Designing Justice
5 Powerful ways to be anti-racist as a creative independent | By Gelaine Santiago
“As freelancers, we get to work with different organizations all the time. Some of us are just beginning our freelance careers while others have been at this for a while, but we all have spheres of influence. By practicing anti-racism as freelancers, we can help shift organizations and build more equitable spaces that benefit all of us.”
How to think differently about doing good as a creative person | A guide to avoiding "creative savior complex" when working on social impact projects, written by Omayeli Arenyeka and illustrated by Neta Bomani
“So you’ve decided doing good truly is an objective of your project. Even once you’ve made this distinction, actually doing good requires much more than merely having the intention to do good. Our decisions, no matter how small, have unforeseen ripple effects. Those effects are multiplied when our decisions involve other people. Unintended ripple effects can be avoided or minimized when we understand the people and the issues we’re trying to help.”
If We Want Design to be a Tool for Liberation, We’ll Need More Than Good Intentions | Words by Design Justice Network
“Good intentions alone aren’t enough to ensure that design serves as a tool for liberation. Beyond an intent to do good, we need an approach that explicitly focuses on how every design process can reproduce and/or challenge specific kinds of power inequities.”
Redesigners for Justice: the leaders we need for an equitable future
“In Creative Reaction Lab’s mission to cultivate Redesigners for Justice, we are promoting self-awareness that helps us all examine our roles in either perpetuating or dismantling inequity. The framework of Equity Designers + Design Allies supports an understanding of how and when we each might choose to either wield or yield our power in ways that center equity and engage humility.”
Justice by Design | Antionette Carroll
“Antionette Carroll challenges us to redesign a better world starting in our own communities. Everything around us has been designed - even systems of inequality. Therefore, social justice is a design decision and we all have the expertise, power, and responsibility to use design intentionally in our communities to create a more just society.”
Download the Equity-Centered Community Design (ECCD) Field Guide
“Equity-Centered Community Design, created by Creative Reaction Lab, is a unique creative problem solving process based on equity, humility-building, integrating history and healing practices, addressing power dynamics, and co-creating with the community. This design process focuses on a community’s culture and needs so that they can gain tools to dismantle systemic oppression and create a future with equity for all. Creative Reaction Lab’s goal is to share equity-centered community design to achieve sustained community health, economic opportunities, and social and cultural solidarity.”
James Baldwin’s “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” (recording here, text here in The Cross of Redemption)
“Well, one survives that, no matter how… You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.”