Research Seminar – Leah Lockhart

Furious and Hopeful: Centering Justice in Design

Leah Lockhart – Freelance Design Researcher

Thursday 14th November 4pm – Inspace, 1 Crichton St

Design can be a key to collective liberation but design practices are deeply inequitable. Our public institutions aspire to be inclusive regardless of their unfair legacies. With the explosive growth in Scotland of service design in government, are newly designed public services at risk of reinforcing power imbalance and disguising oppression as human centered practice? How can designers be accomplices to unheard and underrepresented people in the pursuit of accessible and equitable public services?

This talk is a story about finding professional identity, design ethics, leaning into anti-disciplinary knowledge and design justice. We’ll take a journey through areas of queer theory, Black feminist thought, articulating Whiteness, assets based approaches and probably end up with more questions than answers.

Leah Lockhart is a freelance design researcher and facilitator focused on public service reform. You can find her on Twitter @LockhartL