Closing Out 2023 & Entering Our Seasonal Pause | Design Justice Network Newsletter, 2023 Issue #05

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We close 2023 grateful for the many opportunities we had to connect with all of you through Care Pod, Member Story, Node and Working Group events. We welcome you to revisit those moments in the links to available recordings shared below, and we look forward to more in 2024 after our annual extended pause, starting December 16th 2023 and ending January 7th 2024.

In our transition from this year to the next, we celebrate Taylor Simone as she moves on from DJN’s contract team to her new role as Educational Program Director with the Underground Music Academy. As DJN’s Special Projects contractor for the last couple of years, she’s focused on design and development of our collective visioning, member system, theme-weaving and digital community restructuring initiatives -- and so much more! You can also follow her work with the Exodus School of Expression on IG, and add her design portfolio to your bookmarks to stay up-to-date on her projects. 

Victoria Barnett and Rene Joy continue their roles into next year, as do DJN’s Care Pod Team, Denise Shanté, Jody Chan, and Corina Fadel. Wesley Taylor, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Nour Arafat, Boaz Sender and Elena Silvestrini also return as members of DJN’s Steering Committee.

DJN’s Steering Committee stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people and invites all design justice practitioners to sign the Designers Against Genocide pledge. 

In gratitude and solidarity,
The DJN Team
Email: info@designjsutice.org
Instagram: @designjusticenetwork 
Twitter/X: @design__justice (double underscore)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/designjustice/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/designjusticenetwork
Web: designjustice.org

Network Updates

Member Stories & Spotlights

Sharing member stories is a powerful part of honoring our community’s history and building a more just and joyous future together. Past stories have featured members working in a variety of fields such as social work, community organizing, and handicrafts.

Recent Recordings

Introduction to DJN & Member Story Event, Lucía Garcés Dávila: Generating Community Participatory Processes through Design (MUUCH) | Evento introducción a DJN y testimonio de un miembro, Lucía Garcés Dávil

Recording in English:
In this talk, Lucía Garcés Dávila discusses Design as a method to promote generative processes based on community participation. She shares her research experience whereby design was a tool to work alongside participants in the revitalization of ancestral knowledge and languages, begun in the Mayan community of X-Yatil, Mexico. Using a participatory design process, members of the community created networks for sharing intergenerational knowledge, created a space of autonomy and empowerment where their voices and interests were shared collaboratively through the creation of visual materials, and revitalized the sharing of the Mayan language among the children and youth of the community. Based on her experience, Lucia’s design practice focuses on promoting these learning communities, starting with the empowerment of participants through the philosophy of popular education (Freire, 1979) and are supported by the implementation of visual dialogues (Sheelan, 2011). This generates a common language where the participants are researchers and interpreters of their own reality, through collaborative creation of visual materials.

Grabación en Español:
En esta charla hablaré sobre el Diseño como método para promover procesos generativos basados en la participación comunitaria. Compartiré mi experiencia en la investigación que empezó en la comunidad Maya de X-Yatil, México (2015), en donde el diseño se convirtió en una herramienta para trabajar junto a los participantes en la revitalización de conocimientos y lenguas ancestrales. Utilizando un proceso de diseño participativo miembros de la comunidad activaron redes para la transmisión intergeneracional de conocimientos; crearon un espacio para la autonomía y empoderamiento en donde compartieron sus voces e intereses en la creación colaborativa de materiales visuales; y activaron la revitalización de la lengua Maya entre los niños y jóvenes de la comunidad. A partir de está experiencia, propongo una práctica de diseño enfocada en promover comunidades de aprendizaje, que parten del empoderamiento de los participantes a través de la filosofía de educación popular (Freire, 1979) y están sustentada por la implementación de diálogos visuales (Sheelan,2011). Que generan un lenguaje común por medio de la creación colaborativa de materiales visuales en donde los participantes son investigadores e intérpretes de su propia realidad. 

Resources from the Meeting | Recursos de la reunión:

Introduction to DJN & Member Story Event, The Design Pedagogy Summit: Embedding Equity and Justice into Academic Courses

Recording in English:
In this member story, Jana Saadi, Madhurima Das and Anastasia K. Ostrowski discuss the Design Justice Pedagogy Summit where instructors from academia, industry, and nonprofits came together to learn about design justice in design pedagogy and to work on embedding equity and justice into their courses. The Design Justice Pedagogy Summit included panels and interactive activities to support instructors in reflecting on this content and embedding it in their courses. They share the materials and insights from the summit with a larger discussion of how communities such as this support design justice in design education contexts.

Resources from the meeting:

Coming Up for 2024

More Member Story sessions and spotlights, including two workshops to come from The Design Justice Pedagogy Summit:
In this workshop series, participants will complete three activities that were a part of the Design Justice Pedagogy Summit: an activity on taking the first step to reflect and embed design justice into your course and/or activity; a syllabus “makeathon”; and a policy envisioning session. In the first step activity (Activity #1), participants will identify one initial thing that they would like to change in their activity or course. In the syllabus makeathon (Activity #2), participants will explore the workshop outputs from Activity #1 to see the changes that participants were thinking of incorporating into their work. Then, participants will document all of their ideas for their course, reflect on how those ideas relate to incorporating equity and justice considerations into their course, and consider their long-term goals for the course. In the policy envisioning session, Activity #3, participants will create goals around design justice in higher education including at the department, institution, and/or academic field level. We will host this in 2 parts: Activity #1 will happen in Session #1 (1 hour) and Activities #2 and Activities #3 will happen in Session #2 (3 hours).

Registration links open in January!

More to Watch and Read

Interested in sharing your Design Justice story? Are you inspired by another member’s practice of the Design Justice Principles? We shape the storytelling process around what works best for you and will only share what/how/where you consent for us to share. As our Network grows globally, we’re particularly interested in elevating stories from new and international members!

Please contact info@designjustice.org to share your story or ask questions!

Nodes & Working Groups

Access our list of Nodes and Working Groups on our website. If you’re thinking of starting your own, learn more about how to organize a local node and read our local nodes zine that was created to support and give guidance to local nodes; much of it also applies to Working Groups. 

Recent Updates & Links

DJN’s Care Pod Team

With multi-passionate backgrounds in grassroots organizing, herbalism, bodywork, writing, holistic design strategy, emergent strategy, experience design, therapy, transformative justice and disability justice — our DJN Care Pod team is stewarding the network’s commitment to care and healing justice.

Watch recordings of the September event series: communicating through conflict

Care Circle, Framing Conflict As Play with Meenadchi

Watch recordings of the November event series: creating care ecosystems & care teams

Care Circle, Astrology as a Portal to Prototyping Care Ecosystems with Yoo-Jin Kang

Our Care Pod Team can be contacted at djncarepod@gmail.com. Please expect 48-72 hours for response.

DJN’s Organizing Team

DJN’s Steering Committee and contractors manage fundamental operations for the Network and support member-led experiences through a variety of initiatives. You can learn more about DJN”s structure on our website.

  • Organizers begin a seasonal pause on December 16th, 2023 until January 7th, 2024. Responses to most queries may be reserved until the end of the pause, but urgent requests will still be resolved as needed.

Our organizing team can be reached at info@designjustice.org. Response times may vary depending on the subject. We also provide a FAQ and simplified forms for certain common inquiries.

Open Opportunities

Ongoing Opportunities

Get involved with DJN via these volunteer opportunities open to all: 

Volunteer opportunities may include free annual membership with DJN. Reach out to info@designjustice.org to learn more about volunteer options!

Open Requests

We’re working towards more accessible events, materials and experiences. Guided by the Design Justice Principles, we’re interested in working with accessibility service providers led by and benefiting living experts directly. 

Do you know any community-based and equitably organized providers that may align with our Network? Send them our way! Submit your entry here or email Taylor directly: specialprojects@designjustice.org

We’re developing this resource list to share with members and add to our website’s resource page. If you would like to be credited as a contributor to this database, please email (or include) your name, pronouns, and if you are a current member.

For First-Time Subscribers

If you’re new to the Design Justice Network, welcome! Here are some resources to help get you started. As we continue to build these resources we welcome your questions and feedback.