Speaker: Terresa Moses, Lisa Mercer

Racism Untaught is an iterative framework and toolkit that shows organizations how to recognize racism in designed artifacts, systems, and experiences and how to create anti-racist design approaches. Throughout our keynote, we will explore the foundation of our work which includes our agency as the designers of artifacts, systems, and experiences and how the designs we each develop and implement in the spaces around us affect historically underinvested communities.

We will also explore six major paths of study, including:

The Racism Untaught research study and the development of the framework.
Defining design and the agency we each have in the development and implementation of artifacts, systems, and experiences in the spaces around us and how they affect historically oppressed communities.
The individual’s positionality in the context of racism and oppression and the intersectionality of the conversation on concepts of racism, sexism, ableism, classism, and other isms.
A shared language that helps participants identify how oppression shows up in the world around us.
The identification of racialized artifacts, systems, and experiences and how design perpetuates and reinforces the status quo and various levels of oppression; and last.
The role of equity, ethics, and responsibility in the design discipline leading us to collective liberation. The Racism Untaught workshops have been conducted with over 3,000 participants – over 700 hours of workshops, 12 college-level courses, and numerous national and international presentations in academia, industry, and community. Including PayPal, Target, Apple, Spotify, Shopify, Matterport, and our academic partners including Parsons School of Design, Louisiana State, University of Illinois, University of Minnesota, University of Tennessee, University of Cincinnati, and Auburn University.