I keep recommending that friends download and use their public library card to listen to audio book for free (!) on the Libby app. So I thought I’d share a list of the books I’ve been inspired by. Because it can be hard to figure out which books are actually available in audio format.

Because Libby works as a public library, you often will have to wait to access an audio book. So I tend to go in every few weeks and add a bunch of books to my “Holds.” So, that’s what I recommend you do with this list…

For my Design dissertation, I am exploring the idea of clarifying and engaging people in the long-term outcomes of social justice work — visions of the worlds we can achieve. Walidah Imarisha (2010) writes about this as she defines Visionary Fiction. In Design we want to make these visions tangible and experiential (FoAM, 2008, Candy, 2010). In efforts to achieve social justice, visions of the future we might achieve could help communicate WHY the work is necessary and worth the struggle. …

“The more we understand about our histories of both oppression and resistance to it, of injury and resistance, the better we come to know our real capacities, and the better able we become to act powerfully and build real alliances.” (Morales, 2019, p. 65)

A new paper, Anti-Oppression Mindsets for Collaborative Design, will be published as part of the Design Research Society (DRS) Conference in August, 2020. In this paper I draw on the work of Decolonising Design and Design Justice, and I learn from Cross-Cultural Psychology to shape careful and respectful relationships with design partners. Here is a glimpse…

Everyday racism is entwined in the technology that we design, yet we have few tools and techniques to engage participants in solutioning. Participatory Design is an ideal method for bringing people from marginalized positions into the design process. It is a powerful way to imagine solutions with those directly involved in a challenge, but for sensitive topics, like racism, group discussions can be too painful and personal. Here we share how a first-person, fictional, interactive narrative can serve as a rich foundation for collaboration and discussion, and relieves participants of the need to reveal personal trauma until they are ready.

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My PhD dissertation is focused on anti-racism and design, so people sometimes ask for advice on more diverse or socially-oriented readings for course planning. As a student in the classroom myself, I have felt the frustration of a syllabus filled primarily with white men. It is especially painful as our courses are often made up predominantly of women, and if we’re lucky, include a diversity of cultural backgrounds.

Here I present a list of readings for you to consider adding to your design syllabi to demonstrate that women and People of Color do have a voice and place in design…

Written by Team Resilience: 
Hillary Carey, Alex Klein, Nandini Nair, Yuchuan ShanRacial Inequity in Pittsburgh, Transition Design Seminar 2020, CMU

Hillary Carey is quarantining in Oakland, California. She has now completed her first year of the PhD in Transition Design at CMU. She is focused on bringing anti-racism and anti-oppression theories into design practices.

Alex Klein is currently quarantining in Michigan, but calls NYC home. In May 2020 she will complete her Masters of Arts in Design at CMU. Her work focuses on the ecology and the built environment.

Nandini Nair is a third-culture kid hailing Aotearoa (New Zealand)…

Research through Design

INTRODUCTION

I have been taking Stacie Rohrbach’s class, designing learner experiences to do some hands-on exploration for teaching about racism. This project started with a broad question about how to make more people aware of racism in general and evolved to the more specific objective of teaching college educators about the harm of microaggressions in the classroom.

WHAT I MADE

Slight Off-Hand: A learning game about microaggressions
Making the topic of racial microaggressions more accessible and less intimidating by enabling Teaching Assistants to play out classroom experiences around race in a low-stakes learning environment.

In Transition Design class today, we engaged in a video lecture with Arturo Escobar, activist and author of Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds (2018). In this book, Escobar proposes a way of designing, Autonomous Design, that is similar to Carnegie Mellon’s Transition Design, and Ezio Manzini’s Social Innovation. Yet Escobar draws more from critical social theories like Feminist Theory and is deeply embedded in Epistemologies of the South.