Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and Masters of Graphic and Experience Design

The program was fortunate to attract these talented graduate students, now accomplished alumni.

A PhD candidate. A Master Inventor. A Doctoral student and Professor. A Design Manager. A Research Manager. An Entrepreneur and Professor. A PhD and Professor. A Chief Creative Officer. A Digital Art Director. A Professor and Indigenous Peoples Advocate. A Design Studio Entrepreneur. These eleven alumni represent the best of the College of Design’s graduate program.

Some of these alumni are committed to changing the face of design, some to refocusing the scope of design, some to expanding the reach of design, some to rethinking design education. All are contributing significantly to industry and to education, leaders in their career pursuits.

The following interviews were conducted in Fall of 2021 by Associate Professor Jarrett Fuller, the producer and host of the design podcast Scratching the Surface.

Your background is in journalism and mass communication. What is its relationship to graphic design?

I’ve always been interested in writing and it’s always been something that I’ve been pretty good at. When I went to undergrad at UNC, I started taking journalism classes and I quickly realized that a lot of the news editing and that kind of thing wasn’t really super appealing to me. At the same time, I was always interested in magazines. When I was younger, I’d cut them up and make collages and things like that so I thought I should look into something like publication design. We didn’t have a graphic design major, it was part of a visual communication program, so I just started taking any graphic design class I could take.

I think the relationship between journalism and graphic design is actually much stronger than we sometimes give it credit.

I remember when I first started the program, I was thinking, “that was journalism... this is graphic design.” But it wasn’t like that. It’s not like this separate thing. For me, writing has become a way for me to organize thoughts and to communicate ideas. I use it in my practice in parallel with what I’m making, so it becomes this conversation.

Why’d you continue with a PhD after the MGXD program? What are you working on?

It’s the perfect intersection of design, writing, and research. My work now is directly related to what I did for my MGXD thesis, which looked at art-based or imagerybased therapy for anxiety; how design can help facilitate that therapy process through something called imagery rescripting. The idea is that people with anxiety have certain images of thoughts that pop into their head and theory suggests that you can alter that visual content to help ease anxiety. I’m interested in mediating that tendency through drawing and illustrations.

PhD programs have historically been restrictive or not accepting of people who are women and people who are black. How has this influenced your work?

I come from a background of extremely educated people, especially women. My grandmother, on my mom’s side, went to UNC. She was a professor at Johnson C. Smith University, which is an historically black college in Charlotte. My great grandmother went to North Carolina Central. She also was an educator. Then on my dad’s side, my aunt was the first to go to college and the first, obviously, to get a PhD. She passed away while I was in the master’s program. That was a really challenging time for me but also something that I draw a lot of inspiration from. When she was finishing her dissertation, we spent a lot of time together and it’s a time I think about a lot now that I’m in this program. So I have always tried to have the attitude that I deserve to be in this space. I have a lot of family history in this area, and specifically with these universities, so I have every right to be here. And so I try to carry that attitude forward in any space.

Everybody experiences impostor syndrome but I’ve never had anybody in this program make me feel like I need to do more. I’m pretty sure I’m the only black woman in the PhD program and I would love to see more women of color, specifically black women, in programs like these. I’m wondering how that can happen because it needs to start even earlier with undergrad, and masters programs, and even people just saying, “hey, have you thought about this program?” Like people did with me.

You have a BFA in graphic design and then there’s a year gap before you started in the MGXD program. Tell me about that year gap. Oh, I love that year because it was the year of the worst job of my life and has given me the perspective to love what I do. My very first job out of the gate was at a design agency where it was just me and the owner and he ended up being completely inappropriate because of this male in a position of power with a younger female. So when I quit out of principle, I was left paying for my rent, paying for my bills and not having a job. I didn’t have the luxury of job hunting so I literally took the first thing I was offered, which was as an in-house graphic designer at a chemical company. It was a huge hit to the ego because a lot of my friends who graduated with me were working at really cool agencies in downtown Charlotte. They were doing amazing work while I was Photoshopping a bulldog driving a race car. It was demoralizing but it paid the bills. I was dying inside. I dreaded driving to work every day. I was like, there’s got to be something better; this cannot be it. I knew there was something about design that I loved and this wasn’t it. I was very much in this mode of soul searching and trying to figure out what about design resonates with me. Where is my passion?

Laura Rodriguez (MGXD ‘11) is a User Experience Designer at IBM with a focus on enterprise collaboration software, Advanced Cluster Management, and internal tooling for use by IBM employees.