The Design Justice Summit is a Design Advocates Gathering, in partnership with the AIA, bringing together twenty-four social impact architects and designers from across the country with the explicit intention of sharing knowledge and workshopping to address the intransigent issues of injustice facing communities throughout the world. Our mission is to codify and grow a diverse community of public interest design leaders with the capacity to shape the future of the profession towards equity. We hope to inspire and challenge these leaders to take the knowledge learned throughout the summit and return to their respective communities to innovate and implement.
DESIGN AS PROTEST (DAP)
A series of actions of sustained design workshops advocating social justice in the built environment.
DESIGN JUSTICE PLATFORM (DJP)
A platform and living document for building a collaborative social justice standard of ethics for designers.
Design Justice Advocates strive to...
Identify the sources of injustice in the built environment.
Effectively communicate with clients / agencies / organizations / communities in promoting design justice.
Empower more advocates to utilize the cohort to continue sharing peer resources and knowledge.
Build relationships in their respective communities that directly impact the built environment.
Identify themes, and make plans to follow up on post-summit to further develop ideas into projects in their respective communities.
What were the goals of this summit?
To develop an understanding of the Design Justice movement model, theories of social change, and how to work alongside community-led efforts for systemic change.
To examine privilege and racial bias, and how that can impact a designers approach and analysis to the work.
To increase awareness of structural inequity and how it manifests in design practice, policies and institutions that deeply impact communities.
To analyze the extent to which the environment designers are working within, promote equity and engage in Design Justice work.
To discuss Design Justice opportunities and challenges taking place at the national and local levels.
To understand how to facilitate a Design Justice framework into current efforts and orient work toward creating justice.
Moments from this year’s Design Justice Summit. Check out the gallery below for more, and for images from other Design Justice gatherings!
This year’s summit has concluded, but please follow us on our Instagram @colloqate for interactive components of this year’s conference, our other projects and events, and information about next year’s summit.
