Design + Equity: On Expanding Design’s Limits

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October 28, 2020

Please join us as we welcome Pierce Gordon, Ph.D. for our Fall 2020 Designmatters Residency.

Dr. Gordon will kick off his residency by presenting Design + Equity: On Expanding Design’s Limit on Wednesday, November 4th, 1-3pm.

Equity Design, a topic with new synergies and old roots, recognizes the paradox of innovation practices and the collateral impact on the practice in countless issues that affect marginalized communities. The field is a single foray into centering, ceding power to, and constructing interventions with subaltern populations at the center, and developing communities, organizations, spaces, pedagogies, and value systems that do the same.

This talk will outline the birth of Equity Design, a few of its many influences, exemplar outcomes, and opportunities to adopt and spread the practice within the ArtCenter community. This dialogue offers space to critique, transform, and build productive opportunities for understanding innovation’s place in reforming a more restorative, ethical, and liberatory world.

 

RSVP by November 3rd for Zoom link  – designmatters@artcenter.edu

Open to all students and faculty

 

About Dr. Gordon:

Dr. Pierce Gordon is an innovation catalyst, researcher, facilitator, and evaluator. He’s captivated by how liberation and design are interconnected. He specializes in interdisciplinary research that unpacks how communities value, support, and practice innovation in social justice and international development. Pierce’s research and consultation work has worked to track and support the field’s spread, complexity, and emergence.

Additionally, he specializes in spaces of transformation where equity is at the fore. Whether serving as the Inaugural innovation Fellow in Residence at the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub, conducting ethnographic analyses and facilitation projects in the Botswana Innovation Ecosystem, or by co-founding Reflex Design Collective, an equity design consultancy that’s worked for creative social justice in the Bay Area, his core aim is to catalyze good social change.