have their own cultural qualities and insights, but what’s the same is how they hierarchize their power. It’s always important to bear witness to how these systems have designed the world.
What’s important, however, is to show examples of design built for and with oppressed communities in mind: Curb cuts, closed captioning, the bicycle, Braille, the Medicine Wheel, sociocracy, the menstrual cup, are only a few examples. One thing is known for sure: each of these systems offer an opportunity: novel objects, novel design practices, and communities that hold essential wisdom about how the world should be designed. What’s more, they’ve been actively creating in those environments in ways all of us should learn from.
So, let’s do it. What’s stopping us?
Inspired? Here are three things you can do next:
1. As Dr. Jared Ball said, “there is a brilliantly beautiful, militant radical tradition in your community that is currently being suppressed and intentionally kept from you. Go find it: get off your screen and connect with people in real grassroots organizations — that’s where all the answers are going to come.” That includes answers about what is being built and what you need to build. Learn from communities that are affected by these issues, and curate and build with their wisdom in mind.
2. Try to work through how oppression shows up in your society and in your mind. These systems are fractal — so how you categorize people, how you fail to consider where your products come from, how you believe in building a new world without the sacrifice of privileged communities, and the way you try to practice solidarity with folks that desperately need it, will tell you everything you need to know about whether you’re practicing design supremacy or design liberation.
3. Get in touch with your creative side. Creativity is everywhere, and can be imbibed and practiced by everyone. It’s affirming, collaborative, and useful to see how creativity can be a channel for what you care about and what you want to build. So try it, suck at it, and then keep trying until you feel good about what you’re building. And then keep going.
