The Equity Mindset

3Thoughts on Being an Equity Designer

Whitney McGuire (she/her) is an artist, professor, attorney, and co‐founder of Sustainable Brooklyn.

Whitney:

I love discussing the power of design because this is what I teach. I'm aware of how, across the board, our systems are designed in a way that is inequitable; that most of the systems we interact with are built with inequitable approaches; and that the root of it all is engineered on white supremacy, and patriarchy, and the propping up of—or the positioning of— people and certain cultures and histories that are considered to be more prominent and more important than other cultures and communities. And so we often have this crisis of omission where design is just not meeting the needs, and it's creating more unmet needs in the process. So as a designer, it's our responsibility, especially as designers from multiple marginalized communities, to engage with the systems that we're trying to redesign in a way that creates agency for the people or communities that we're designing for and with.

We also engage by unlearning the fuckery that pervades this design world. The facts are that culturally and historically marginalized communities have been designing solutions because of the inefficiency of the designs that we interact with on a daily basis. We are forced to carve out these alternative systems and alternative ways and use much more brain power just to maneuver through the world and I think that is a skill set in and of ...