DAP: Design Justice for Black Lives initiative seeks to streamline professional activism

2020-06-12T13:25:00-04:00

A new initiative focused on leveraging designers' "professional connections and privileges in the name of advancing justice" offers an easy and effective way of reaching professional organizations, leading architecture firms, political entities, and academic institutions via email.

Hosted on the website of architecture and urban design studio Colloqate, the DAP: Design Justice for Black Lives initiative, which is aligned with the design justice movement and is undertaken in solidarity with the Movement of Black Lives, automatically generates email messages preloaded with contact information for industry and academic leaders that individuals can send out to advocate for change within the design fields. The effort is the latest installment of Colloqate's Design As Protest (DAP) effort, an ongoing series of projects that instrumentalize "design as a means to speak out in support of the disinherited and marginalized communities" by exposing and working against the injustice, discrimina...

Design Justice fuels the work of New Orleans-based Colloqate

2019-12-02T16:00:00-05:00

It’s hard to reconcile our work without first acknowledging that for nearly every injustice in this world, an architecture is constructed to perpetuate that injustice. Our profession overwhelmingly serves those with means and ignores the consequences of our decisions for those without means, resulting in the collective disinheritance of historically marginalized communities.

In a compelling Op-Ed for Next City, Colloqate founder and design director Bryan Lee, Jr. lays out a few of the principles of the Design Justice movement, a perspective that is central to the Design Justice Platform created by his New Orleans-based nonprofit design practice.

Lee writes, "This movement towards just spaces has seen a resurgence within the profession in the last 15 years, with a renewed commitment to address the root causes of some of the world’s most intransigent issues. At the root of climate change is a built environment that exhausts 39 percent of our carbon emissions and demands 40 percent of our energy production. At the root of housing, transportation, and economic injustice are the remnants of redlining and racial covenants that continue to extract wealth and codify structural or de facto segregation. At the root of unjust policing is a prison-industrial complex sustained by spaces that extract human dignity and economic potential from marginalized people in t...

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DAP: Design Justice for Black Lives initiative seeks to streamline professional activism

Design Justice fuels the work of New Orleans-based Colloqate