This month, we are featuring the work of Pierce Gordon, Ph.D., an interdisciplinary researcher, facilitator, evaluator, and change catalyst impassioned by the intersection between transformation and liberation. His research and consultation work has tracked and supported design+international development's spread, complexity, and emergence: by developing reviews of human-centered design for international development, by conducting ethnographic analyses and facilitation projects in the Botswana innovation ecosystem, and by developing mixed-methods analyses of educational design spaces like OpenIDEO and UC Berkeley's DevENG Minor that unpack the efficacy of their platforms.

He has developed acclaimed workshops that guide passionate changemakers through building their own social change strategies: whether he builds community-centered design and evaluation work as the Inaugural Research Fellow in Residence at the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub, whether he is co-facilitates Botswana’s first Policy Hackathon, shepherding 100+ country experts on codifying entrepreneurship support, or by co-founding Reflex Design Collective, an equity design consultancy that works for creative social justice in the Bay Area, his core aim is to catalyze good social change.

You can connect with Pierce Gordon directly at: piercegordon1.medium.com/about

Below is one article (of many), featuring Pierce’s work: A Hundred Racist Designs, and as well, a Podcast (Oct. 22, 2020): Racist designs, Design Justice and Mycelium.

If you are a DJN member doing interesting work, and would like to be featured in a future newsletter or blog post, please email us at designjusticenetwork@gmail.com.

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Podcast (Oct. 22, 2020) : Racist designs, Design Justice and Mycelium

(This article below, originally appeared on Pierce’s website, on August 2, 2020)

A Hundred Racist Designs

This moment feels different.

It seems overnight, the world is overcome with injecting anti-racism into every endeavor. Some colleagues, for the first time, are coping with the weight of the oppressive system. Others, fortunately, have collected countless resources posed to help design a more equitable future.

Unfortunately, racism proves to be larger, more abstract, and more elusive than the objects traditional designers are used to constructing. To some extent, it’s not their fault: racism’s been designed into our society for hundreds of years. Unfortunately, designers still fail to recognize the countless ways — tangible, yet invisible — that racism has been injected into our technologies.

It’s time to do more.

Source

A couple of months ago, I logged onto ‘Design Twitter’ to see how the community was coping at large with the political climate. I happened upon a tweet thread, started by @LabSpecEth, which asks the design world this question above.

When we think about racist artifacts, we lean on products of the past: figurines, old advertisements, and other anachronisms. Droning on past designs keeps us from recognizing the objects that continue to affect us today. What are the objects that were designed to, or are used as unique leverage points towards racial inequality?

But before we get started, let’s make something clear. Just because a design isn’t intentionally made by a racist doesn’t mean it hasn’t adopted racist politics.

Sure, racism is woven into every part of our society; but how deep does the rabbit hole go? Surely some of these designs weren’t made to oppress black folks, right? Of course, the cotton gin, the noose, and slave ships were racist. But does the banjo count, because it was designed and popularized by black people. Sure, countless racist books have been created; but is the book itself racist?

The truth is, some of the most corrosive racism is camouflaged. Just like racism is bigger than a single KKK member, a racist design doesn’t only come from the intentionally racist designers. You’ll see many shades of grey with the designs below: some were intentional, and others corrupted by the system we collectively inhabit.

We must approach the task with nuance and care. We must consider history, context, the capabilities, expectations, and unintended consequences of tools communities take for granted.

Admittedly, this casts a wide net. You might be surprised at some of the options on this list, and many of them continue to do tangible good in the world. However, our designs contain multitudes, and it’s up to us to reconcile the many sides of our creations.

These truth and reconciliation projects will reveal to us — piece by piece — the invisible, intentional, and collateral damage that racism has on our history. If you want to debate, let’s have them. If you have examples of other racist objects, come forth and share.

Things cannot be changed unless they are faced.

Photo by Liza Rusalskaya on Unsplash

1. The Speculum

The speculum we see today — that duck-billed apparatus that clicks open, giving doctors a line of sight to the cervix — is fundamentally quite similar to the one [Dr. James Marion Sims] used on his slave women. In 1870 a man named Thomas Graves updated the device slightly, and gave us the form we see today.
Source

To finish reading the entire article with all images, please see the article on Pierce’s Blog here: https://piercegordon1.medium.com/a-hundred-racist-designs-ff713cd5aa42