Metropolis: 10 Architecture and Design Books Worth Adding to Your Reading List
By Metropolis Editors, August 24, 2023. Link to Read Here.
“This groundbreaking book dives deep into the hidden biases embedded within design practices and offers a transformative approach to dismantling systemic racism. Taking readers on a journey through the history of design, Mercer and Moses showcase how racialized design perpetuates inequality and exclusion in our society and challenges readers to confront their own biases and actively engage in unlearning these harmful design patterns. Racism Untaught includes practical strategies that aim to empower individuals and communities to create a more inclusive and equitable future. It is a must-read for designers, activists, and anyone committed to dismantling racism in design.”
Print Magazine: Five Essential Design Books to Decolonize Your Studio, Library, and Classroom
By Cheryl D. Holmes-Miller, October 31, 2023, Link to Read Here.
“As a scholar and academician, I’ve always loved the month of October, and October 2023 gives me five new reasons to celebrate. In my 50-year design industry awareness, practice, and career, I have never witnessed the parallel release of so many design books published by prominent Black graphic design scholars. They require our attention! But more than purchasing them, I ask that we USE them to decolonize our corporate design studios and expand our classroom syllabi. If you are an educator, your students will dearly appreciate the conversations that result from exposure to a greater diversity of design voices. For practicing corporate designers, these books will help you to consider a broader history of design storytelling.”
Recognition: NEWCOMM Project 501(c)(3) NonProfit Education Design Studio, Harlem, NY
Racism Untaught, published by The MIT Press, by Lisa Elzey Mercer and Terresa Moses, “Racism Untaught” provides an insightful #toolkit and #framework which is meant to disrupt the #status quo of the #design research process and focus on the #development of anti-racist designs in collaborative #design environments. The goal of this toolkit is to teach how to analyze design—and reimagine racialized artifacts, systems, and experiences guided by anti-racist/anti-oppressive principles. Through their work, Mercer and Moses demonstrate how to examine one’s positionality within the context of racism and oppression, helping participants understand how design can reinforce and perpetuate oppression. In Racism Untaught, Mercer and Moses provide the #framework we need to unlearn racialized design practices and move more generatively toward collective liberation through a core value of “antiracist design”. How can we disrupt normative design practice through different approaches? How can we discuss and analyze topics of racism and oppression in ways that lead to a de-construction and re-construction of design practices in work environments, community spaces and more?
Design Week: Designing out Racism is “Work for Everyone”
By Sophie Tolhurst, November 10, 2023, Link to Read Here
Design educators Lisa E. Mercer and Terresa Moses explain in their new book, Racism Untaught, how design can offer tools for anti-racism accessible to anyone.Working from the understanding that many of the objects, brands, spaces and systems around us today have been built against a backdrop of ongoing racism and colonial legacies, the book’s premise is that just as racialised experiences have come to be through design, they can also be designed out.