University Libraries

“The Room of Silence,” is a short documentary about race, identity and marginalization at the Rhode Island School of Design by Eloise Sherrid.

from IIDA: A Conversation on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion with Gabrielle Bullock and Karen Compton, Hosted by Cheryl S. Durst

As the first of an ongoing dialogue series, IIDA’s Talent Collective, Culture as Foundation explores the ways in which equity, diversity, and inclusion are addressed in the workplace and the industry at large.

A weekly collection of news, developments, and stirrings in the art world with host Hrag Vartanian, cofounder and editor-in-chief of Hyperallergic.

A brand dedicated to honoring, uplifting, and celebrating Blackness and Brownness in the arts and culture sector.

Nurturing and developing younger students is key to achieving future diversity in the interior design industry. We take a look at how designers and firms are breaking barriers in minority communities and the ways in which new education pipelines can grow.

A panel of design leaders explore how the design industry can be a force for change and decolonize design—understanding what this means in a multiplicity of ways, and shifting the focus from traditional design influences to a more expansive, multi-ethnic view that examines history, values, and current trends.

A podcast where black and brown folks have a conversation about architecture.

Breaking the Silence of Design is a bi-monthly vodcast tackling the uncomfortable conversations around race and inequity in the AEC industry.

Colleagues Huda Tayob and Suzanne Hall have been at work since autumn 2018 on a transdisciplinary open-access curriculum in Race, Space, and Architecture. Incorporating history, critical race theory, and studies of cities from Beirut to Dakar to Kuala Lumpur to New York, the project also gives prominence to fiction, biography, poetry, and film.

Racial inequity is historically and literally built into the country’s landscape—here’s how we can begin to fix that.

Bringing together a group of 30 interior designers and manufacturer representatives, the 19th International Interior Design Association (IIDA) Industry Roundtable, held Friday, Jan. 8 through Sunday, Jan. 10 in Chicago, tackled the often-personal, sometimes uncomfortable topic of diversity in the Interior Design industry.

As the first of an ongoing dialogue series, IIDA’s Talent Collective, Culture as Foundation explores the ways in which equity, diversity, and inclusion are addressed in the workplace and the industry at large.

Olivier Vallerand, Assoc. IIDA was named the 2021 Educator of the Year for guiding students to consider how design movements emerge from social, economic, and political contexts through exposure to marginalized communities and voices.

Last year, we profiled two prominent, successful women of color in positions of leadership—IIDA’s Cheryl Durst (pictured) and Gabrielle Bullock of Perkins and Will—on the cover of our February 2019 issue, asking the question: “Why is the interior design industry not more diverse than it is?” A year later, we’re posing the question again.

Much of the academic and professional discourse within the design disciplines over the last century has been bereft of a critical reflection on the politics of design practice, and on the politics of the artifacts, systems and practices that designerly activity produces. Our premise is that— notwithstanding important and valued exceptions—design theory, practice, and pedagogy as a whole are not geared towards delivering the kinds of knowledge and understanding that are adequate to addressing longstanding systemic issues of power.

The Design Justice Network is an international community of people and organizations who are committed to rethinking design processes so that they center people who are too often marginalized by design. We work according to a set of principles that were generated and collaboratively edited by our network.

People and cultures have always exchanged and borrowed ideas from each other to create new forms of art and symbolic expression. Whether intentionally or not, most if not all human creations reflect varied sources of inspiration. Why, then, are some products negatively labelled “cultural appropriation” or their creators accused of disrespecting the very cultures they found inspiring? And why do products inspired from Indigenous cultural heritage seem to spark particularly strong reactions and pushback? This guide unpacks these important questions. It provides advice to designers and marketers on why and how to avoid misappropriation, and underlines the mutual benefits of responsible collaborations with Indigenous artists and communities.

Race, Space & Architecture is an open access curriculum shared as a work in progress. Here, we engage with three questions: What are the spatial contours of capitalism that produce racial hierarchy
and injustice? 
What are the inventive repertoires of refusal, resistance and re-making that are neither reduced to nor exhausted by racial capitalism, and how are they spatialised? 
How is ‘race’ configured differently across space, and how can a more expansive understanding of entangled world space broaden our imagination for teaching
​and learning?

Colloqate Design is a multidisciplinary nonprofit Design Justice practice focused on expanding community access to, and building power through, the design of social, civic, and cultural spaces. Our mission is to intentionally organize, advocate, and design spaces of racial, social, and cultural justice throughout the built environment. Through programming, planning and design projects, Colloqate seeks to dismantle the privilege and power structures that use the design professions to maintain systems of injustice.