On Topic: Season Two, Episode Four

On Topic is platform exploring the complex and lucid cultural conversations that represent the DNA of MCAD. If you like this episode, you can explore events, writings, and more episodes.

Amanda Huynh 黃珮詩 is a product, interaction, and food designer whose research focuses on community-building, race equity, and sustainable design. She has worked and lectured across a variety of design sectors in Vancouver, Bali, Shanghai, New York, Toronto, Ottawa, Milan, and Barcelona. Amanda is based in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY).

Amanda earned a BDes Industrial Design from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and worked as a professional designer for several years before pursuing a MSc in Food Design from Scuola Politecnica di Design in Milan. She is a Leader on the IDSA Diversity Equity and Inclusion Council, helping lead the effort to increase diversity and minority representation in the field of industrial design. Prior to her appointment at Pratt, she was an Adjunct Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, teaching in the Faculties of Design + Dynamic Media, and Culture + Community.

Rosemary Ugboajah is the founder and CEO of Neka Creative, a brand development agency committed to bringing the power of inclusion to organizations.

Over the course of her career she has worked with numerous brands, including 3M, Frango, Xcel Energy, Cargill, and Johnson and Johnson Vision Care. She also gained corporate experience as a marketer for Target Corporation. As founder and CEO of Neka Creative, she has led strategic and creative projects such as CareerForce (Minnesota’s statewide workforce system), Hennepin County’s LRT extension corridor, The Commons, US Bank Stadium, and NCAA’s Final Four Tournament.

Rosemary studied art and design at West Kensington College of Arts in London, graphic design at South Thames College London, and has a BA in advertising from the University of Minnesota. She currently serves on the board of the Minneapolis Downtown Council/Downtown Improvement District. She is also co-founder of ArtWest, a nonprofit organization with a mission of advancing equity in art education.

Full Transcript: 

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Sanjit Sethi: I'm Sanjit Sethi, president of Minneapolis College of Art and Design and this is On Topic where I engage with creative, cultural leaders on pressing issues facing artists, designers, and the broader community. In this season of On Topic, we're exploring creativity and equity and how it relates to work, leadership, teaching, and beyond. For this episode, we are highlighting a talk I had this past October for MCADs annual presidential lecture series on race and design. I was thrilled to speak with Amanda Huynh and Rosemary Ugboajah. Amanda is a product interaction and food designer whose research focuses on community building, race equity, and sustainable design, and is currently a professor at the Prat Institute. Rosemary is the founder and CEO of Neka Creative, a brand development agency committed to bringing the power of inclusion to organizations. Amanda and Rosemary shared their own experiences addressing race and racism inside and outside the design world. Together we also explored concrete and tangible paths for change and address the question of how can practitioners and companies structures be more responsive to the communities they serve and ultimately be more successful.

I'm so pleased to welcome all of you to the second annual MCAD lecture on race and design sponsored by the Target corporation. MCAD is dedicated to educating the next generation of creative and cultural leaders. It goes beyond the traditional binaries that we see within art and design education to realize that our students have a right and expect a holistic education that provides them with opportunities to do what they're doing and to be leaders in their fields. In order to do that work well, we need to address some of the most pressing issues of our times, and there has never been a more important moment to understand the impact of race and racism in the design world than right now. Today you get to hear from two internationally recognized visionary design leaders in a pointed conversation about racism and inequity in the design field and what we can do about it.

Rosemary Ugboajah and Amanda Huynh are both incredibly insightful on how this field can continue to be more inclusive, more responsive, to the communities it serves and ultimately in the end, a more successful field. Amanda is based in Brooklyn, New York. Amanda earned a bachelor's in industrial design from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, and worked as a professional designer for several years before pursuing a Masters in Science in food design from Scuola Politecnica di Design in Milan. She's a leader in the IDSA diversity equity and inclusion council, helping lead efforts to increasing diversity and minority representation in the field of industrial design.

Prior to Amanda's appointment at Pratt, she was an adjunct faculty professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design teaching in the faculty of design and dynamic media and culture and community. So we're really fortunate to have Amanda with us. Rosemary Ugboajah is the founder and CEO of Neka Creative, a brand development agency committed to bringing the power of inclusion to organizations. Over the course of her career, she's worked with numerous brands, including 3M, Frango, Excel Energy, Cargo, Johnson & Johnson, Vision Care, among many others. She's also gained corporate experience as a marketer for Target. As founder and CEO of Neka, she's led strategic and creative projects such as Career Force, which is Minnesota statewide workforce system, Hennepin County's LRT Extension Corridor, the Commons US Bank Stadium, and NCAA's Final Four tournament.

Rosemary studied art and design at West Kensington College of Arts in London, graphic design at the South Thames College in London and has a BA in advertising from the University of Minnesota. She currently serves on the board of the Minneapolis downtown council and downtown improvement district. She's also co-founder of Art West, a nonprofit organization with a mission of advancing equity and art education. So also fortunate to have Rosemary with us. So we're going to start off by hearing from Amanda and then after that Rosemary and then we'll be off to the races with hopefully a real vigorous and collaborative conversation.

Amanda Huynh: Hi everyone. My name is Amanda Huynh and I use she/her pronouns. So more than the job title that Sanjit shared, more than my professional accomplishments, I am prouder to be a partner and a friend, a sister, a daughter of immigrant refugee parents who were displaced by war and colonialism. I'm proud to be a mentor and a mentee and a colleague and a neighbor. I'm also, as Sanjit mentioned, an assistant professor of industrial design at Pratt Institute. So something that I try and do more and more in particular as a model for my students is to interrogate my own positionality as an abled bodied, light skinned east Asian woman, cisgender, and I've had the privilege to pursue higher education. I bring my own experience as a racialized first generation student to everything that I do, and I hold all of these identities at once. So when we talk about complex issues of race equity and inclusion, designers I think, are poised to connect these dots because diversity and equity inclusion should be embedded in our day to day work.

I do want to say that I'm under no illusion that design will save us all, not one of those people. It's really going to take sustained collaborative generative commitment and care from everyone to do this forever work that should live again in everything that we do. I asked the students before designing chairs to draw chairs from memory. What are chairs that they've seen throughout their lives that kind of stand out in their minds and what are the aesthetics that we value and why do we value those particular aesthetics? Trying to make space for the aesthetics of our lived experiences rather than the aesthetics of what we see repeated in a white supremacist society.

So we're very conditioned to centering whiteness and assigning value to white coated design. So how do we kind of take that apart or try and unlearn that? As I did earlier today, I do want to talk a little bit of what my trajectory to where I am today and how unlikely it was for me to be here in the first place as a first generation student to study design, go to an art design school at all instead of becoming something that thoughts a little bit more safer and understandable to my immigrant parents.

It really goes to this pipeline issue of not understanding what design is, especially industrial design. I don't think it should be up to luck that we fall into these places that we really find ourselves. All of my teachers and professors throughout my entire education from kindergarten to graduate school have been white. I was educated in Canada with the same aesthetics, same design canon that carried through to our students today. And I wish there was someone all along to tell me that there wasn't just one way to see things and to value things. And there was ways to have multiple voices and stories to be told. What does it mean to bring your whole self? For me, how do you search for shared values and trust in the community that you work with, that you go to school with, that you exist with in your neighborhood?

The idea that identity doesn't necessarily equal equity, or we have to apply this intersectional lens of class, race, gender, culture, age, ability, sexual orientation. I think of earlier this year, early 2021, I got a phone call from an acquaintance who shares the same race identity as me, but had no idea that racism existed and wanted me to talk him through this idea that racism is a very real issue with material consequences for a lot of people that we encounter every single day. And it didn't surprise me, but it also just stuck in my head as a way that people can be cushioned by different facets of their privilege, in this case economic privilege, to not seeing or being conditioned not to see the issues of bringing your whole self or not being able to.

So I fell into teaching at my Alma mater at Emily Carr University. I'm always endeavoring as a professor to be what I myself didn't have. And I have to say what a trip to become colleagues with your former professors. With the return to campus now, I mean, later pandemic, students have been organizing more around uncomfortable classroom situations and actually being able to be in the same space and organize together collectively to... Some of them come to me to ask for my advice on what they should do. And it's been encouraging that they feel this is something that they can do. And it's just beyond Zoom where the room is closed and everyone's just sitting in their rooms, but being able to actually share spaces and share values with their colleagues and take collective action.

Some of my colleagues who are incredible women designers gifted me a book also earlier this year called Women in Design that they put together 30 years ago in the nineties as a response to the women students in the department, largely white male department, who went to them with their issues about the ways that they were being ignored in the classroom, or the ways that their work was just not being valued in the same way as their white male colleagues. Their stories echo a lot of what continues to happen today, obviously, but we also have this intersectionality lens. So we have to understand that there are layers to the oppression. It's a book from the nineties, Women in Design and how can it be that we're having the same conversations 30 years later?

So as Sanjit mentioned, I am a food designer and it actually came from having these frustrating professional situations having to do with whiteness, having to search for a creative outlet that was something other than what I was being paid for in my day to day. So these short term design projects of making food really took over much of my life, evenings and weekends. And I realized that food was a material, that I could manipulate the same way that I do as an industrial designer with wood or plastic or metal. And it's because of food design that I finally saw myself as a designer and found a way that connected my training as a designer with my lived experience and my cultural background. Food is a material and it continues to be a material that allows me to address difficult topics because it lowers the barrier to entry for people to engage.

We can talk about anything if we talk about food first. Through this lens of food, this is the way that I've kind of tried to chip away by creating a space for myself in this industrial design world. So I knew I wanted to continue with design and it was interesting to me that it was food that made it all click together and it made the thing that happened that people refer to as bringing your whole self is actually seeing value in who I was in the field that I was trained in. So IDSA in summer 2020, as a response, as companies responded, as institutions responded, the Industrial Design Society of America responded by creating an Inaugural Diversity Equity Inclusion council on which I am a leader. And we're looking at solutions for changes within the society itself, changes within industrial design education and changes within the industrial design industry.

So again, this was not a place that I ever saw myself reflected as a student or a professional for many, many years. And the change seemed quick, but I know there were a lot of people working behind the scenes to make this happen, to give us a platform and give us resources and legitimize a DEI council. In February, in response to all of the anti-Asian hate crimes, IDSA released the statement on ongoing anti-Asian racism. And even though I personally worked on this statement, it still made me tear up a little when it came across my feed, because it was just a place where I didn't see myself and to be acknowledged in this way meant a lot, even though it took a global uprising, it took a lot of confronting of race and race equity to get to this point. So I want to talk a little bit about DEI hiring practices, but this also for educators applies to admission.

So I've been asked, and I know a lot of people are asked, to include a diversity statement. So for a company or a school to include a request for a diversity statement in a job application, that signals that you are committed or at least thinking about creating an inclusive and supportive working environment for everyone. But I do think that has to be a step further than asking for a diversity statement, which is largely not the thing that is... There's no set structure out there. It's just something that people started asking for. So I never know if I should acknowledge my own identity in a diversity statement, just talk about the things that I do to leverage power. But to me, I can't tease it apart from my statement of intent. I can't tease it apart from my statement of pedagogy. And that's something that I credit my colleague [inaudible 00:14:29] to kind of instill in me this idea that it's not separate, your diversity statement should not be separate from what you do in your day to day.

The other strategy is cluster hires. So hiring, for example, five indigenous faculty members, hiring five black faculty members, to provide an automatic cohort for those hires to come in and have a built in support system for these underrepresented employees. But still diversity hires are not going to solve a diversity problem, especially when they're not given power. So beyond hiring at all, to actually be able to retain people and give them leadership opportunities. Another facet of hiring and admissions practices is should job applicant requirements look the same for everyone? When we ask for particular education, credentials, professional licenses, accreditations, and certifications, we are already recognizing that particular communities are disadvantaged economically and they have fewer opportunities. So what if my resume has a state school and not a specialized private school? What if I couldn't make it into college at all because I had to support my family through working. What if my lived experience isn't credentialed? How do I get hired?

So back to bringing your whole self, who holds the power to decide that my diversity statement is enough? That it's good enough? And is there a trap door? So if I'm trying to bring my whole self to the table, literal and figurative, at the tables is there a trap door? Is there someone for me to trip up or waiting for an excuse to say, she's always talking about race. She's the one who's creating all these issues, she needs to go. So how do I bring my whole self when there's always these risks to kind of calculate before I say something that does represent part of my whole self? Looking at values versus statistics. So can we look at, rather than checking boxes of percentage of underrepresented folks who are on our teams or in our classrooms, actually having anti oppressive values and preparing for the employees that we want. Can we make a space to bring them into that they won't want to leave right away and fall into that trap door.

Having anti oppressive values also lessens the lift for these people, for these students, for these junior designers, to educate others on their team, to make space for others like them and to do all these other things that is required of us in addition to our jobs. Inclusivity doesn't stop at including you specifically. If you're a white woman, it doesn't stop at including white women. I am the first woman of color in my position as a full-time faculty member in the second oldest industrial [inaudible 00:17:30] program in this entire country. But we are so far from finished, right? We're not going to pull up the ladder behind us. We have to keep going.

SS: Thank you, Amanda. That was fantastic. Definitely, I can imagine that many of you have questions from Amanda's presentation. Hold on to them now and we'll look at them after we hear from Rosemary. So Rosemary, it's all yours.

Rosemary Ugboajah: All right. Hello everybody. I am so pleased to be here. First, just thank you, Amanda. I've enjoyed learning about your story, your journey, and your ideas on how we can all move forward, and definitely thanks to MCAD and Target for creating this opportunity to share and have the dialogue that we would have afterwards. What I'm going to share today, some of it will echo what Amanda said. I think I'll be coming more from an agency and corporate marketing perspective. I tend to be pretty candid. So just a little warning there. I've been doing this work for a long time. So a lot of the filters have been lost over time, but I am very passionate about it. So first and foremost, I founded an agency about 13 years ago, called Neka Creative. And this agency really came out of a desire to work within a culture that was inclusive.

So I do live in the twin cities. I am in west Africa right now in Nigeria, but I did work in six agencies in the twin cities. And I had extent of the corporation, right? So if you know anything about the ad world, we are a revolving door. We all kind of know each other. So I felt like I had experienced a lot of the agency life. And there was only one agency that I worked in that I feel we were really given the opportunity to be ourselves. And that agency eventually got acquired, but there was a time in that agency that we had 13 nationalities and 30 languages being spoken. And I longed for that experience. And while I shuffled from agency to agency, I thought let me try and create something. Another catalyst for me, building an agency [inaudible 00:19:56] advancing inclusion, also stems from the experience I had working for a large corporation.

There was a great desire to be inclusive. There was great statements around diversity and equity. However, my firsthand experience and a lot of experiences of my peers that happened to be from other groups that were non-white or from non able bodied groups and just other mainstream groups, didn't really feel that it rang true in our daily experiences. So I felt how can we help corporations actually attain that? So right now I have a team of real passionate people who we all share the same values of advancing inclusion one brand at a time through our model of inclusivity marketing. All right. So we all know this, the world has changed dramatically. In fact, it is the biggest global events since World War II, we're all experiencing the trauma of this change and we all have no idea when it's going to end and if things will ever go back to normal. I think most of us are settling into the idea that there will be a new normal or can that new normal actually be better than what we left? That will be up to us.

One thing that we can all agree on at this point, post summer of 2020, is that the disparities that exist can no longer be hidden. The disparities didn't begin with the uprising after the killing of George Floyd, but people somehow were forced to actually pay attention, right? So we cannot act as if everything in the world is okay. I would even speak for myself. Before I even studied my agency when I was in college, I really thought things were okay. I come with a lot of privilege, right? I am an immigrant into America. I studied in England. I studied in Nigeria too, then England. So I didn't come with a sense of knowing my place. And I put that in air quotes. So I just attacked everything I wanted to, but it did take me a while to understand that that was coming from a place of privilege. I hadn't been told no or turned down enough for opportunities that made me crawl back to my shell and not bother anymore.

But now we're actually at a point where we all should know now, after the uprising that we have a long way to go. Now, the question that I think we should all ask ourselves is all the commitments that we made post summer 2020, are they movements or are they moments? And only time will tell if it's going to be a movement that leads us to change. And only each and every one of us can make it a movement and not a moment. I understand how uncomfortable it feels. We just really don't want to deal with this anymore. And to Amanda's point, right, the whole idea of bringing your whole self and is she going to talk about race again? Are we going to talk about equity again? Well we're so far from being done, and if we hurry out of those discussions, then we are really contributing to being a moment and not a movement.

Another big change that we've all come to realize is that employees realize that they have more power than ever. I believe employees have had power, but we just didn't realize it. Now you see people making demands about how they want to work. And you see people leaving the jobs for better jobs or more people becoming entrepreneurs. I became an entrepreneur because I did not like the conditions under which I worked. But again, I just felt if I wanted it, I should go and do it. But that also stems from the background that I have. So while we have more people that understand that they have choices. When I founded my agency, we had happy hour one day and go, gosh, what do we really stand for? This was over drinks, really. And we just were like, we want to be the role model for inclusion, a lot of chairs and high fives. The next day, back at the office. I think it probably was a Monday.

And we go, so now what? What does it actually mean to be the role model for inclusion? It sounded good, right? We looked like just perception wise, we could definitely be champions for inclusion, but that's not enough. So we set out, it's been 13 years in the making, and I know hopefully we have so many more years because you never truly attain inclusion, it's something you have to keep reaching for, in creating processes around what does that look like? So we first started from our work hours. At my agency we have never had fixed hours. Why? Because we had to put ourselves in the shoes of people whom fixed hours becomes a barrier to them participating in the workforce. So for example, if someone's living with a disability and trying to get that Metro transit to get to work for nine o'clock and have their performance judged on whether they're early or not to work, that's a barrier for participation right there.

I'm in a creative field, right? I have never, ever believed that people designed on a clock, right? So this notion that from nine to five, you're going to come up with your best ideas have never made sense to me. Best ideas come up in the movie theaters, in the shower, walking down the aisles in stores. So giving people flexibility to create, and those were just some of the things that we implemented. So we had always been a semi virtual shop because it was an inclusive way to work. And now I'm glad to see, albeit sad about the global pandemic, but is glad to see that more companies are now realizing people can still be productive if you give them some flexibility that works with their lives. So employees know they have more power or they have choices now that publicly did occur to them before. Consumers, they're shopping their values. That used to be, oh generation, the millennials or generation Z, they shop their values.

Now, many more generations are shopping their values post 2020. All you have to do is follow any Twitter feed with the canceling, the boycotting, right? The [ask seeking 00:26:53] transparency from different organizations and all the apology statements and backtracking their corporations do. That's because customers are shopping their values. So how aligned are we in our work as a company? So capital C with the values of our customers, but that capital C is made up by each and every one of us in those organizations. When I started this work with this passion to advance inclusion, well, I wanted to build a more inclusive world. I felt I need to really reach people and and how could I reach corporations who are really concerned about their bottom line?

So I started pulling a lot of data about the buying power. So I felt I had to make an economic argument. Well, I'm happy to say, as I've gone on doing this work and also with the awareness that we have, it's not a matter of humanitarian or social versus an economic argument. It's an and. So now it's a matter of making all the arguments, but yes, businesses are in business to make money. I'm not going to tell you that we're not, but we can still do that by being good stewards of our societies. So let's just talk about the economics for a little bit around why this should matter from an economic standpoint. 17.2% of the buy-in power today is held by Asians, African Americans and Native Americans. 11.1% of the buying power is held by Hispanics.

Now let that sit with you for a bit and then think about the communications that are out there and how much they center or focus on, right, the non BIPOC community. When in fact the buying power rests with them and it's going to continue to grow. By the year 2050, this number will be drastically changed. In my work, I haven't met an organization, and maybe they just don't approach me, that doesn't have good intentions about this. Everyone who calls me that I work with, they want a better world, but it seems like we keep spinning our wheels. It seems like there's a lot of check boxing that goes on, not necessarily intentionally all the time, but it's a more comfortable place. We had a speaker like we're doing right now. Hopefully this is not a checkbox.

This is just trying to give you some ideas on what you really need to be doing. Or we hired a DEI leader, but maybe we didn't fund the department, but we do have one of those. So there's a lot of spinning that has been going on within corporations. And some of it feels like we're looking for an easy button, but there is no easy button. It actually takes true transformation to make any change. So this is a study by Deloitte that found that 71% of organizations aspire to be inclusive. Like I said, I'm yet to meet a corporation that doesn't want to be. But only 12% meet the goals of being inclusive. So again, a bit more evidence to spin in our wheels, doing a lot of things, but not moving the needle. So what is racism? It is the conscious or subconscious belief and or action that supports the social construct of race as a primary determinant of human capacities.

The most prominent race is inherently superior. Again, conscious or subconscious, the outcome is still the same. So we see the world through multiple lenses. Our lens is guided by our own experiences, our personal stories, the stories that we've learned from other people, right? Our held beliefs and sadly also by false narratives. So just knowing that we view the world that way should make [inaudible 00:31:15]. We don't know it all, right? We don't have every answer to everything. And in fact, in America, and I'm finding out here to in some way, whiteness is the prominent lens in which we view the world. And I say this, not to say that only white people have a lens of whiteness. No, we've been conditioned to use whiteness as a lens. I can speak for even myself. I could have come to this meeting with an African head wrap and a different attire completely, but I did not because I'm dressing for what's appropriate.

So somewhere in there, regardless of how we try, whiteness is a lens. White centering is a centering of white people, white values, white norms and white feelings over everything and everyone else. And here's a quote from Tony Morrison. "In America, in this country, American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate." And just think about some examples. We've had a lot of press about missing young women or young women that have been stolen or murdered. And we have this whole narrative now about why is it only some people get the media attention and it's not just who gets the media attention. It's what's the description? So it's not uncommon to see if a young white lady has gone missing or sadly has been murdered, the attributes are beautiful, talented, hardworking, top student, right?

She's validated of all the things that she is or was. But when it's a non-white person, we rarely ever ever see those attributes. It's really the story's more focused on the person's past. If they're in a seating neighborhood, if they have two or three degrees separated from somebody who has a troubled pass. We don't really use those same attributes. So even our language is coded, right? The grammar we use to center whiteness. And like I said, not only white people center whiteness, even in some communities of color. And I would say for the African American communities, sometimes you hear some young people say don't act white or you're acting white, right? Again, we're centering some of the favorable good attributes of whatever it could be with whiteness, as opposed to these are just great attributes. They don't have to just be whiteness.

So in our everyday world, right, we add onto this, we are the ones that carry this notion forward and it shows up in our work, in our creative work. I would say this idea of centering and whiteness is a very strong gravitational pull. So it's going to take a lot to separate from it, but it's going to take trying every day. So if you're a person of color that doesn't want to gravitate towards whiteness, or you're probably not going to think you're going to get far ahead in life, you might not get hired for a particular job. Think about it. We've had a dialogue going, I think you should all know about here and how I'll just speak for black people. Black women want to wear their natural hair but discouraged to do so because it's not professional enough. That centers whiteness. The more your hair looks like white people's hair, then the more accepted you are.

And then another way that we center whiteness is in our portrayal of other groups of people. And I'll give you an example. When I worked for a corporation, I worked on the coupon book and all the people cast for that book, it's a big book with images and the coupons. So for example, it was a very diverse book. They did show people from different cultures, right? Different races. But my first thing was we had a problem with how people were being depicted. The black lady had a big Afro. This was 2007, right? Afros came in after that. Then Afro wasn't in trend at that point. The blonde lady was blowing a big bubble and looking ditzy with her eyes looking up at the sky. The Asian person had a pencil, was chewing on a pencil and had glasses on. And I could go on and on.

Every image in that book screamed one stereotype or the other to me. And I went back and made sure they mixed it up. We do want an Asian person in there, but why do they always have to be portrayed as the smart? Because that's detrimental to the narrative of Asians in our country too. And why does the blonde have to always be portrayed as ditzy? That is detrimental to our perception of those. So always look for those cues in your creative work and mix it up. It's not enough to say we have all of these different people represented. How are they being represented? Are we coming from our lens that is centered on whiteness? So their implications of this white dominant lens, it reinforces racial boundaries, right? Who belongs, who doesn't, what the norms are, what the norms are not. It bolsters the racial order of things. It excludes those that don't fit, right? And then it does promote conformity, which is another form of trauma as well, when you're forced to be something that you're not just so that you can get by.

So how far are you willing to go for true transformation? Because that's what this is going to take, it echos what Amanda said. To see transformation, we have to be ready to be transformed ourselves and that's taken from Amanda's book as she shared. To get studied, you really have to commit to lead inclusively in all of your endeavors. Be ready to do the work. So always, always challenge what you think you already know. So question your own answers and have other people question your answers. Understand your privilege, right? Understand how you differ with your privilege from others around you. I know we've been using that term a lot in the past year and a half or maybe even two, but it's really important. I know my privilege and I'm sure there are probably others that will be uncovered for me as I go through life.

But one thing is I did get a great education. I went to an all girls boarding school, by the way. So my entire high school, I didn't even have to compete with boys. I didn't have to take second place to anybody. That is a privilege. I understand that. So I wasn't conditioned to know my place by my gender, it's a privilege. So try to start understanding your privilege, be open to learn about your biases. When you get an aha about a bias, stop, pause, and go, wow. And then figure out what you're going to do about it. Right? Examine the role you play in perpetuating or dismantling the current structure. Are we just going through and just taking things as they are, or are we actively trying within the capacity that we have to make a change? Broaden your network. The only way you're going to broaden your worldview is to broaden your network. Start within your organizations.

I can't tell you, yeah, I could go into any lunch room and I see groups of like sitting with each other. Break out of the mold, broaden your networks, have lunch with someone else, ask them about their lives, listen and share yours as well. Otherwise, we stay narrow. And be willing to make sacrifices. I'll just give an example. In a meeting in a room, if your voice is the one that's almost always heard, be willing to take a step back and allow space for someone else without thinking that you're giving up way too much because this is all for the greater good.

SS: Thank you, Rosemary. I'm so grateful for both Rosemary and Amanda's presentations. I'm going to start, thinking about both of your presentations had pieces that really talked about, and I'm looking at this through the framework specifically within the design world and the design industry. So I'm wondering about if the two of you can talk out the type of code switching that you see specifically within the design world and the toll that that type of code switching has within a culture of authenticity and what individuals of color that are currently in the design field can do to go ahead and not fall into the traditional tropes regarding code switching. 

RU: Okay. Code switching. Well I think it's learned behavior and it's a survival skill, right? If you don't code switch, sometimes you feel you're not going to make it. So I think it takes a lot of courage to be your whole self and not code switch within America. And that's because it's not safe. It's not safe not to code switch. And I will say this from my experience too, I like to show up as myself and I have really gotten into a lot of trouble showing up as myself. So I think this idea of code switching doesn't fall on the person who has to code switch to survive. It really falls on everyone else making the spaces safe enough for people to be themselves. I'll give you an example. When I worked for the corporation, the whole bring your whole self to work and you get to work on a Monday after a weekend. It's like, what was your weekend like?

I know I first say, well, I was a single parent of a six year old child. My weekend's nothing like what they expected. I didn't go skiing. I didn't go hiking. I really just parented and tried to keep up with my life, but it didn't fit in. Right? So I really got to a point where I stopped sharing that. What was your weekend like? Oh, we just did some fun things. So there's just that need to survive, to fit in. So the onus is on others in the community to make it safe for people to really bring their whole selves and not feel the need to code switch.

SS: Thanks Rosemary. Amanda, I don't know if you've got thoughts both about industry, but also even within higher education itself.

AH: Sure. Yeah. I love what Rosemary said about this illness being not on the people who are code switchers, the people who are requiring us to code switch. It's these curated spaces that are people who understand where we're coming from like the office hour spaces or convening any sort of racialized people only. I think it's very necessary to survival to bring that word up again. The survival of being able to feel heard and affirmed in some of the things that we experience.

I also like in that same vein of sharing things that you did on the weekend, but just not matching up with a lot of my colleagues. And I think I stopped sharing kind of downer things. Like I mentioned, a first generation student. So when I hear colleagues who say, oh I'm third generation student at this particular school or sharing things where they don't really check or understand the privilege that it conveys, that they had, but I'm not about to say, oh my parents are immigrant refugees. So it's kind of not just code switching, but actually censoring myself to center the white comfort of these conversations.

SS: That's great. And I do think that like both of you were saying is that the onus has really shifted not on the individuals that are doing the switching, but that broader kind of culture of change that supports that type of authenticity. One thing that I guess I did want to ask you is that when you both are working on initiatives that you think are tremendously arduous, specifically within the territory of looking at equity, who are the people or organizations that you go to for support or for inspiration for the work that you do?

AH: I think a lot of it is again, self selected or self convened. I don't know that I would go to particular organizations, although organizations have... IDSA, again, has put together great guidelines for DEI considerations in online conferences or in conferences in general, picking panels, things to kind of avoid or giving some direction. So I think mostly for me though, it's these people that I find to kind of do the gut check with, that things feel right or when to kind of just press the eject button when it's not going to be worth my energy and days off my life.

SS: Great. Thanks Amanda. Rosemary?

RU: Yeah. I think I center the work that I do on the communities that we're trying to reach. So everything that we do is bounced off the communities or the groups of people that we're doing the work for. They're supposed to be the primary beneficiaries of what we're designing. I use a lot of resources and I learn from everyone else who's done this. So I'm a sponge for information. And I like to just try things out. But I think when we go throughout the process we've developed, starting from curiosity and just making sure that the work that we do is guided by whom the beneficiaries of the output are supposed to be. That's pretty much our litmus test on what we do, how we create.

SS: And I guess I'm just wondering, as you're pursuing equity work for both of you, whether it's in the classroom and the industry and beyond as mentors, how do you start to see being able to understand a more holistic vantage point of equity?

AH: I can take that one. You're making me think of, Sanjit, in your question about these allowances that we've made during the pandemic that we were told were impossible before for people with disabilities or people who had different responsibilities in life and couldn't do the things the way that they were structured. So it's so different to be able to see during the pandemic everyone's literal background. Where they are, the people passing around. I just remember really early pandemic, being on a Zoom. I do some co-design research with kids and seeing their siblings in the background. There's sweaters on the stove behind them and really coming to understand that everyone's struggling to just show up, show their faces on the Zoom screen. So I think it afforded a lot more empathy, at least institutionally so we could say things like, oh be a little bit more lenient about attendance, be a little bit more lenient about grading in this time, but why can't we afford that all of the time if we can do it right now?

SS: Great. Rosemary?

RU: Yeah. So I've always approached this from a lens of inclusion because of intersectionality of what we do. And I was really clear, I do not do multicultural marketing. I just, I don't do that. I do inclusive work, which means that we are addressing all of those things, not just your ethnicity or your race, but your ability level, your religious beliefs, your gender preference. So all of those things come into play for every single human being. So I don't like to sort of just say, oh, we're just focusing on this particular ethnic community and ignoring that we have people living with disabilities and people that are [inaudible 00:48:20] from LGBTQ community within those communities as well and which is a problem I have with multicultural marketing to begin with.

I think some of the ads, I think this was an ad for Wells Fargo about maybe four or five years ago. And I can't cue that up now, but they were very proud of this ad that showcased a young, I'll tell you all the layers in here. It showcased a gay couple, two women, right, that were learning sign language to adopt a young girl from a different culture. And this was Wells Fargo saying, look at it, we're doing all of these things. And I just felt that ad completely missed the mark because it's okay for us to just have an ad that shows a person with a disability in a normal setting.

You don't have to be a superhero to be acknowledged, right? And the same with all groups, people just want to be included to be normalized in everyday things. We don't have to make a huge storyline out of it before we put them in our communication pieces, just give representation. And I think it's when I travel through England that I see just baseline representation more than I ever see anything like that in the United States where it's just an ad for a drink. And it just so happens to be a person with a visible disability. It's just normal everyday stuff. But many times when we choose to feature someone that's not from the dominant group, we want to make sure they're superheroes. So we are very conscious of that in the work that we do.

SS: Thank you. I know we're rounding out on 90 minutes and it happened very quickly from my perspective, because I feel like we're just starting to percolate things but I do want to be respectful of time. There's some fantastic links that Jeffrey and Trayvon have both put in the chat box as well based upon these conversations. First and foremost, I want to offer a sincere round of applause and turn on your cameras even briefly and offer a round of applause to Rosemary and Amanda for their fantastic presentations. It's just been such an inspiring day and this evening just really capped it off, but it's truly great.

Thanks for listening to this episode of On Topic. To find out more about all of my guests this season and from season one, head to mcad.edu/ontopic where you can find profiles and links to all of our guests. If you haven't already, don't forget to like, rate, subscribe and follow wherever you're listening and you can always find more content at mcad.edu/ontopic. This podcast was produced with Taylor Lewin and underscoreaudio.co.