ON SISTERED DESIGN

Assistant Professor, Departments of Design and Race and Social Justice

Northeastern University

Abstract

This presentation explores the theme of Design Consequences with a focus on design education and pedagogy.

Lily Song and Euneika Rogers-Sipp present their sistered approach of teaching and learning to bring about just transitions and reparative design in the Georgia Black Belt. They speak about opportunities presented by anti-racist reckonings within the design professions and the global pandemic, along with challenges and strategies of harnessing specific moments to open up new practices and methodologies that retool design in more relevant, accountable, and impactful ways.

Lily: I’m joining this afternoon by Zoom from Northeastern University in Boston, which is situated on the occupied lands of the Wampanoag and Massachusett People. I want to begin by honoring the Native and Indigenous community leaders who work to preserve the history and culture of the tribes in this region. I also want to acknowledge the migrant, racialized, and working-class people who have joined them — despite four centuries of systematic division and cooptation — in seeking more healthy and humane ways of living together on the land. Boston remains among the most segregated metro areas in the country but is also home to fierce anti-displacement struggles and initiatives for equitable development.

Euneika: I would first like to acknowledge the living land, Our Mother Earth, as well as those first non-human and Indigenous human land keepers for the close relationship they had with the land. I would then like to acknowledge my ancestors who toiled without reward on this sacred soil and their allies who understood fellowship beyond blood.

Lily: We will be speaking about the responsibility of the designer with a focus on design education and pedagogy. We believe it’s important to design with an understanding of thick histories of place along with peoples’ movements and their struggles. No matter what, design has consequences; it’s our responsibility as designers to learn from the past to take mindful actions in the present that move with intention into the future.

Euneika: We are at a moment of climate crisis and vast inequality where we cannot afford to design without thinking about the severity of consequences, both intended and unintended. It’s also critical to act strategically to scale up transformative design that builds connections and movements between design practitioners, planners, activists, and change leaders. These would be transitions that shift society from the current extractive economy to regenerative systems. We are both very interested in what the cultures and methodologies of this sort of contextualized, solidarity design education and pedagogy looks like.

Lily: The project we are presenting today is the CoDesign Field Lab: Black Belt Study for the Green New Deal, a design-action research seminar that we co-created. It was offered at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) this past spring (2021) as a virtual course. I launched the CoDesign Field Lab in 2020 in my capacity as a lecturer in urban planning and design and founding coordinator of CoDesign, a school-wide initiative to link design teaching, research, activism, and practice. The previous year’s iteration of CoDesign Field Lab (CDFL) worked with the Place Leadership Network and the Boston Foundation. I was

Lily Song & Euneika Rogers-Sipp

thrilled to meet Euneika and learn about her long-standing practice of collaborative design and fieldwork. Euneika’s work inspired the next iteration of CDFL.

Euneika: Destination Design School of Agricultural Estates (DDSAE) builds on years of research and practice centering the Black Belt region of the southern United States. We have been investigating the practices and possibilities of integrating a reparative design residency into an intergenerational setting, anchored on youth-led inquiry. We are a collective of educators from different backgrounds and design disciplines and are all connected to the school through the Black Belt Reparations Design Residency and CDFL research project. Using a care and healing-based approach to collaborative design rooted in Indigenous and African American agricultural communities, this work led to my year-long Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard GSD in 2016 and eventually my connection with Lily in 2019.

Lily: Sistering is an anti-supremacist, reparative design epistemology and methodology in which designers accomplice place-based activists and frontline organizers who are leading the change to heal and repair communities, commons, and the planet. By reparative, we mean acts of repair, healing, and making whole that move us beyond the prevailing development regime, which has enclosed land and commodified much of life under settler colonialism and racial capitalism. To counter this, we seek ecologically and socially regenerative systems. One of the hallmarks of sistered design epistemology and methodology is working on relationship and community while attending to diversity and difference. This allows us to better recognize and address our respective biases and limitations as well as exercise our creative strengths and collective capacities more fully and impactfully.