how to get to now
a vision for an antiracist future
project prompt: create a speculative design of an institution, unit, or experience in education redesigned for antiracist and equitable outcomes.
design question: “what if we were suddenly all thrust in a classroom together—people of different classes, different races, different cultural backgrounds? how should that classroom operate? what conditions need to be met?”
outcome: a zine that documents the process of creating an equitable learning space at a fictional university set in a distant future.
tools: canva, adobe indesign, google suite
methods: literature review, curation, storytelling, graphic design
what is an antiracist learning space? what does this look like? read on to learn about my process of creating this zine!
i was inspired by three scholars bell hooks, ta nehisi coates, and prince. In her book teaching to trangress, hooks asserts that “...the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy” after describing how her school was a place where she felt safe enough to engage with new ideas, push boundaries, and reinvent her self (hooks, 1994, p. 3). similarly, ta nehisi coates, describes how howard university was a site for black scholars to exist in multiplicity and experience the variation of black identity (coates, 2015). in prince’s 1985 album around the world in a day, he sings about about “paisley park” an imaginary utopia where people of color and marginalized identities live freely and fully. these moments struck a chord in me and i wanted to explore the idea of the role of spaces in fostering community, belonging, and well-being and how learning spaces could be a living, breathing, thing that shape shifts depending on how the people choose to move within it.
my first iteration was to do some form of architectural modeling and play with built environments i.e what physically needs to be present for a learning space to be anti-racist. my initial prompt was "what if studio ghibli’s cat bus was a school and what elements would make it antiracist?" but after a lot of research and iteration, i decided to approach the idea from a people angle. my prompt then evolved to "what are the people in an antiracist learning environment saying, thinking, and doing? how are they occupying the space? and how did they get there?"
once i settled on my approach, i began collecting ideas, quotes, experience to create my artefact — a zine that documents the process of creating an equitable learning space at a fictional university set in a distant future. i particularly wanted to explore how a learning space can support anti-racist pedagogy. i chose a zine format for many reason; as a medium zines have historically been used as a tool of subversion. marginalized communities (poc, women, lgbtq+, etc) have employed zines as a tool to push their message out and as an extension of their voices. the format also allowed me to combine different presentation techniques such as storytelling, curation, and aesthetic encounter to engage the viewer in an immersive world and pull on their imagination as they consider what an antiracist institution could look like. i also wanted to practice my design skills and it was the perfect medium for that.