Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton

I first learned about Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton way back in 2015 when I interviewed Silas Munro. Since then, Tasheka has gone on to become one of the leading voices behind discovering Black people omitted from the graphic design history canon. Even design legend Dr. Cheryl D. Miller has sung her praises, so I knew I had to sit down with Tasheka and learn more about her remarkable journey.

Tasheka spoke to me about her experience as an educator and researcher, including an examination of her teaching philosophy. She also talked about growing up in New Orleans, her shift into design, working for the Navy Reservists, and even starting her own studio, Blacvoice Design. Lastly, she discussed her upcoming book Black Design in America, and shared how the different aspects of her work keep her motivated and inspired.

If there’s any lesson you learn from Tasheka, it should be this one: you have control over your own path as a designer, so work hard and you can make your dreams come true!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Hi, and first, I want to say Maurice, thanks for having me here on Revision Path. I’ve been a listener for a long time now, so I feel really grateful and honored to be here. My name is Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton. I’m a designer, design educator. I run a design studio called Blacvoice. I also am a researcher, I guess, or design historian in regards to Black designers, as well as design writer.

Maurice Cherry:
How has this year been going for you so far?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Very busy, but good for the most part. It’s been a really, really good year with lots of new projects on the horizon. Exciting and exhausting, all at the same time.

Maurice Cherry:
Any plans for the summer?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yes, family vacation is one of the plans. I will be attending Typographics, and I’ll be a speaker there. So it’s exciting because I’ve never been to the conference before, and it’s kind of strange to have that my first attendance there would be me actually giving a talk, so I’m excited about that. I’m going to be teaching, I guess, this summer. I don’t normally teach in the summer, but I’m co-running a design residency program at the University of Texas, Austin where I teach. So I’m looking forward to that as well. And I have a couple of writing projects that I’ll be working on over the summer, and some design stuff as well.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Sounds like you’re going to have a busy summer ahead.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yes, for sure.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, speaking of teaching, you are teaching at two universities right now. You’re at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and you’re at the University of Texas at Austin, which is pretty new. You’ve been at VCFA what, for 10, 11 years now?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah, it’s been 10 years in April. 10 years. I started there in 2013.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
It’s kind of crazy to think that I’ve been there that long, actually.

Maurice Cherry:
Congratulations.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
What has the experience been like there?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Wow. The experience at VCFA has been truly amazing and transformative, and I think a lot of it has to do with the amazing faculty that’s there, that I teach with, who are not only colleagues but longtime friends now. It has to do with the sort of non-traditional structure of the program. We don’t have any classes or any courses. The program is, if you think about it as a two-year-long independent study, basically it’s a self-directed program where students decide on what they want to study and what they’re interested in. And the faculty is there basically, to sort of guide them and offer them resources, but it’s a self-directed program.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, that’s really interesting. No classes or courses?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
No.

Maurice Cherry:
So you don’t have to put any curriculum together. That’s great.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
No. So yeah, it’s definitely a different experience. So you do work with the students during the residency to come up with a semester plan on what they’re going to be working on throughout the semester. So as a faculty, you are there to help guide them and shape that semester plan. But again, it starts with what they’re interested in. We meet once a month. Students send their work via email, and then we have an hour conversation through, usually Zoom, and to talk about the work and sort of reflect on it, and kind of give feedback on how to move forward over the next month.

Maurice Cherry:
I love how sort of open that is, especially I think during this time when I know we’re not out of the pandemic, but certainly, I think it’s still a time where some schools are trying hybrid models or things. That sounds like the way that it’s set up at VCFA, it allows you to really still be able to learn in that type of environment.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yes. I think the one thing that at the core of the program is, first of all, it’s really tailored to, working professionals are people. You don’t have to quit your job for two years to get an MFA. You can still work or run your business, or whatever it is you’re doing and still go to school. And this is something that we’ve been doing prior to the pandemic.

So when the pandemic happened, not saying that it didn’t change the program and how we teach, but we were already sort of interfacing in that way. So the only thing it stopped was having the week long residencies that we would have twice a year in person. Then that programming got moved to Zoom. But as far as the interaction between the student and the teacher, or we say the student and the advisor, that was already happening.

Maurice Cherry:
Now one of the professors that’s also there, we’ve had on the show. Oh God, that was a long time ago. We had Silas Munro on the show. This was I think, episode 85, 86, something like that. But he’s also a professor there, I believe.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah. So Silas, so you brought Silas up. Silas is one of the reasons, that’s how I ended up at VCFA actually.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
He’s one of the founding members of the program and Silas and I, we overlap by a year at CalArts. And so yeah, when the program was starting up, he sent me an email and asked me to join the faculty. And I wasn’t able to join at the time because of obligations with teaching. But then the following semester in April of 2013, I was able to come on board as a visiting, as a guest. Sort of a preliminary or, I wouldn’t say probationary period, but just to test to see if it would work out for me and if it would work out for the program.

So yeah, I credit Silas to bringing me in to a community in the program that’s, like I said, it’s been really transformative. Especially, the sort of approach to design pedagogy, this openness and not having this one idea of what design is. That sort of shift and change and marks according to the students, and the type of work that they’re interested in, and the type of diversity and the faculty and what we study and research, and type of work we’re engaged in. So that’s the thing that I really like, and it’s probably one of the few places that I’ve worked where I really felt a sense of family with my coworkers. Not that I didn’t have that relationship with other places, but there it’s really genuine. It’s not forced, it’s not fake. We actually truly do like and love each other.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, first of all, props to Silas for bringing you in, but it sounds like it is a great environment because you’ve been there for 10 years. Nobody’s going to stay there for 10 years if it’s not good.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah, no, that’s true. Actually, you saying it, it’s technically the longest job I’ve ever had.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
When I think about it, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Now you’re also teaching at University of Texas at Austin, which is fairly new. Tell me more about that. How’s that experience?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Wow, it’s been great, to be honest. I haven’t been there that long. I just moved to Austin, so I’m new to Austin and I’m new to UT. It’s been a really good experience as far as working in an environment with, I guess kind of similar to VCFA, where you don’t feel like there’s this sort of one way that the faculty or the program is trying to teach design. It’s a little bit more flexible, it’s a little bit more nuanced where students get to dabble in a lot of different areas of design. Graphic design, industrial design, interactive design, design history, product design. So it’s really sort of flexible in that way and that’s one of the things that sort of drawed me in into UT.

The program itself was revamped around 2017, 2018. So the program as it is today, design, it’s the Department of Design and Creative Technology, is fairly new in a sense compared to a lot of other programs that are out there. So I think there’s something about that sort of newness. There’s a lot of vulnerability and a lot of questioning about the direction of the program. So it’s kind of exciting to be somewhere where we’re constantly thinking about ways to evolve and improve the experience for the students.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What is your teaching philosophy? I would imagine, between the work you’ve done at VCFA and are currently doing, and now with teaching at UT. And you’ve taught at some other places as well. What’s your overall teaching philosophy?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Well, one is, I try to approach teaching, one of the things that probably on the first day of class, I let my students know that, “Hey, I’m interested. I’m more interested in what you’re interested in learning, and what you’re interested in general out there in the world.” Not that I don’t have anything to impart or to give to them, but it’s less about me walking into the classroom saying, “Hey, listen up, I’m the expert here. You all need to learn what I have to offer.” Obviously, there is an important exchange that’s sort of happening, but I’m not interested in the hierarchies that traditionally plagues, I think, academia. So that’s the first thing is, to let my students know, “Hey, I’m curious about you, who you are as a person, and what you’re interested in.”

The other part of my teaching philosophy is, so how do I nurture that? How do I give them assignments, and give them projects and things to learn, to help nurture those interests? So often, I give projects and things that are about to help students investigate their community, and their environment and their identity. I think it’s really important for students to feel a connection to the project brief, to what they’re working on. And to figure out how to sort of channel their life’s experiences, as well as who they are into their projects. There are some practical exercises that are given to topography to talk about kerning and leading and that kind of stuff. But the start of bigger projects, I really try to figure out how to give assignments to help them sort of explore who they are in their environment and their community. Also, really, I think it’s important, one of my other goals is to make sure that I’m giving them projects or I’m giving them things to read and write about, and to consider about what’s going on in the world.

I like having discussions and I don’t shy away from, I won’t say controversial conversations, but I don’t like to shy away from, there’s always a group of students that have a certain perspective about another thing, and then you might have another group that have a different perspective. So I like having those type of conversations so we can learn from each other, because too many times that we all are always listening to and engaging in conversation with people who have the same perspective as we do. So, I always often give reading assignments, or articles or essays, or just come up with topics or things that might make some of them feel uncomfortable sometimes, where they have to talk about things that they don’t know how it’s going to be received by their classmates. And also, try to give them a sort of sense of agency and responsibility when it comes to their own learning, and not just take everything at face value to question, even question me, right? But obviously with the mutual respect, I guess.

Maurice Cherry:
I’d love to hear an example of something you would cover in class with your students.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Sometimes, it’s as simple as, I think this project isn’t something kind of, out of the park, but giving them … One time I had students design sort of protest signage. So they could approach it with whatever topic, anything that they felt really strongly about. Some people feels really strongly about, you should have solar panels on your house. Some people still feel really strongly about abortion, which sometimes for me, some of these topics that are still surfacing are kind of surprising. And some people feel strongly about police rights and things like that.

So any type of way I can give them some kind of assignment that addresses these issues, usually I try to get them to think about stuff that’s relevant in the media. Things that people are on opposite sides or sort of butting heads about, just to see, how do you handle that in the design context? Even, how do you handle as a designer having conversations about, “Well, if you have a very specific social or political agenda, what does it means to do design? Or could you do design for somebody to have a different perspective than you do?” So those type of conversations I think, are important to have.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I totally think that’s important because at any point throughout your design career, you’re going to encounter some conflict. I mean, I think we know the goal is to try to not have this sort of conflicts with clients or prospective clients or anything like that, but it’s going to happen. I mean sometimes you’ll have a client, you think they’re one way, and then you start working with them and it’s completely different. And even as you’ve said about personal views and such like that, it can get really tricky because the world is not just, I mean, not to use this as a racial thing, but it’s not a black and white place. There’s all sorts of ambiguity and things in there. So the fact that you’re able to work out those scenarios and issues with students in a learning environment is really important, because then they don’t get out there in the real world and have greater consequences for those sorts of scenarios.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah. So that’s one of the reasons why I do it, because I feel like if we can’t have these open discussions and conversation and academic space, then what’s the point of education or school in that environment? At least, that’s how I look at it.

Another project that I did when I was working at NC State last year was, I tasked my students with doing some design research in their hometown. So if they were from Charlotte, if they were from, I don’t know, somewhere in Germany, it didn’t really matter where they were from, but they had to do research about design in their particular community, where they were from. It was up to them if they wanted to pick where they live presently or somewhere where they were raised. And I gave them some sort of guidelines or places to start, I would say, because obviously if you said, “Okay, go research Charlotte, they may not know where to start.”

So I gave them four different areas to start. So I said, “Hey, why don’t you research the educational institutions, find out what schools offer design programs and research their faculty to see who’s working there? What type of design work or research that they do? Research the history publications in your particular area,” because I think newspapers and those type of print media is a good place to find the history of a place, sort of like the pulse, right? Design studios, talk to people there, make a list of all the ones that exist, maybe find out information about ones that used to exist. And I think the last place was printers. If they’re like print shops, go talk to those people. So those were the different areas as far as starting points that I gave them to start their research.

And then they had to interview people to help fill in the gaps of trying to create that sort of storyline. Because part of what they had to actually design was some kind of information design, but this wasn’t about charts and graphs. It was more like a storytelling or narrative sort of based research project, if you will. And then it was all the data, information was sort of collected in this zine that each student sort of designed together, and got it professionally printed at the end of the semester.

And I think it was a really good project. They learned a lot about design from where they were from, that they didn’t know, that they probably wouldn’t have even thought about if they didn’t have this project. And they learned something about themselves. I think for some of them, it was confidence boost. If you’re from somewhere or you come from an area where maybe design isn’t talked about or there are not a lot of people you see in design that look like you, and I think this project sort of helped them do some research and some discovery in those areas.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, what do you learn from your students? I mean, you mentioned earlier that you tell them at the beginning of the courses that you’re interested in learning from them. What kind of things do you learn?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
I learn a lot from them. I think I can admit as a seasoned educator professional, but sometimes I go into the classroom with certain types of assumptions or misconceptions. So a lots of times, I might have assumptions what I think they might be interested in or what they should be. But then I learn actually, what they’re actually more interested in, and that sort of shifts and change sometimes. So for instance, a lot of students, now what I’m seeing, maybe something that’s trending because of technology is that, this sort of longing for tactile things, this longing to create and print things. Lots of times I think that students wouldn’t be interested in learning about letterpress, or screen printing or these sort of, or electroset. Electroset is something I love, doing electroset exercises with my students. And I really enjoy being able to talk to them about the history behind these all ways of printing.

But I find they’re really interested in these things. And I mean, you do have some that are like, “Okay, I’m really more comfortable in a digital space, and that’s fine.” Again, I’m not there to try to not nurture what their interests are. But, I feel like I’m also there for to say, “Hey, look over here. There are these other ways of making and approaching design that sort of outside of maybe what you think you should be doing.” Or lots of times, I feel what I have learned is there are very specific things that sometimes students think, “Okay, design should be this way or look this way.” And a lot of it has to do with the tools that they’re using, because everybody’s using Adobe Sweden, everybody’s using Illustrator or whatever. And I try to tell them, “Well, if we’re all using the same tools, then everything starts to look the same. But why not take your ideas, and have your ideas and the content have to dictate what type of tool you use.”

So a lot of times I learn a lot that I shouldn’t make assumptions, about technology or different ways in which how they’re interested in making, or what they actually want to make. Sometimes I assume, “Oh, they’re probably interested in developing an app,” and they do have those type of interests, or they’re interested in AI. But then I find so many of them when it comes to technology, they’re like, “No, I don’t even want to touch that stuff over there. I want to get my hands dirty.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. That is so fascinating to hear that students want to do kind of tactile things. I do a lot of different types of judging throughout the year. I’ll judge design competitions. I look at portfolios and things like that from students. And I have started to see more actual tactile work books, or pamphlets or zines or something like that. It’s such a stark contrast to 20 years ago. Now, I didn’t go to design school, but I knew people that were in design school at the time that I was also in school and everybody wanted a piece of digital. I guess it’s because it was just coming about at that time. I mean, when I went to college, there were computers. I remember vividly wanting to, I majored in computer science, computer engineering, and then switching my major over to math. Because I told my advisor I wanted to learn web design, and he’s like, “Yeah, that’s a fad. No one’s going to be into that sort of stuff.” And the school that I went to didn’t have an arts program, didn’t have a design program, so I just switched over to math.

But I knew people that were at the Atlanta College of Art, which existed back then, and the Art Institute of Atlanta. And everybody was just clamoring to try to do something with digital because they were tired of print. They were tired of, I guess, I don’t want to say they were doing maybe more traditional things like electroset or things like that. But everybody wanted to get in on the newness. And now, 20 years from then when technology is everywhere, now students want to get tactile, they want to make stuff. Yeah, I think that’s pretty cool.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah, I think the thing that I have to keep in mind is that the way they’re growing up and how they’re entering these spaces in this world is very different from how I entered it, where I was there prior to computers and then post. Not that, to be honest, I don’t have the pay stop experience. I mean, I was in school at the advent of, Adobe was already there, Photoshop was already there. The Mac computer was already there in the early two thousands. So I was sort of a little bit post the desktop publishing area. But I think the thing that I forget is that, well, they’re so consumed, this is all they know. So for them they need a break. They are exhausted from the screen is what they tell me. So they’re kind of exhausted from it. And so when you show these other analog processes, they really light up. It’s really nice and encouraging to see that they still have these interests.

But again, there are some that are really interested in the technology. A lot of them are interested in the 3D sort of space and the digital space, but also the physical space. There are sort of a range. But I think that’s what I learn. The more I teach, the more I learn about what the sort of dynamics to what they’re interested in. And they have various interests and it’s not good to even put them into a box and assume what they’re interested in because, it’s a lot of different things that are out there.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. I love that. I love that. Students are tired of screens. I’m loving hearing that. Now, let’s learn more about you. Let’s hear your origin story. You’re originally from New Orleans. Is that right?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yes, yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Tell me about what it was growing up there.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah, I grew up in the inner city, not on the outskirts. I grew up in New Orleans, we sort of identified with the wards, which are actually voting wards. So I grew up in the seven ward, New Orleans, which the time that I grew up was predominantly Black or all Black maybe, don’t know the statistics on that, but a very urban inner city. Grew up poor, single mom, family. I’m the oldest of four siblings. Had a good childhood. I remember going outside and play, making games up as we go, just started using resources and things that we had around to play different sports, so to do different things. My mom was always really supportive in whatever it was I wanted to do. So when I was younger, I wanted to go to law school. Actually, I wanted to be an attorney. And so, I actually approached going to college, thinking that I was going to go to law school and practice law, actually.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh wow. What interested you about law?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
To be honest, Maurice, it was, the part of it that was probably really superficial, meaning I watched a lot of court shows growing up, and I got sucked into the drama of the investigations. And this aha moment when the real person, suspect was revealed. And the banter in the court and the back and forth between the attorneys, all the drama. So that seemed exciting because I always felt like, I’ve always had a strong voice, I guess, and a strong personality and perspective in that way. I can be very argumentative about things that I’m super passionate about. So I just thought I would be a good attorney. Why not? I was a good student, usually brought home good grades. So yeah, I could do this law school thing, and I can go to law school and do that.

The other side of it is, I also saw law as something that oppressed us as a people for a long time, and I wanted to understand it better to help us. So that was the sort of flip side of my interest in going to law school. But yeah, that faded when I actually, I mean I was really, up until my last year in college, I was still pursuing going to law school, to be honest.

Now, I was at Loyola, I was an English writing major. And the reason I picked that major was because I was told … I can’t remember if it was a job fair or a college fair when I was in high school and somebody said, “Oh, people who do really well in law school, they major in English because of all the writing and research you have to do,” whatever. So that’s really how that came about. And I did a lot of reading growing up. So the idea of having to read and write was kind of made sense, something I was sort of interested in. So yeah, that’s how that came about was because I wanted to be a good law student, to be honest.

Maurice Cherry:
So you had been on this path, I mean, to the point where you went to school, you were studying in it, you were getting all the way up to your senior year. Was there a deciding incident that kind of changed your trajectory?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
The incident was preparing to take the LSAT, I would say. So it was more like a process. So I want to say the first semester of my senior year, I was preparing to take the LSAT, researching what schools to go to. And all of that became extremely overwhelming and stressful, but it wasn’t exciting in a way, how things could be really overwhelming, but you’re still sort of excited about it, and if it’s you’re anxious. And so then I did some soul-searching and it was like, “Well, why do you want to do this Tasheka? Why do you want to go to law school?” And so, one of the things that is at the time it was really hard for me to admit, was that I honestly didn’t think I was good at anything, or I didn’t know what I was really good at. So because I was always sort of a good student, I just kind of looked at it as that way. I can go to law school, I’m going to be a good student, and then I’ll get a decent job.

I have always been a very goal driven oriented person. And so for me, it was always just sort of scratching things off the list. So go to school, major in English writing, do well, go to law school, take the LSAT, get a high grade, study. It’s just this constant thing. But when I actually really looked within, I realized that, well, I didn’t want to do it for the right reasons. You shouldn’t choose a career path just because it’s sort of checking off the list. I can accomplish this thing, but it’s not something that, I mean, I had a genuine interest in the law, but when I look back, yeah, it definitely wasn’t the right path for me.

So I just remember there was this one day, I used to do work study in the library. I just started going online and doing research about what do creative people do. So copywriter came about because I’m getting a degree in English, but at the time I didn’t feel too confident about my writing skills. So I was like, “Eh, I don’t really want to do that.” And then I remember, topography kept popping up, and this isn’t a time where in the early two thousands, when they had a lot of portfolio schools, like Miami AD and those type of schools.

So I was doing research and those type of schools kept popping up, and then I kept seeing topography and I’m like, “What is topography? I don’t even know what that is.” So I looked in the school course catalog and I saw topography one and two, and then it was graphic design and I didn’t know what any of these, I wasn’t aware of any of this stuff, or what that meant as far as a career. And so the more I read and the more I did my research, I was like, “Oh, this design thing sounds really interesting.”

So the next semester, I just went head first. I signed up to take a type one and a design one class, the year, the semester I was supposed to graduate. And then I fell in love with it. And then I pushed my graduation back about a year so I could get a minor in graphic design. And I didn’t get a true minor. I kind of had a relationship with the director of the art department at the time, because throughout my time in college, I took drawing and painting classes as my elective, because I’ve always had an affection for art and drawing. So I talked to her at the time and about getting a minor, and so they sort of told me that, just take the main classes. I didn’t have to take the foundations and stuff like that. So they sort of fast tracked me into design one and however many classes I could take within a year, because Loyola is a private Jesuit liberal university, just very expensive. And I was on a scholarship, so that extra year, I could only go to school those two extra semesters.

So I did that. After that year, it was like, “Okay, I’m a graphic designer now. That’s it. This is what I want to do.” Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s a really interesting turn. I mean, you were already set to go along this way, and then you kind of just had another idea and there you go.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah. It wasn’t something that was obviously planned out in that way, but I’ve never looked back. I can’t honestly imagine being in any other field than design, to be honest.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, that’s really awesome that it sort of came about that way. I’m curious now on what Tasheka the lawyer would be like, if you would’ve went there.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
I think about it, too. I don’t know, honestly. I mean, I think there’s a way that I would’ve found my niche. I would’ve found an area of law that would’ve been good for me. I don’t know how lucrative that would’ve been, especially if you think about going to a private undergraduate school, and then law school and then student … It’s just sort of the bills and student loans to pile up when you think about it. So yeah, I don’t know. I think I would’ve found my way, but I think that it definitely wasn’t the right path for me. And I think the sort of activist in me, I would’ve found whatever I guess sort of industry I would’ve ended up, I think I would’ve found that sort of angle.

But I do remember this one conversation I had with a lady at a job fair my senior year, and she said that her husband was an attorney and that he had a studio in their attic and he was a painter. And she said that, but once he started really getting into law, he stopped painting as much as he used to. And so I started thinking that I never wanted art to not be a part of my life. So that was sort of a reality check where I was, “Oh, I don’t want to go into law if this is going to prevent me from being creative or being a maker,” I guess.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So you graduated from Loyola, and I know later you went and got your MFA from CalArts. Between then, did you get out in the working world and experience a little bit of what it was like to not be a student for a while?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yes. It was a very short time. It was exactly a year and four months to date. So yeah, after I graduated, I end up working as a designer at the Navy, which was such a strange thing for me personally, to end up working for the military. But yeah, I worked for the Navy Reservist Public Affairs Office, and they hired me because they saw my resume, that I took topography classes, which is kind of funny when I think about it. Because it’s like, well, when you go to, you study design, you take topography. It wasn’t nothing special. But anyway, but one of the other reasons they hired me was because they wanted somebody young with fresh ideas. And at the time, they were publishing and producing a tabloid newspaper. And so they wanted me on board to help transition that newspaper into a monthly magazine.
I actually stayed there long enough just to do that, basically. We had a few firsts. I guess half the time I was there, we were publishing the newspaper. Then the second half, we transitioned over to a magazine, and that’s my first job. I will say that it was a really great learning experience in school, as far as print production and that kind of stuff. You don’t necessarily learn. So the Navy, I would drive to Panama City to go see the publication on press, that kind of stuff. So I learned all the production there. So yeah, it was a really good experience for me, as far as my first professional design job.

Maurice Cherry:
And you were able to get that, I mean, one right out of school because you had this small amount of design experience just from studying, and they were like, “Yeah, we’ll go with that.” Nowadays, for entry level position, they already want you to have three years experience somewhere. So it’s good that they kind of took a chance and said, “Yeah, we’ll move forward and see what you have.”

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah, I will say it was actually a head hunter that found me, or like a temp agency, I would say. And they put me in contact with the Navy. And I think that they were, because they were producing a publication, it was probably a time crunch. And so, I don’t know if I was the first person they referred them to. I don’t know if they had interviewed a bunch of other people. I have no idea. But I just knew that, oh, they were also impressed that I studied abroad. I’m trying to think of the things that they said to me during the interview or that made them sort of intrigued or want me to come in. They liked that I had spent some time abroad and that I took topography courses, to be honest.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Where did you study abroad?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
I studied abroad in Prague, in the Czech Republic. And it was mainly, it was more of a printmaking study abroad than graphic design. I mean, the graphic design aspect of it, was it that there was this workshop or this class that we took to set up design posters by hand. All analog, which was great, but it was really for printmaking, like lithography, learning to do aquatints and that kind of stuff.

And it was interesting, because it was actually with a program that was through NC State, and one of my professors at Loyola at the time was the person who was in charge. I had started that study abroad program. So it was kind of weird last year when I worked at NC State, it was like, “Oh, I did a study abroad program at this place and now I’m teaching here.” So I don’t know, it’s just kind of funny how things kind of happen that way in life.

Maurice Cherry:
So tell me how your experience was getting your MFA at Cal Arts.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
That in of itself was an experience. CalArts was tough. I mean, I definitely went there knowing that it was going to be difficult, that it wasn’t going to be easy. Actually, I was there for three years. I got accepted for the three-year track. So a lot of schools now have a three year and a two-year track, and normally the three-year track is reserved for students who don’t have a traditional graphic design background. And so since my degree wasn’t in design, it was in English. And then, I had that limited experience, that year and a half working for the Navy. So I actually did three years instead of two. So the first year was, I guess an adjustment and challenging, in and of itself. For one, I was the only Black student there in the graduate and the undergraduate program, which for me was pretty shocking.

And the reason it was surprising is because I think, to be honest, at the time I was just starting, right before grad school and doing my first year of grad school. I was just starting to notice how there was a lack of visibility of Black people in design, or how the design profession didn’t seem to, or the lack of diversity that existed. Honestly, I don’t know why it took that long for me to actually realize that, but it wasn’t until, I think it was the 2004 AIGA conference that I realized that, where I saw maybe four or five other Black people at the conference. It was in Vancouver, I remember that. And then that’s when, that was not long before I actually started school at CalArts.

So that experience, and that was the thing that I think started me on this kind of trajectory, or the path into doing the research that I do, was looking around, not seeing anybody like me. Not learning anything about anybody who looked like me with the history class, or so, yeah, that’s sort of where I started. And me being at CalArts as a student, sort of asking the question, talking to faculty or just saying. Even sometimes it was in my work, I was questioning, where are the Black designers? When was the last time CalArts had a Black student in the MFA program? Nobody can answer that question. Or can you tell me something about Black people in design history? Nobody can answer that question.

So it became this thing where, and I know we’ve done similar sort of scavenger hunts. It’s like, “Where the hell are all the Black people?” So anyway, that is where my research started. So because I couldn’t find anything out there that was tangible to hold onto, I just started doing my own research and investigation. Because I was like, “There’s nobody who’s here to tell me or give me that information. I have to discover it from myself.”

But I will say the faculty there was all, for the most part, it was, I felt supported. Although it was tough. It was like bootcamp, going to CalArts. It was a really, really tough, intense program. But I did feel encouraged most of the time for the type of projects that I had. And some of them was filled with a lot of emotion and anger, and aggression and frustration, and a lot of times that came out. But I will say that they sort of helped me nurture and cultivate my voice, and they also always encouraged me to be true, to keep that investigation and then that energy, and to being inquisitive about my design, Black design history, and culture and identity.

Maurice Cherry:
I think it’s such a good thing now that it almost feels like, I’d say maybe within the past, I don’t know, 10, 15 years perhaps, we’ll say that. But we’ve started to see more Black design educators out there, and we’ve also started to see community efforts. I mean, Revision Path is one of them, but we’ve started to also see community efforts with making sure that Black people, and I would say Black and brown, I mean, I would kind of widen that lens a bit. But we’ve started to see now more people of color in general, being talked about, recognized, showcased, researched as it comes to design. I mean, I don’t know if we’ll get to a point where there’s full equity with regards to that, but I think within the past 10 years, we’ve seen a lot of headway in that direction, where we’re starting to now see more Black students, or at least more talk about Black designers throughout history. You know what I mean?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yes, I would agree with that. There is definitely some sort of shift. I mean, if I’m honest, I’m not seeing it enough or as much as I would like to see it. But I’m also aware that things do take time, and especially when you have things that are so systemic and that’s a part of system that’s been there for so long that it’s not, it takes a long time to sort of dismantle it.

If I’m honest, I do believe that it doesn’t have to, or it shouldn’t take it as long, but I understand it. I try to understand it. I do think that things can happen a lot quicker, but I do realize that there are still certain structures that are there, that’s way more difficult to dismantle to where it takes a lot longer. But I am happy to have colleagues. I didn’t think that I would see a day where I could name at least three other Black women that are doing similar type of work or things like that. So I am happy to see that there’s a change, and there’s a lot of work and way more work that needs to be done. But yeah, I agree. There are more efforts, I guess, and more initiatives that are happening at different places.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I think with schools, it’s just always going to take longer because schools are just such, these large institutions. Of course, they get funds from different philanthropists and foundations and stuff like that. But I agree with you, in that I think the change could be happening a lot quicker. I a hundred percent agree with you there.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah. I just think that one of the things that I liked about UT was they started changing their admissions process. I think there are still more work to be done, but they have done away with the traditional portfolio. And so, their admission process is more a design prompt, so a student could … So the design program looks at just that one particular piece that they’re doing, and then they submit a 60-minute video that sort of talks about their process and their ideas, alongside the piece that they made for admissions.

So I think that, that takes a lot of pressure off because you still have so many students that, they don’t have the resources in their high schools to submit even a fine arts portfolio, let alone something that’s specific to design. Where you need all these different, you need a computer, you need the Adobe software, you need all these digital tools that a lot of high schools still don’t have those type of resources. So it’s nice to see that they’re at least trying to change that process a little bit, to make it more equitable for students of color to have access to the program.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, along with you being a design educator, and you mentioned this a bit earlier, you have your own design studio called Blacvoice Design. Tell me more about that. What are some of the projects or other work that you’ve done through your studio?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Well, a lot of projects I would say, first start off with the type of clients that I work with. So most of my clients are educational institutions like universities, colleges and things like that, nonprofit organizations, as well as kind of start up or small businesses. And I actually like the work that I do within those spaces. The type of projects that I do, format wise, most of them are books. I design a lot of books, but I don’t like to just consider myself a book designer because I do do identity projects and things like that. But a lot of the books that I do design, because a lot of my clients have modest budgets, usually I’m given texts and that’s it.

And so, I think that’s why I wear this hat of an image maker, because a lot of projects might call for me to take photos and I’ll take my own photographs for a particular project, or I do my own illustrations and create my own imagery for them. And so that I actually like. I like that whole process of generating the imagery, and doing the type setting, and doing the layout and the design. I really do enjoy being a part of that process from the beginning to the end. I thought at this point in my career that I would want to be in a more creative director sort of role, but I actually like and still enjoy being hands on.

So some projects that I’ve worked on in the past that are really kind of dear to my heart is, I used to do some work for a nonprofit organization. They’re now called 826 New Orleans, but they used to be called Big Class. And Big Class is a nonprofit organization. They started off basically sort of reaching out to the inner city public schools. And so, they would have writing prompts or writing projects for students to engage in after school. And so they would come up with themes, the students would come up with themes or topics that they wanted to write about. Usually it had to do with their feelings around their culture and their community.

And so, what I would do is basically, I would come in, talk to the student editorial board, find out what ideas they have about the design and the design process, and basically use that as information or inspiration and design a book for these individual projects. And so Big Class would take those books, they would have these readings, they would get people, they had their own press and their own imprint. And so they would publish and sell the books, and then they would just feed and go back into the sort of program. And I really like that program, because it not only gets students excited about writing, and writing is a form of expression, writing can be creative, right? Writing, I think gave them a sense of agency because they get to write, they get to publish, they get to put it out there, they get to have open mic and spoken words.

And so, I really love to see the sort of confidence that it gave these students, that maybe in their school, they may not ever have that type of experience. So for me to provide a platform for them to express themselves through words, through writing, I really did enjoy working with them. But now they’re part of this larger, more national collection of programs, that’s like 826 New Orleans, you have 826 Valencia. So 826 sort of exists in a lot of different cities. And my hope is to, there isn’t an 826 in Austin. Honestly, have no idea how to even start one. And it’s not that I even want to be in charge of one, but I would love to try to figure out how to create a rapport with some of the schools, some of the public schools here in Austin to try to get one started here. And then that way, it’s something that I would like my students at UT to be involved in that process, of helping those students design and get their work printed and published.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m a big advocate of designers needing to do more writing. A hundred percent. We had at one point in time, kind of design anthology called Recognize that we were doing through Revision Path, where we had designers just like, we would give a particular prompt or theme. I think the one we did before we shut it down was reset. I think reset was the theme. And so based off of that, we wanted people to submit essays up to 3000 words, centered around reset in whatever way that they wanted to. But it had to be design focused, like design writing. We didn’t get great ones. I’ll be completely honest. I think a lot of people rather wanted to design something than write something.

And even the first year that we did it, we would get some pushback from people, “Well, why do I have to write something?” I’m like, “It’s a essay.” I mean, you have to write something because that’s the structure of it. I do want to bring it back one day if Revision Path can get the right funding and all of that. Because, I’m still a big proponent and believer of designers, I think, need to be, they need to know how to write because of course, it just helps you get your ideas out there. But it’s just so helpful for, and I think this probably ties into your research focus. It ties into your work being part of the cannon. If you can write down what you did, the work you did, case studies, et cetera, if it gets put out there in some way, if it gets preserved in some way, you’re now part of the cannon.

One thing with me, when I try to find guests for the show, it’s very hard for me to book a guest when I can’t find anything on them. I could maybe find-

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah, you could maybe do some research.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, yeah, because I can maybe find a website or there’s maybe a blog post or something somewhere, but I need to be able to see what you’ve done so I can get a sense of who you are as a designer, if this is going to be a good fit, that sort of thing. But I say all of that to say that I’m a big, just huge fan of designers being writers, and write it down, write down your work, show your work.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
I agree with that too, Maurice. And even as a person, I still think I have a very strange or uncomfortable, I think it’s a better word, relationship with writing. It’s something that with my teaching, I always make sure that there’s some writing component in a project for students, whether it’s a reflection to something they read or something they saw. I think it’s really important. I see a lot of similarities in the writing, in the design process. So for me, it’s been, although it’s still a place where I’m super uncomfortable in lots of times, a few years ago, to be honest, I think it was back in 2017 when I was teaching at Southeastern Louisiana University, and I had just gotten tenured there. And I didn’t realize at the time that until I was at NC State during that interview process, that up until that point, I had got tenured because of my creative work, because of doing exhibitions and things like that.

And at that point, I realized that with the research that I was doing, and then at that time, my research was startup, sporadic, how I was engaged with it. I started this research in graduate school, and then I would start to engage with it from time to time when somebody would ask me to give a lecture. And at some point, going back to what you were saying about the importance of the canon and sort of writing things down, that became a real turning point for me because at that point, I wanted to change my practice a little bit, and have it more focused on writing and publishing. Because in my mind, I’m like, “Well, I can continue to do these lectures and talk about this stuff, but then what?”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
What do you with it? And so I knew at some point I always wanted to write a book about Black design history. I knew, even from grad school back at CalArts, that’s something I wanted to do. I think, not until that point, I became more intentional about it. I was like, “Okay, if I want to shift,” not do away with making, not do away with freelance, not doing away with that work, but I wanted to be more intentional about the scholarly part of me, I guess, in that work. And sort of getting it out there and not have it just be through lectures. And I think, oral history and that stuff is valuable. I’m not trying to devalue that at all, but I do think there’s something about having something written and on a page, and printed and sort of documented. Right? I mean, I think it’s really important for our work and stuff to be documented, so it can be passed on.

Maurice Cherry:
Exactly. I mean, the oral storytelling, and I realize we’re saying this on a podcast, but is mean that is important. But being able to write it down, pass it on, put it in a book, have it stored somewhere, that is what is really, that is the canon. That’s what you end up preserving. Speaking of books, I mean, we’re both working on books, but part of the research that I find is trying to find these writings and trying to find where people have talked about stuff. And you know what we’re doing now? Interviews. We’re having to talk to people because we can’t find where folks have written stuff down. So to that end, about books, as I mentioned that just now, you’re working on a book called Black Design in America. Talk to me about that.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah, so I’m a co-author of Black Design America, African-Americans, and African Diaspora and Graphic Design, 19th to 21st Century. My co-authors are Silas Munro and Pierre Bowins. And how this book came about is not a linear kind of trajectory of story. So back in 2020, when George Floyd was murdered and you had the protests going on, and a lot of things were sort of happening online, VCFA had started this sort of virtual programming. I believe they contacted me and asked me if I was interested in doing a lecture or something about my research. And so at the time, I want to say around that time, I can’t remember exactly, but I know at some point, me, Pierre, and Silas had created a Google Doc, and we just started populating it with our research. And some of our focus on our research was slightly different. There was some overlap, but we started this Google Doc, and I think we started it with the intent of writing a book someday.

So the idea was that, “Okay, we want to have this document populated to start working on the outline.” So VCFA came to me. I decided that I didn’t want to just be the only voice talking about Black design history. So I invited Pierre and Silas to also give a lecture. So they call it these micro lectures. So still had the same amount of time that I had to give my lecture, but instead of me talking for an hour or 45 minutes, we each had 15 minutes to do a micro lecture, a mini presentation about our specific research.

So again, around that time, I met Dr. Cheryl Miller, and she was just starting, or had already started her archive for Stanford, a Black design history archive. And somebody gave her my name. And so, I met with her about sending my work there. And something that I still feel weird about saying was that was my first time hearing about her and her work, but I’m glad I did. I’m glad that we had that opportunity to talk and connect. And now she’s a huge mentor and influence, inspiration in my life. But that conversation with her sort of gave me a little focus. So I was like, “Oh, I’m really interested in the history of Black women in graphic design too.” So my portion of the lecture was about that.

So we’re in the midst of the pandemic, and Silas had this idea. And so we all talked about how this information needs to get out there. I don’t know if we have time to go through the process of writing a book and getting published, and trying to do all the stuff that you have to go through, as you you’re working on one yourself. It’s a huge timeline. You don’t just do it overnight. It takes a lot of time. So Silas and his studio, that’s how they came up, and they put together the BIPOC Design History Classes, went live January of 2021. And so again, it wasn’t the intent to have the classes. And that sort of happened first. That idea, we thought, prior to the pandemic and whatnot, that we would be working on a book first. So that happened. That was the success. And so then after the chorus, then we felt like, “Okay, now we have to write this book now, because we kind of already have a structure. We have content.” But little did we know, Maurice, that it was not that easy.

These small classes. Okay. Yeah. There are chapters in the book, but I don’t know. It’s just, yeah, they’re still talking to people. There’s still more research to be done. There’s still more archives to visit. So it wasn’t just that simple to just make that transition from the series of classes, and then to make it into a book. So we’re still in the process of writing now. We have a hard, hard deadline coming up on June 1st, where we have to really turn over the manuscript. And we’re all also collaborating on the design of the book, too. So yeah, it’s been an interesting process.

And I think the thing that, I know for me, and I think from my co-authors as well, the thing that’s been most difficult is that it’s a design history book, but we’re not approaching it like a Meg’s book in a way, or this book came out a few years ago, it’s called Graphic Design Pioneers, or Pioneers in Design, where it’s focused on individuals. So we do talk about individual designers and sort of their impact, but it’s more about the diaspora, it’s more about Black experience in a way, and what we had to go through and deal with. It’s more about how we’ve been represented through visual culture, and who’s responsible for that and that kind of stuff. So it’s not necessarily about a clothesline of designers, although we do talk about individual people, because you can’t write a history book without acknowledging individuals. But, it’s not just about highlighting people, I guess in that way. It’s more about the different movements that happened, throughout time and throughout history.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, because I mean-

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
And we’ve been affected by it, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Because you’re, like you said, it’s set up with, it’s in the context of America during that time, and so there’s been wars, there’s been civil rights movements, there’s been other sorts of radical movements. And so, being able to talk about how Black design has been a through line with all of that in this country, we don’t learn it in school, in K through 12 schools. And based on what you’re saying, and probably from others, it’s probably not even something that’s really readily learned in colleges.

So having a book like this is super important, I think, not just to the design canon, but just like to American history in general. Because everything that we go through in this country has been designed in some capacity. That don’t necessarily mean that it’s been done with a pen and paper or in some visual aspect, but the systems of oppression that are in this country and many other things that sort of hold people back or push others forward, these are designed constructs. And so being able to talk about Black design in this country is super important to, I think, informing that for a lot of people. So, I’m excited to see the book when it comes out. Congratulations to you, because I know it’s a lot. I know all too well. Yeah.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
I mean, I think writing a book is a challenge, in and of itself, but I think history, and I think we have a special challenge in the type of history that we’re trying to bring to light, because it hasn’t been well documented or readily available. So it’s a lot of things you have to do to discover these stories. That’s definitely been a challenge. I think, one thing that I want to say I’m proud of about how we approach the writing in this book is that we sort of try to do away with … we’re being ourselves. We feel like using I, then we use I. If we want to throw in a little snarky, something that maybe a long time ago would be unorthodox for a history book, but we are just throwing it and putting it all out there. We’re not sort of concerned about our voices being the same, and we like that our voices are fluid and they’re sort of interchangeable.

We collaborated and wrote the introduction together, and there are parts of it, it’s like, I don’t even remember what I wrote. And we do have our chapters that the three of us have been responsible for, and we have contributors to certain chapters as well, but we’re not sort of concerned with the more traditional approach to this type of book. We don’t even call it a textbook. We’re not really approaching it in that same traditional way, I guess, if you will.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So you’re teaching, you’re running your own design studio, you are working on a book, you’re doing this research and your research focuses on, as we’ve talked about throughout this interview, Black people being omitted from the graphic design history canon. Given all the different spaces that you occupy, designer, educator, et cetera, what does the path forward look like for you?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
I think about that a lot. I think it’s going to continue in this realm of writing and publishing, and designing. I think I like the idea of being a content generator and being the one to design that content. So I see more books around the same topic, but in different iterations. So for instance, I’m completely obsessed with Louise E. Jefferson. She is a Black woman who was one of the first art directors in the publishing industry at Friendship Press. She started working in the mid, late 1930s, and she was a designer, a calligrapher, a cartographer, an illustrator, a researcher. I mean, she was a real true renaissance woman, and she rubbed shoulders with all kinds of people during the Harlem Renaissance. But I’ve been doing research on her for a really long time. And so, I envision writing and designing a book about Louise E. Jefferson. And right now, I’ve been in touch with Friendship Press where she worked at as an art director for 20 years, and they’re interested in me writing a book about Louise and her work.

So those type of projects I see still continuing. The past few years have been great. The writing, the lecturing have been amazing, meeting amazing people, and have been great with giving me more opportunities to write into research. But I would like to hopefully, have more of a balance between that and my making, especially maybe even more so personal projects. I really enjoy doing small collaborations with other designers, whether it be zines or just random, creating compositions and giving files, going back and forth between digital files and things like that. Well, not really knowing what the outcome is. I think I just miss making and playing, and having fun.

Not that the design work that I do isn’t enjoyable, but it’s just a different type of making, I guess it’s different. You’re doing research and you’re writing. That’s a lot different than like, “Okay, I have this idea for making this thing using these materials, or even this tool or this technology. Am I making?” I’m really interested in this sort of synthesis, and analog and digital tools and how they sort of come together, and how to expand our uses in ways that they weren’t actually meant to be used. So I would like moving forward to be able to engage more, and just being a maker and not thinking about what I’m making so much.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, being a designer and an educator and all these things, you’ve talked now about how you want your path to go forward, but in your current work, how do you balance these different aspects? Do these different roles inform each other in some way?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Yeah, I mean, I definitely see there are so much overlap in … For a long time, I actually didn’t know how to bring all these things together, especially in the classroom because it took a while before I started teaching design history, and actually I’m not teaching it right now. I haven’t taught it in maybe three years. But I think, that doesn’t mean that I can’t still bring that into the classroom. So to me, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care that I’m not teaching design history. Whatever I’m teaching, you’re going to learn something about Black design. Some kind of way I’m going to insert my agenda, because I know that these are things that are, in part, it’s not just Black design history. I talk about queer history. I talk about other areas of design where people are marginalized or we don’t know a lot about, and I know a little something. I still try to impart that to my students, so I make sure that I’m trying to be equitable in that sense.

But yeah, I’m just starting to see where these roads and where these things are starting to overlap. So am I making? Now I think about, well, how could, besides designing books about Black design history or whatever, and the publishing aspect, but I start thinking about, well, what are other things that you can make that sort of has to do with your research? So I’m starting to think more about that, like timelines and things like that. So to me, the crossover is starting to happen. It’s slow and maybe not as fast as I would have liked them to be. And then I see them in the projects that I give to my students too. So it sort of reverts back to the classroom in that way.

Maurice Cherry:
So, I like that it all feeds into each other then. That’s good.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Kind of makes less work for me in a way, as opposed to try to compartmentalize everything. So for a long time, everything used to be in these separate buckets. Black design studio, freelance here is writing and lecture. But now, they’re just starting to morph together, and that has been good, and that’s how I would like things to continue in the future.

Maurice Cherry:
Hey, look, work smarter, not harder. I get it.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
What advice would you give to someone out here that’s hearing your story, that’s hearing about all these different things that you’re interested in, and they want to follow in your footsteps? What would you tell them?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
I would say, learn how to be comfortable in your voice, in your skin, and how to … I didn’t always feel comfortable being Tasheka, being authentically me, because sometimes I had moments where I didn’t want to step on people’s toes, but I noticed moments where I did do that, and I was just kind of myself and just kind of put it out there. Those have been the best experiences.

And I would say that we all have control. You have some kind of control over your path, and so if there’s a certain direction that you want your practice, or your craft, or your skill or whatever it is you are into to take, that you can kind of plan for. Talk to people who are doing the thing that you want to do, align yourself. Reach out to them. I know sometimes, we think and we look at people that we admire and we put them on this pedestal, but if they’re the right people, they’ll talk to you and they’re not full of themselves. And lots of times, people are more than happy to talk to you about your path, and this is especially to younger designers. Don’t be afraid to reach out to people who you admire, and have conversations with them about what they do and how they got to where they are. But yeah, I just say be bold.

Maurice Cherry:
Be bold.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Be bold and intentional about how you move through this world.

Maurice Cherry:
I love that. Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What do you want the next chapter of your story to be?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
I do see myself still teaching. I do see myself still being at UT, and I’m hoping, my hope is that in five years, I have a couple of books under my belt by then. Maybe, I’m just going to throw it out there, Maurice. I would say at least three of them, because I have a list of projects that I’m really like. It’s kind of like these have to be done before I die. No, maybe they don’t have to be done in five years. That’s pretty ambitious of me, but I’m already working on one, so I can get the other two at least in the works by that time, that would be great.

I do have sort of a passion project that I’ve been sitting on on for a while. I have a collection of drawings, maybe it’s like 200 and something drawings, that I would like in five years to have their own sort of brand, where it’s a collection of, whether it’s greeting cards or home decor or apparel. Not or. I should say and. So I’ve been procrastinated on this project for a really long time, and I hope in five years that that project sort of sees the light of day.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, about your work and everything? Where can they find that online?

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
I’m probably most active on Instagram and Facebook. So Facebook is Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton. On Instagram, it’s Blacvoice. I am on Twitter under Blacvoice, but I’m not that engaged with that platform as much. But, I’m on there and I tweet every now and then. I’m on LinkedIn, which is, you can find me under Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton. Again, that’s not a platform that I’m super engaged in, but I’m there, and you’ll probably find me multiple times under LinkedIn, but I’m there. But Instagram, I would say, it’s probably the place to see me. I’m more active there. I would hate to throw out my crappy Adobe Portfolio website. That’s just a bunch of stuff that’s thrown on there right now. But hey, why not? Blacvoicedesign.portfolio.com. That’s just something that’s there right now, just to have an online presence, until I have time to do something else with it.

Maurice Cherry:
All right. Sounds good. Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton, I want to thank you so, so much for coming on the show. You and your work have been on my radar for many years, I think probably, maybe since 2015? For a while now. And it wasn’t until recently, I had spoken with Cheryl, had Cheryl on the show for 500th episode, and she sung your praises to the high heavens. And I was like, “I feel like I reached out to her before. Let me reach out again just to see if she might be interested.”

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Actually, you did, Maurice. I thought about that. I was actually just telling my sister right before, and I was like, I feel weird because you did reach out to me a long time ago, and I think at the time I was just not ready, and something that had nothing to do with you or the show. I love the show and listen to it, and I think that was just like, “I’m still in my boldness. I’m kind of shy too, and more of an introvert.” So I think that, yeah, it just took a while, but you did. You did, but I’m glad you reached back out again.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, but I mean, I also just want to say from hearing your story and hearing about everything that you’re working on, I think it’s evident that you have a passion for design. You have a passion for honestly getting the story right, whether it’s through writing, through education, through your visual design work. I’m really excited to see and hear more from you in the future. I feel like you’re one of our bright shining stars that are really going to help represent us, as we move forward in this crazy world that we’re in right now. I feel like the work that you’re doing is really going to stand out and help showcase what Black designers are doing everywhere, so thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton:
Thanks again for having me, Maurice.

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Dr. Christina N. Harrington

Our back to school theme continues this week with a conversation with Dr. Christina N. Harrington. I first met Dr. Harrington as a contributor to the first volume of RECOGNIZE, and now she’s an assistant professor in the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and the director of their Equity and Health Innovations Design Research Lab! Impressive!

After a brief pandemic check-in, Dr. Harrington talked about some of the design research work she’s doing at Carnegie Mellon, and spoke about how her past teaching experiences helped prepare her for this opportunity. We also talked about how she got into design via engineering, the utility of design Ph.Ds, and some of her latest obsessions. I’m glad we have educators like Dr. Harrington who can expand the concepts of design for the next generation!

Transcript

Full Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
All right. So tell us who you are and what you do.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
All right. I am Christina Harrington. I am a Southern, black, queer creative technologist. I have backgrounds in both engineering and design. I’m a tinkerer. I’m a crafter. I’m an inquisitive, how does this work, inside mechanics, logic type person. Right now I am in the space of higher education academia. I’m an assistant professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And I teach at that intersection of design and HCI, where we think about people and what people need when they engage with technology, why people engage with technology the ways that they do, the ways that technology can better support black and brown folks, folks that may not have the infrastructure to interact with the newest or coolest tech or gadgets or whatever, but that could really benefit from tech being ubiquitous in their everyday lives. I’m a writer a little bit, in terms of talking about design and figuring out ways to have these conversations about design outside of the walls of academia.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Speaking of writing, you were one of the first people that we published on Revision Path when we did our recognized design anthology back in 2019?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
2019. Yeah.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yeah. You scared me with that one. It’s crazy because going through school, it was almost like you were told you can either be really good at math and science, or you can do the humanity side of things. And I always wanted to write, because I just felt like sometimes expressing ideas is just as equally powerful through text as it is through sketching something.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
When I saw that Revision Path call, I was like, I’m just going to jump out there and see what happens. And I was super, super, super nervous, which is crazy because I had done like a whole dissertation and conference preceding papers and journal articles, but I was like, I really, really, really want to get into this anthology. And I really want to do writing that has a little bit more of my voice and a little bit less of like academic, technical jargon. Very, I don’t know, polished speech. It was really, really cool. Thank you for that opportunity.

Maurice Cherry:
No, thank you for submitting it. Unfortunately we had to, I don’t know if I mentioned this on the show, but I certainly had wrote about it. Unfortunately, I kind of took a hiatus from Recognize this year. The pandemic really did a number on, honestly like the number of people that were submitting, which sort of made sense. I mean, folks were just trying to survive out here. They weren’t thinking about trying to write stuff.

Maurice Cherry:
But then the things that we would get, people just wouldn’t write to the prompt. They’d write what they wanted to write. To give you an example, the year that we did the first anthology, and the theme was space, a lot of people wrote about Nipsey Hussle. I’m not super familiar with Nipsey Hussle. I don’t know if there’s like a space theme in his rap or anything, but I was like, why are so many people writing stuff about Nipsey Hussle. This has nothing to do with space. Or maybe it does, I don’t know.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Is that the year he passed?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, that was the year he passed.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I mean, I imagine that might be part of it. I don’t know anything about Nipsey Hussle either.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. If people are listening and want to clue me in, please do, because I was like, why am I getting all these … It wasn’t just that people were writing poems, people were submitting artwork. And I’m like, “No, I just need an essay, I don’t need something in Photoshop. I don’t need to see something you painted. Thank you, I guess.” I plan to bring Recognize back at some point in the future. I just think right now, probably the timing’s not great for it, but hopefully in the future, with more support, I’ll try to get it back out there.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
That’s one of the things about thinking about how we stretch design. Saying that you got so many people that we’re submitting artwork and Photoshop, and it’s like, designers are afraid to write sometimes. I’ve literally heard running jokes, designers, engineers, computer science folks that are like, “I’m an engineer or I’m a computer scientist, I don’t write.” And it’s like, “Wait, wait, wait, how do you communicate what you’ve done? Or how do you communicate your ideas behind what you’ve built or what you’re envisioning?” There’s so much space for that, yet folks shy away from it so, so much.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It’s certainly something that I was trying to put forth through Recognize, is to have more people just write because it helps you, like you said, formalize your ideas. If you’re an entrepreneur, it helps with writing better proposals, writing better proofs, just communication in general, it tends to be really helpful. I mean, we even had a writer, actually a couple episodes ago, had our first writer on the show. I think in his background, he called himself a verbal designer, which I thought was really interesting.

Maurice Cherry:
He’s a writer, and we talked all about how writing is, at least nowadays’s, such a crucial part of the design process. It was good just to have someone who’s a writer come on and really talk about like, yeah, I’m a writer and this is how I work within design teams and on design projects and giving feedback to designers about what they could do to either strengthen their writing or improve their writing, or even see the importance of writing in the whole design process.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yeah. Definitely. Definitely.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, aside from the new appointment, how’s the year been going? What’s been on your mind?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
The year has been transformational and also kind of like, you feel like you’re sludging through mud at the same time. I think the world is like a really crazy place right now. I don’t know if it’s like, oh, all of these things are going on, and 2020, 2021 is like this unprecedented time in life. Or if it’s like, no, the world’s always kind of been crazy, but as you get older, you have more of a connection to why.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Politics have always been wild in the United States, but for some of us, it’s not until we get older that you start to really see how like, oh, the ways that we’re voting are impacting like, I don’t have healthcare. I can’t go to the doctor and take care of myself. I can’t do the things with my body as a person who identifies as a woman in the United States that I want to, because of the state that I live in.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think that all of those things on top of a global health pandemic are happening at the same time. I’m like, am I becoming an empath in my old age that it just … I literally have days where I’m like, “I can’t today.” Because everything feels so heavy and it feels pointless to be writing a journal article or to be writing a conference paper. And these are things that I like to do, but there are some day ease lately where I’m just, I don’t have the motivation.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I’ve been seeing a lot of memes and all of these articles that are talking about how black women in particular are just like, we are collectively burnt out. And I think it goes to earlier, the question you asked about the things that have happened in the last year in terms of really intensified racial moments. And it’s like, we dealt with a couple of months of white people coming out of the cracks of the sidewalk, asking us how we’re doing and apologizing for things. I don’t even know you. All of that contributes to this like just community exhaustion, I’m kind of feeling, from a lot of my friends and a lot of folks.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
So on the one hand with this new job and with this new role, it’s really exciting. It’s a blessing to be here. My career in terms of academia has shot through the roof to places I don’t think I ever would’ve imagined, but I am very tired. I’m very tired with just holding all of the emotions of what’s happening in the world.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I think that’s been a general sort of feeling that I’ve gotten from talking with a lot of black creatives, just a lot of black friends of mine. It’s been like, we’re just tired. It’s like a lasagna of fatigue. There’s tiredness of just like, you being a black person in this country, and then on top of that, whatever other identities you have on top of that, whether you are queer or trans or what have you. Then on top of that, just like this whole pandemic and coronavirus and these variants. And then on top of that, there’s the government like forcefully pushing people back out into the world like, no more masks mandates, get back out there. Even the whole, and I don’t mean to get super political, but the insurrection was this year. So much has happened.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Time is so warped right now. Time is so warped right now. There’s no concept of time because it feels like things are back to back. And it also feels like there’s so many intertwined struggles that you can’t parse out something to say, this is what’s upsetting me, because everything’s connected.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think that when we think about the moments that we had the uprisings that we had last summer, and it’s like, you’re mad about that. You’re angry about that, because collectively, black lives have been proven over and over again to be disposable in this country. But then at the same time, within those conversations, we have to talk about how black, queer and trans people are treated when they also too are part of those black lives. And what does it mean to have to have those conversations among other black folks who are telling you, we can’t talk about that right now. Don’t be divisive right now.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And watch the number of black trans women being killed continue to rise. Watch people not mention the names of the black trans men or the gender non-binary folks who have also been murdered at the hands of the state and police. Watch folks not want to talk about the rates of homelessness and just all of these things. And it’s like, whew, you can’t touch on one part of it without feeling that thread and the whole sweater unraveling. So, yeah, it’s a different type of … I think I ask my social media once every two weeks, what’s the word for past exhausted? What happens after you’re exhausted? What is that called?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I don’t know. I feel like we’re all at some point trying to persevere through whatever that state might be called, but it’s there. Now, we’ve jumped in like both feet in this discussion. I do want to bring it back to your work and what you’re doing. You mentioned your assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon at the HCI Institute. Can you talk about what that is and what you’ll be teaching?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yeah. So the HCI Institute, it’s kind of like a dream job for me. It’s like this collection of, they joke like a collection of almost misfits of people across computer science, human-computer interaction, design, folks that are interested in that intersection of people and technology, technology and environment, people and environment, and anything that has to do with the ways that we interact with the digital world is kind of that area of human-computer interaction.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think what’s so dope about the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon is it’s one of the few, if not the only spaces designated purely to human-computer interaction degrees. You could study human-computer interaction in schools of computing, sometimes in schools of design within the United States, but to find a space where they’re like, we know exactly what this is. It’s kind of thus become like the leading institution for how HCI is thought about. To be at the place where it’s kind of like, this is … Some of the work that’s come out of this institute, this university, is what we’ve based other research on, is definitely cool for me.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think a little larger than that, being at Carnegie Mellon, where they also have a really high ranked school of design. And folks that work across that so seamlessly, because they do go hand in hand. I think that that’s just, it’s really, really, really exciting for me. And a lot of what I’ll be teaching is everything from foundational courses and introduction to user experience design or human-computer interaction. I like to say that I’m a methods girl. I love design research methods. Or engaging with students around how they learn about the people that they’re designing with or for. How they engage people in design and all of that is like design methods.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
You could go your traditional research route of just doing an interview, or you could be doing like card sorting, or role playing, or artifact analysis. Like all of these really cool things that designers have in their tool belt. I will be teaching any one of those things, but also hopefully introducing courses that consider design equity and design justice and thinking about design where design has not been talked about.

Maurice Cherry:
I first got exposed to HCI, wow, I’m dating myself. This was 20 years ago. Oh, my God! It was 20 years ago. I was an intern at Marshall Space Flight Center, right outside of Huntsville, Alabama. It’s normal, Alabama’s a city. I remember my mentor at the time, he was studying HCI, as it related to like haptic interfaces. And it was so funny because he was like, “In the future, we’ll have like a computer that’s just like the size of a sheet of paper.” Basically he was talking about a tablet.

Maurice Cherry:
And this was, my God, this was 2000, 2001, something like that. But talking about like learning how we interact with haptic interfaces. I think it was still very new at the time. I mean, I find that a lot of innovation that tends to happen sometimes through NASA, eventually trickles into consumer stuff. Because that was also where I saw my first 3D printer, was back then, because they print the nose cone of the space shuttle is made out of this substance called Marco. It burns up on reentry when the space shuttles reenter the atmosphere. They print that out every time. They literally like print it out, a big machine, and replace the nose cone every time. And I was like, “Oh wow!” I was like, “So you’re printing in 3D.” I mean, that was what? 1920 at the time. It blew my mind, like you’re printing in 3D.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
It still blows my mind. I didn’t know that. Definitely learned something. HCI has been around for a while. I mean, definitely since the late nineties, just from like the academic texts that I’m familiar with. Actually let’s say, I can think of papers in the mid to late nineties that have talked about human-computer interaction because the minute we started talking about computers, we had to talk about how folks are interacting with computers. And I think initially that was done in like the human factor space. Thinking about work and cognition and like mental load and task load and what it takes for a computer to remember chunks of information and memory and how that is likened to the human brain and then what the person can be expected to be able to do and task and stuff like that.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And then human computer interaction came along. And then somewhere down the road, design kind of like attached itself in a very particular way, because we started talking about, how do we develop the tools that we’re either building computers with? How do we develop the code? How do we create the housing of the computers? We’re talking about new phones and we’re talking about new tablets or iPods. When Apple came along and started doing that so, so, so, so well, and not to say that this was the initiation of it, but it’s always my go-to example because Apple is just kind of like the Mecca of design for me, when you’re talking about technology consumer products. Then I really think folks started having conversations about the way things looked in the technology space. And the way things were experienced in the technology space. I think it’s a cool place to be, in terms of like the work that I do.

Maurice Cherry:
And now with HCI, are you focusing on hardware software or both?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Neither.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, okay.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I am the anti-technologist technologist. I’m focused on how we think about everyday technologies in people’s lives. I am not necessarily trying to design the software of the phone and I’m not necessarily trying to design the casing of the phone, but I’m trying to think about how the phone can be used as a tool for health information, for folks who might not have access to medical professionals on a consistent basis.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I’m the researcher that’s trying to consider, well, in what ways can we embed public displays? How can we get community health information out there for people who don’t have wifi in the home or computers at home, such that they’re not behind … When we think about the pandemic and how out a lot of that information that was coming out from the CDC, I was seeing it on Twitter. I was seeing it on Instagram. You’re getting alerts. Like the CDC just made this update, here are the places where you can get tested and things like that. How do we get that information to people who aren’t so heavily reliant on their phone? And do we do that through computers and public libraries? Do we do that through health kiosks that are at the Walgreens or the CVS? That’s the level at which I’m thinking about technology?

Maurice Cherry:
Actually, that makes a lot more sense too, to think about it in that way. I think it’s because now, I mean just thinking about haptic interfaces and everything like that, I mean, everything that we utilize with technology, it feels like it’s through some sort of a touch interface or an audio interface or something like that. Thinking about how it works within the context of our lives and spreading information and stuff like that is really crucial.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s a good point that you mentioned about with the CDC stuff, because my folks are in rural Alabama. Basically I was passing the information to them on the telephone because they don’t have an internet connection. They don’t have a computer, so they’re not going to get that information in the way that it’s going out, especially because, one, they’re in the rural south, but two, broadband is not everywhere in this country. So it’s not a public utility in that way, like the plain old telephone services.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yeah. And unfortunately, the reason I focus on digital access and design equity is because is I’ve been the poem and the quote like, [inaudible 00:24:30] on the moon. Like we’re trying to get information to our folks in rural areas, but we have communities that are literally shipping off to Mars to escape the realities of what’s happening down here. And it’s like, there’s such gap. There’s such an imbalance in the ways that technology is utilized between certain communities.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
So it’s like at some point we have to say, hey guys, we can’t keep building new, new, new, new, new, while we have communities that are still like, wait, what’s a Google Home? What’s Alexa? Oh, I could use that to track my doctor’s appointment? Like, what? That gap, that dissonance is something that I feel like I’m always going to have an area where my work is needed because we have folks that are so focused on creating these technologies for the year 2032, and we are still trying to get some folks caught up to the year 2005.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. A lot of those futurist innovations really just like, they just completely blow by a lot of communities. I mean, even with smart speakers, I think I got my mom a smart speaker, I don’t know, a while ago, probably back in the early 2010s or whatever, when they first started coming out, and Alexa couldn’t recognize her. Couldn’t recognize her accent. So it’s like, well, that’s not good. She ended up giving it to me. I don’t even still have it anymore.

Maurice Cherry:
But to that point, like, yeah, you’ve got these other interfaces and stuff like that. The tech tends to be so focused on the next big innovations when like there’s still so many issues right now that need solving. And I don’t know if it’s because these are not like flashy, sexy news making issues that need to be solved, but it’s a huge chasm between the work that needs to be done and the work that’s being done.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
It’s also why you don’t have a whole lot of people focusing on it, because it’s not sexy, innovative work. I get hit with the same question, oh, do you do hardware? Do you do software? Are you in AI? Are you in machine learning? Are you in VR? And it’s like, I’m in this space of information because folks are still trying to understand the full features of what your phone can do, to support your everyday living. To jump to, here’s a headset that can make it seem like you’re pumping ice cream at McDonald’s in Kansas. It’s like, okay, that’s cool, but we’ve skipped a whole area for certain folks. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. That reminds me of what I saw on, I think it was maybe last week or this week, I think, with Good Morning America Facebook debuting these virtual reality work rooms. And like everybody’s got on a $300 VR headset to meet in a virtual space to have meetings. I’m like, this is the most ridiculous shit I have ever seen in my whole life. I mean, it’s one thing that we can’t get together because of the pandemic, where like now I have to buy a $300 peripheral just so we can sit in second life and talk about status updates? It’s ridiculous. You’re also heading up the Equity and Health Innovations Design Research Lab. Talk to me about what that is and like what some of the projects are that are coming out of the lab.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yeah. I mean, the EHI lab is literally just that. I came through both my masters and my PhD in heavy lab cultures. I was involved in the research in ergonomics and design research lab at North Carolina state. And then I worked with the Human Factors and Aging Lab at Georgia Tech. Becoming a faculty, literally the first thing I wanted, and I don’t know why I was so obsessed, but I was like, “I need a lab.”

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I want a lab where I can curate projects, but not just for namesake or ownership of a space, but more so, one of the things I’ve really been trying to do is kind of like kick open the doors of academic research to the communities that we sit in. So I wanted something where communities know like, okay, if we’re trying to do something, if we’re trying to build something, we can come here and collaborate and build and work and voice concerns or discuss some of the things that we’re trying to do.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Most all of my work is community-based participatory design. What I call CBPD, which stems off of community-based participatory action research that you’ll find in public health sectors, where it’s like letting the community define the need, define the project, define the scope of what we’re doing, which in academia sometimes means flipping on its head, what the project outcomes are. How can we do a design research project and put something in the hands of community before we ever publish a paper or present at a conference or do a poster or whatever? And that means creating zines.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
One of the projects that we’ve been working on for almost a year now is the creation and the development of a speculative design toolkit for communities to be able to brainstorm without the leadership of a formal design researcher or a professor or academic PI or whatever you want to call it, to say, we want to brainstorm our own solution to this thing that we’ve been working on, whether it be re-imagining what to do with an abandoned building on a particular block, or we’re trying to get safety cameras put in at the basketball court, so that parents feel safe. So that with their kids being out there late, or we’re trying to get broadband access in a particular neighborhood, how can we think about that through a design lens? How can we brainstorm that? How can we iterate on what solutions might look like?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
So we’ve been developing this toolkit that we’ve been calling Building Utopia, and we’ve been working with community design practitioners who do just exactly that type of work. So, Jen Roberts, from the Colored Girls Liberation Lab. An amazing, brilliant end day who works with Black Womxn Flourish Collective, which you may or may not be familiar with. They’re one of the co-founders of that with Denise Shanté Brown. And they and Jen have been collaborating with my lab on the development of this toolkit, and we’ve been testing it and refining it and hoping to launch it maybe sometime this year, early next year.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I told myself that I wanted to do projects that I cared about. So what are the projects that matter to black and brown folks? I think what you mentioned about your mom is actually a really great example because that’s another one of the big projects I’ve been doing is looking at health information seeking with voice assistance for black elders. And how do we meet the needs of them being able to ask health-related questions of these devices that right now, for all intents and purposes, don’t want to understand our voices, our accents, our dialects, the words that we use that may not be formal language. And so that’s another one of the projects that’s coming out of my lab at the moment.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And we’ve been looking at, how do we redefine more ideal conversational assistance? How do we define what the conversational dynamic black elders want to see looks like? And we’ve been doing that in a very community-based participatory manner. I kind of let the work that I’m doing lead me, like doing this project, and when you hear enough, people say one thing and it’s like, okay, here’s that defines what the next project is. When the toolkit literally came out of us exploring speculative design with folks that are like, yeah, this is all well and good, but what are we doing when the academic researchers are gone? And the students have finished whatever project and studio classes are over, and we’re still trying to think through some of these things?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And it’s like, oh, well, what if we worked collaboratively with folks to develop a toolkit that is kind of like a resource for folks to do that work without the need of having to engage with universities or industry designers? So, yeah, that’s kind of what the EHI lab is about. And the things that I’m open to doing is really just closing that gap that I was mentioning earlier between the ways design has been used in communities of privilege and of fluency. And the ways that design can impact communities that are not defined in that way.

Maurice Cherry:
As you’ve been going through these things with the lab, it’s interesting that you said that the problems or the things that you all are working on, kind of uncover themselves as you start talking to people, as you start using the things that are coming out of the lab more. It’s almost, I don’t know, self-generating in a way. Like you’re finding new ideas as you get out there and talk with other people. I mean, I think that’s a good thing. That’s how labs are. Labs are for experimentation.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yeah, definitely.

Maurice Cherry:
And now, prior to this, you were teaching at DePaul University in Chicago for a number of years. When you look back at that time, what do you think you learned that really prepared you for what you’re doing now?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Several things. Definitely I think DePaul, being one of the few formal schools of design that had a PhD, that also was open and starting to define design in this very like social good, social impact way. DePaul, A, I’d say is known very well for like games design, graphic design. And then you had folks that were also starting to define this sector of like Dr. Sheena Erete’s lab, the technology for social good and this area of social impact.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think it was a great home for me to start off and define my own research interests and my own research agenda, and how I was going to maneuver through some of these projects in an academic space. And I think Chicago was a really great city to do that because Chicago is kind of like this very, I don’t want to say social impact, when you’re talking about things outside of academia. But Chicago has this movement activist, equity driven lens just inherent throughout a lot of the work being done in the city. So I think engaging with outside organizations and then seeing how other faculty were engaging with the city and different organizers and community partners is definitely something that rubbed off on me.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And then I think DePaul as a university, being a place where you really get to harness teaching students. I’ve been in this research thing since I started my master’s program. But teaching is very rarely something they teach you how to do. Like how do you effectively develop course objectives and evaluate students in ways that’s not just throwing a 300 question exam at them? And I think I was able to learn a lot of that at DePaul.

Maurice Cherry:
I want to go general, like more into your background, because you have an extensive educational background and everything. Let’s start from the beginning. You mentioned at the top of the show that you’re Southern. Where did you grow up?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I am from Fayetteville, North Carolina, born and raised. At some point my parents moved to Richmond, Virginia. And then when my parents split, my mom’s side of the family and my dad’s was still back in North Carolina, but we had the closest relationship with my mom’s side. We literally were in Fayetteville whenever she was not on the clock at work, because that’s where her support system was. So North Carolina is very ingrained in me, but I did a lot of my schooling during the week in Richmond, Virginia.

Maurice Cherry:
Were you exposed to a lot of tech and design growing up?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
What I would consider the tech and design that I know now, no. I went to the math and science center. I was one of those kids in middle school, I went to the math and science center in middle school. I forget how I got into that. I was always a tinkerer, even in like my younger elementary school days. I was always trying to take things apart, put things together, build things from scratch. I remember one year when I had the concept of like what a birthday is and you get people a gift. I tried to build my mom these shoes by taking one of her pair of shoes and tracing it on paper and then foam. And then the stuffing of the foam that comes out of like a packing box.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I’m trying to build up these layers so I could build her a more comfortable pair of shoes, because she was always working. Because design hadn’t really reached a lot of high schools and middle schools, it was like, okay, you’re doing that, so you’re supposed to be an engineer. There was no concept of like, you’re supposed to be a designer. I never heard the word design or like designer. I literally was told you’re good at math and science, you’re tinkering, go be an engineer.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I remember telling my high school guidance counselor. I was clearly doing well. And I was in gifted honors classes, and this, that, and the third. So I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to go to college. Here’s where I’m applying.” He’s like, “What do you want to do?” And I was like, “I want to build electronics. I want to create electronics.” And he was like, “Oh, go to school for electrical engineering.” And then my uncle was an electrical engineer that graduated from North Carolina A&T.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I went to college for electrical engineering, and it wasn’t until I did a summer bridge program at Virginia Tech, that’s no longer there, but it used to be called Aspire, but it was for incoming black, Latinx. And I believe at that time, even Asian students to take these summer courses at Virginia Tech, the summer before you started your fall semester as a way to promote retention, because minority students had low numbers of finishing in these degrees at institutions like Virginia Tech.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I did this program. And so you then came into the fall semester of your freshman year with this cohort of folks. I became really close with some of the guys, because it was mainly guys. And I think it was like maybe six girls out of like 40 students. But I remember two of my guy friends that did that program with me. They were mechanical engineering students. They were getting a minor in this thing called industrial design. And I was like, “Boy, one day, I’m going to go to class with y’all.”

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I went to one of their industrial design classes. I think it was Mitzi Vernon teaching design research at Virginia Tech. And I like fell in love with it. I was like, “What is this thing?” And I literally left that class and I went into the College of Architecture’s front desk office, and I was like, “How do I sign up for this minor? I want to do this too.” And then I went to my undergraduate advisor and was like, “Okay, now how can I make my senior thesis integrate industrial design?”

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I changed my whole senior thesis to like, instead of just electrical engineering project, it became designing a sensor and designing a hardware of the sensor that could detect vehicles that were coming at joggers and bikers at a certain speed for like safety. I’ve always been about like safety and designing for impairments and things like that. I just fell in love with design, taking this design research class and then taking this sketching classes. I forget the other classes that were needed for the minor.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And as I moved through that minor and then going back to get my master’s in industrial design, I realized that like, that’s where I want it to be, because engineering, and this is no slight to the engineers, but I just felt like engineering put me in a cubicle where I didn’t get to talk to people. And I didn’t get to understand people the ways that I wanted to. And design was like, okay, you’re designing the thing. You’re also thinking about the core guts of the thing, but you’re also understanding the person that’s going to be interacting with the thing.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And the period between when I graduated from undergrad and before I started my masters, I worked at Motorola as an RF systems engineer. I was sitting in a cube, eight, nine hours a day, designing radio packages for the government. I never talked to anybody. I never went out. And I hated it. So when I went back to get my master’s in industrial design, it felt like some clouds are opening up. So I was like, oh, this is where I want to be. And the further I explored that, the better I defined like exactly what design meant to me and also realized how limited a lot of folks are in being exposed to design, because I could have been doing that the whole time.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I think an interesting kind of trend that I’m seeing here that is what you’re continuing in your work is that you have the idea that in terms of going into your education, you knew that you were good at these things, but you only had a very limited view of what that could look like, which in turn ended up being engineering. I empathize with that too, because like when I went into school, I wanted to do web design. This was in like late 90s, early two 2000s, and I remember my computer science … Well, no, first of all, I was told, “Oh, you should go into computer science, to design a website.”

Maurice Cherry:
And at the time I enrolled in this computer science, computer engineering dual degree program, you do three years at Morehouse. You do two years at Georgia Tech. You get out with a master’s and a bachelor’s. And I was telling my advisor, I wanted to design websites, and he just laughed in my face. “The internet is a fad. This is what you want to do? We don’t do that here.” I switched my major and went into math because Morehouse doesn’t have a design program. I do think about now how different my career might have been if I ended up going into more of that design route.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m bringing this up because what it sounds like for you is that you started out doing this engineering and then as you learn more information and saw these other paths that were open, that then shifted you more towards design. So like it’s that thing about access and I guess equity in some respect, but just access to knowing that this is an option that you can take.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yeah. I mean, definitely. I think hearing your story fuels that point of, how often are young black and brown students being pushed towards these degrees or this area? You don’t necessarily have to have a degree to be a designer. I think design is like a skillset. Design is also a way of thinking that a lot of people inherently have or what we all inherently have, it’s just whether or not we express ourselves in that way. I wonder how we are exposing like black and brown kids to exploring that as a potential thing to do to harness your creativity or to make a living or whatever it is you want to do out of life.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And it’s not a lie. I think that there’s so many reasons why design is an expensive, especially like a master’s or a PhD in design, it’s an expensive area because design proper doesn’t fall under a lot of the NSF and the fellowships that are going to pay your way. Oftentimes people that are going back and getting post-baccalaureate degrees in design are paying out of pocket or loans. That’s already going to curate a particular type of folk that’s able to do that, and not feel financial stress.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And then I think now people have more of an understanding and a vocabulary around design. But 10 or 15 years ago, when you say, I want to be a designer and it’s was like, well, are you going to make any money doing that? And I think black and brown students are oftentimes limited in having that as a constraint when they come out. If they go to school, it’s like, I got to pick a major that I’m going to do a job that makes money. We’re not always afforded the opportunity to say, I want to do this thing regardless of what the return of investment is going to be.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And so all of these things contribute to, we push, in the past at least, our communities have been pushed to do certain things, to study certain things, and design has not been one of them. And so then it becomes this like elite thing that people think I can’t do design. [inaudible 00:46:38] doesn’t think in that way. And it’s like, if you had a problem at home this morning and you no longer have it because you figured something, you created some type of work around, or you Jimmy rigged your door to no longer creak. Or you’re trying to go in and out of your bedroom to get watermelon in night, like whatever, you’re doing design.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And it’s reframing how we think about what design is and how people think about what they can do with design. I think we’re starting to see that more now. You have designed this trickled out throughout so many sectors. You have literal government agencies that are now wanting to hire people talking about design, to address city infrastructure problems. To address urban planning problems. All of these things, there’s so much value now. And people considering design as a lens to just think through things. It might not even have to be about problems. It can just be about the process of ingenuity and creativity. But I think for my generation at least, that’s just such a new thing, because when I was coming out of K through 12, people were not talking about [inaudible 00:47:54].

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And I’m going to just put this out here and folks can quote me on that. I attribute a lot of that, I think, new thinking around how folks approached design to the fact that the people that are talking about design, like you look at just the general makeup, has gotten a lot more diverse than it has been in previous years, because you’ve got more black and brown people, more queer people, et cetera, bringing their perspectives, which are a mix of education and lived experience into what design is, that it’s helping for a lot of people to expand what the definition of design looks like.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, I remember in like the two thousands, I mean, I was out of college. I was like early in my career and everything about design, at least around like web stuff, because it was still pretty early. It was just all about web stuff. What’s the latest framework. And it wasn’t about, how are we solving problems? Like UX wasn’t really a … I want to say UX wasn’t a thing. It certainly wasn’t as prevalent as it is now. People did UX stuff, but it was not as, I think, known or accepted, I want to say, as being like a hardcore frontend person or backend person or something like that.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, I mean, it’s amazing the titles that you see, the type of work that you’re able to do in design that is, in large part, I think there’s just more diverse people are out there talking about it, sharing their experiences and really showing other people how design is not just something that’s done like on a computer or with a pen and paper or something like that.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
But even to your point, those tools have also helped to break down the barriers to design. One of the reasons I love what people on social media and the ways, I don’t know if you saw like, it was like a couple of years ago, and someone created a movie poster, like coming soon for Set It Off 2. And it was so real that I got upset, because I was like, no, leave, Set It Off alone. We do not need a Set It Off 2. There’s nothing you can do with that. I think it had Teyana Taylor on the cover and somebody else, but it was because someone got in Photoshop and was so sick with Photoshop, that they created this thing that looked like it came out of somebody’s media company. Like it was actually happening.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
We’ve gotten so sick with our Photoshop and illustrator and just our creative skills because of these digital tools, that you have so many people that you don’t need the four year degree to be like, I’m an illustrator. I’m a designer. I create flyers. I do the promotion for this restaurant. You know what I mean? I help this photographer clean up their prints. There’s so many different ways to do it now because of digital tools.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And I think that that’s the dope thing about design, because we’ve now started to see it literally infiltrate corners where folks never would have thought about doing that type of thing. And again, like I said, that then starts to bleed back into one of designs origins of political propaganda, because now I can literally build a career doing the social media promotion for Elizabeth Warren, or I can literally build a career doing a design for Black Lives Matter direct action.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think now when you’re seeing organizations and collective designers protests and design justice network and all of these people that are coming to use design as a lens with all of these different mindsets and backgrounds like, oh, I studied social work, but I now lean heavily into design for ways to really communicate my work and to get things out there and to make change. It’s like, that’s what design to me is and how it should have been talked about for all of this time.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Design, it’s not just this insular, oh, I am in design studio for eight hours a day, studying at this university. And I have this portfolio of these very specific pieces, and now I’m a designer. Design is so many different things, so many different people coming to the table or literally the streets and moving in so many different ways. And I think that all of these things have built for us to get to this moment. I just think that that’s so, it’s dope. It’s dope, where we’ve been able to get it.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, absolutely. And one thing that I have to mention, you shouted out some of your peers earlier, Dr. Dori Tunstall Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel. Raja Schaar is a doctor also, right? I know I’ve heard her name. I don’t recall if she’s a doctor or not.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Raja’s not a doctor. But Raja is actually one of my academic mentors, because Raja was teaching at Georgia Tech when I was a student there and gave me my first teaching gig. I always have to shout that out. Raja is the first person that let me teach the class, when I was like, please somebody, let me teach. I need to know how to teach for what I want to do. Raja let me do that.

Maurice Cherry:
What is it like being a black woman at the top level of design education in this way?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
That’s an interesting question, because I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it like that. The design PhD in general in the United States is not widespread. We’re still trying to figure out what’s the utility of it. Like why do you need a design PhD? In the United States, you get a master’s, that’s the terminal degree you can teach. You can go into industry. You don’t even need a master’s to have your own firm or your own consulting, whatever. Well, you can teach in certain design programs.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Having a design PhD is, in my perspective, literally because Lesley-Ann, Dori and myself, we all do a particular level of writing and research and getting grants and things like that, to move in the ways that some of the other sciences do. I think about it less than the framework of like, oh, I’m one of the few black women that has a PhD in design.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Although I think that if I stopped and thought about it, that is kind of like, oh, that’s … Whoa! I’ve thought myself as another black woman academic. Still few. Still few and far between. Like if you looked at my department right now, it’s not like, oh, I’m the only black woman with a PhD in design. I’m the only black woman in my department. Differentiating myself in that way is not something I oftentimes think about, but I do hope, and I do see, coming on the horizon, if not already here, maybe not myself. It’s just because I don’t always put myself in that equation. It’s kind of like an imposter syndrome thing, but I definitely see where the Doris and the Lesley-Anns are shifting design.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And I think last year was a moment to put that on grand scale, because more people were coming to them, but their work was already at that nexus of like, y’all, the way Lesley-Ann thinks about design, the way Dori is talking about design, what Dori is doing at OCAD and bringing in all of these black faculty and design. And even Raja, I don’t think a PhD really matters, because Raja is one of the people that is … I mean, you want to talk design, to me, the first person I’m going to mention is Raja Schaar. I think it’s more so the impact that they’re going to have in the field of design because of the types of work that they do, not necessarily because they have PhDs, but I guess they’re probably synonymous or maybe I don’t know.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, we spoke about this a bit before we started recording and I really want to talk about it more now. Last year, a lot of organizations and companies really stepped out there to talk about how they support black folks across a number of different fields, design included. And we talk about sort of what it looked like to have that influx of interest and support. Do you still see that support now, a year later?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yeah, like I said, I don’t, but I also am not particularly looking for it, because I don’t think anybody was naive to what that moment was. As I mentioned, there were literally foundations that came and were like, we want to put you on an advisory board so that we can start to think about the equity within our products and our projects. They were also, again, throwing out the same names that I mentioned, you, Lesley-Ann and Dori and Raja. I haven’t heard from them. I couldn’t tell you what’s going on with that project.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
It’s one of those things where it’s like take from it what you needed to take from it and continue with the work. Don’t let that be the sole motivation for the work. Don’t let the die down of that make you feel like the work is any less important or necessary. Because for a lot of us, we’ve been talking about these things and we’ve been doing this type of work, way before anybody was slapping our faces on flyers or panels or whatever. And we will be long after folks no longer care we are. And I think that that’s what energizes me. I think about like a Chris Rudd, who has been talking about anti-racism and design. That’s the whole reason that he ever started working in design. And how in the moment of what happened last summer, I’m sure he like other folks, folks became really familiar with who he was and was speaking on panels and this, that, and the third.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
But he’s been doing that. He’s been doing that work. He’s been so invested in the community in the south side of Chicago. That is his whole lens to design is equity and anti-racism and workers’ rights and thinking about design from a lens of, what would a less racist Chicago look like? What would more equitable Bronzeville corridor look like? He’s been defining those things. I hope that the moment of last year doesn’t overshadow the fact that folks have been talking about these things.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
A lot of the organizers with designers protests, Brian Lee has been doing this area of design. A lot of folks just came to know him in the moment of what happened summer of 2020, but he’s been organizing in this way. He’s been talking about design in this way. To me, I didn’t really even see the companies as much as I saw my friends and colleagues and people that I knew from afar and looked up to, kind of pushed into people knowing their work as people should.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
The companies and all of the organizations and all that, all that was like kind of noise that I knew would fall off anyway. That was never my focus. It’s more like, okay, great. Now we have folks knowing the name of Chris Rudd, of Brian Lee, of Dori Tunstall. That’s kind of what came out of that moment for me. I don’t even really think about the fact that in 2021, those organizations or whoever, are not still knocking down, at least my door, I don’t know about other folks. And the folks that I’m mentioning, they’re still doing the work. They haven’t stopped doing the work because whoever is no longer showcasing 31 days of black on their social media page or whatever, they’re still doing the work.

Maurice Cherry:
To piggyback off of your response there, you’re a hundred percent right. I think what last summer did is that it did help to, I think, amplify a lot of the work that those of us have been out there doing. It sucks though, that that support hasn’t been continued or sustained. Like you can very much tell it was just like a, in some respects, kind of like a flash in the pan kind of thing.

Maurice Cherry:
I’ll share the anecdote, I won’t name the company, but I’ll share the anecdote that I share with you before we started recording, that there was a certain, very large pharmaceutical company that I spoke at last year. That definitely was like, yeah, we really want to help out and do this, that, and the third and whatever. It had just becomes sort of very clear, because they were asking like, is this going to be like a continued thing? Do you think that there’ll be more support out there that people know about this?

Maurice Cherry:
And I’m like, “Ask me next year.” Because right now, I mean, for those of us, like I said, I have been doing this for a while. We’ve seen these kind of like spikes of support that come along as it relates to, it could be a societal issue or it could be an industry issue or something like that. And you get that little spike. That’s great when it happens. If you can sustain that, that’s even better. But a lot of that support I know of from last year did sort of just like dry up. Or the company got selective amnesia about what they said or what they promised. It’s been all sorts of stuff. It is what it is. How can the listeners get more involved in the research areas that you’re a part of?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think a lot of the organizations that I mentioned. I mean, I think that there’s always going to be like that shameless, you want to do a PhD, come to death row type comment of like, come work with the kid. You could definitely do that. I also know that academia is not the only avenue to do this work. I even push some of my students to be a part of design justice network, be a part of do the check-ins with designers protest.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think that a lot of the collectives that I’ve come to learn about, when we did the Denise and Designer project, which it started before the pandemic even hit, but we weren’t able to put things out until I think like late last summer. It kind of overlapped with, we were talking a lot about this area of design and then it was like, oh, the timing just kind of coincided of us starting to put out the zine and the website and highlighting folks on social media.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think following the Denise and Designer project on Instagram and some of the folks that we highlighted, like looking into their work, looking into the collectives that either they lead or that they’re a part of, or some of the projects they’re doing on their own, I think that there are so many ways now, as we talked about equity and design justice is becoming more widespread. There’s so many ways to get involved. I think that people can tap into any one of those.

Maurice Cherry:
What do you think you would’ve done if you hadn’t went into academia?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Real answer, I wanted to go to culinary school. I wanted to go to culinary school. I wanted to do a bunch of different things when I was a kid. I don’t know if that’s like some sagitarious type stuff. But there was the point in time, pre 1998 when I was like, I’m going to be the first girl in the NBA. And then there was, I want to go to culinary school. Cooking was so sexy to me. I don’t know why I just thought I wanted to cook. And then I think when I got to undergrad and I was grounded a little bit more, and even then barely, because I remember end of my sophomore year under my freshman year, calling my mom and being like my, “I hate electrical engineering. I hate it here. I want to get my degree in Africana Studies and be a writer or something.”

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And my mom being, “No, you’re not [inaudible 01:04:08].” I wanted to do so many things and it was like engineering oddly was my safety net, because I was smart in math and science. It could have been a number of different things. And it still might be a number of different things, because I don’t believe that we are fixed to what we do in terms of our productivity or making money in this light. I don’t think we have to be fixed to that.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I still might end up opening a smoothie shop and being the old black lesbian in the neighborhood that’s just making smoothies and minding her business on the porch. That’s just my character and how I see the world of just wanting to do what feels good and what makes sense in the moment. I think this past year has showed me that I don’t want to die working myself to death and stressing over a job. So what that looks like in the next 15, 20 years is very up in the air.

Maurice Cherry:
Woo! You hit me with like a shot to the heart with that one. Woo! I know exactly what you mean when you say that. Stress will kill you. And if you happen to be black, if you happen to be anything else on top of that, it’s a lot out here. I don’t blame you. I think a lot of people are starting to come to their … I won’t want to say come to their senses, because that implies some form of like brainwashing. But I think a lot of people are realizing like, to be quite blunt, fuck these jobs.

Maurice Cherry:
The work is always going to be there. I think I had to come to terms with that a few years ago myself, when I really saw that I was really overworking myself. The work will always be there. I may not. Someone else can easily sub in for whatever, but like I don’t want to burn myself out trying to … You don’t get a medal for being a workaholic.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yep. I think last year I was talking to a friend about this. I mean last year literally showed us whose job was essential and whose wasn’t. And the ways that we need to let go of some of that internal guilt of taking rest, of taking time off, of going on vacation. I know at least like black, queer, trans, non-binary folk in the academia and the academy, we tend to carry that. Like, I got to work harder to get where other people are, and so, no days off. I also have the invisible labor of holding space for all of the students who don’t see themselves typically on campus and all of these things. And it’s like, we also tend to statistically die younger because of it, and not last, and still not get tenured.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think the last year has taught me, I’m going to rest. I am going to take time. I’m going to take vacations where I’m not touching my laptop. I think as burnt out as I was starting to feel with academia, one of the beautiful things that I quickly realized coming into CMU, there’s a faculty by the name of Jessica Hammer in the HCI Institute, who is all about that. Making sure that you’re working efficiently, such that you can unplug and take care of yourself and have that balance.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And I think that that’s just the place that I’m kind of in, because we watched the world go topsy-turvy, and a lot of us didn’t know how to put down productivity. We didn’t know how to not be defined by that. It was kind of sad and a little scary, watching folks scramble to do what felt like normal, but what felt like normal was work, at least in the context of the U.S.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Shout out to the Nap Ministry. I first heard about them last year. I think it might have been right around the summer of last year. Shout out to the Nap Ministry, rest is resistance. Absolutely.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Shout out to the Nap Ministry, shout out to Pleasure Activism, shout out to any messaging that is just like, take care of you. We have to be reminded of that. I think Denise is a great example in the way that they’re operating Black Womxn Flourish is like, hey y’all, we’re taking a break in a couple of weeks. And I’m like, that is like such a symbol, but I’ve never thought to just be like, no, it’s not a holiday, but I’m just going to go to the lake for a couple of days and not answer my email, and y’all will be okay. We know the jobs that are essential now. We know what we need to literally survive as a society. More than likely my journal article isn’t part of that, so I can take a break. I can take a nap.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I love it. I love it. What are you obsessed with at the moment?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
So many things from Real Housewives of Potomac, do not shame me, but I love them. I’m obsessed with that. I am upset with, in terms of design, like this concept of futuring and speculative design, but through a lens of Afrofuturism. I’m obsessed with the concept of like, there are black people in the future. I think it’s become ingrained in everything I see and everything I do, from like TV shows. I like a lot of like sci-fi and those psychological thrillers or like those, the world has ended as we know it and now it’s 2442 and here’s what civilization looks like. You watch those shows and you’re like, wait, so in 2442 there’s no black people? In the casting call, you don’t even think to put one mixed girl, nothing?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And it’s like that concept of like us, the longevity and what our futures looks like has become something that I’m super obsessed with. I’m obsessed with art, of course. I think that that’s what attracted me to design because I was introduced to design as like this mesh of engineering and visual art. So the visual art is always going to be something that like aesthetically … Like I love collecting art in my home. I love going to museums and learning the history of, especially like political art, what people were trying to say through their art. I’m obsessed with my travel bucket list. That is part of my selfish Americanism of like, when am I going to be able to just roam the world again and feel safe? Safe to the extent of being like black masculine presenting queer woman on this earth, as safe as we feel anyway.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I will admit this, but if you see me in person, I’m not going to want to engage in it in person. I’m not a LeBron hater, but I follow his career. So I’m slightly obsessed with how long is this man going to play in the NBA? It’s not even like a Vince Carter. Like where Vince was like, he’s old. He might go in for like five minutes and do a dunk and then you can see him kind of limping off the court and he’s done. LeBron is still playing as like the centerpiece of the team, going into what? 35, 36. So I’m kind of obsessed with like what that moment is going to be when he … Is that going to come? I mean, he’s conditioned his body so well, and I think he’s obsessed with proving to people that he can still do it. As an avid basketball fan, I’m kind of obsessed with seeing how long he goes.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What kind of work do you want to be doing?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think I’ll still be doing similar work. I mean, I have great interest in doing more like civic technology fellowships, where I’m taking a year and focusing on a project that sits outside of the academic institution, like the walls of the academic institution or consulting with folks that are thinking about larger scale problems. I think that that’s the next direction that I feel like I want to go in at some point. I don’t know what capacity that’s going to look like. Because like I said, I tend to let the work lead me, but I would love to do some type of fellowship that was focused on like a larger scale problem that was dealing with digital access or design equity somewhere.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more about you and about your work online?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
So my personal website, christinaharrington.me, although it’s not, I mean, that flashy, it’s somewhat updated of like my travel and where I’m speaking, my research project, the papers that I’ve published and things like that. You can always follow me on Twitter @adapperprof. I’m always ranting about academia, design, The Real Housewives of Potomac, rest, productivity. I have pages on LinkedIn and stuff like that. I don’t use them as much, but I’d say that those are the two places.

Maurice Cherry:
All right. Sounds good. Well, Christina Harrington, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I know when we first met, actually it was a few years ago, we met at black and design, which they are having again this year. So I think by the time this episode comes out, people will start hearing some of the advertisements around the events. That’ll be happening in October, again, virtually this year.

Maurice Cherry:
It was just so good to talk with you and to learn about the work that you’re doing around design equity, your new role at Carnegie Mellon. I just feel like we’re going to hear so much more from you in these coming years about the work that you’re doing, because it’s really super important. I think now that so much of our world has been driven online because of the pandemic in terms of interactions and just general socialization that a lot of the work you’re doing around design equity and stuff like that is going to be super important. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Thank you so much for having me. This is really exciting.

Sponsored by Adobe MAX

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Support for Revision Path comes from Adobe MAX.

Adobe MAX is the annual global creativity conference and it’s going online this year — October 26th through the 28th. This is sure to be a creative experience like no other. Plus, it’s all free. Yep – 100% free!

With over 25 hours of keynotes, luminary speakers, breakout sessions, workshops, musical performances and even a few celebrity appearances, it’s going to be one-stop shopping for your inspiration, goals and creative tune-ups.

Did I mention it’s free?

Explore over 300 sessions across 11 tracks, hear from amazing speakers and learn new creative skills…all totally free and online this October.

To register, head to max.adobe.com.

Sponsored by Black in Design 2021 Conference

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On the weekend of October 8-10th, join the Harvard Graduate School of Design virtually for the Black in Design 2021 Conference!

This year’s theme, Black Matter, is a celebration of Black space and creativity from the magical to the mundane. Our speakers, performers, and panelists will bring nuance to the trope of Black excellence and acknowledge the urgent political, spatial, and ecological crises facing Black communities across the diaspora. You don’t want to miss out on this weekend of learning, community, and connection!

Visit them online at blackmatter.tv to learn more and be a part of the event.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

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Brevity & Wit is a strategy and design firm committed to designing a more inclusive and equitable world.

We accomplish this through graphic design, presentations and workshops around I-D-E-A: inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility.

If you’re curious to learn how to combine a passion for I-D-E-A with design, check us out at brevityandwit.com.

Brevity & Wit — creative excellence without the grind.

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You’re really in for a great conversation this week! Sela Lewis described herself to me as “a designer who writes”, but I think it’s better to describe her as a designer who thinks. Whether she’s expressing herself through her blog or taking on lofty design projects, Sela is always figuring out how her design skills can exist in multiple spaces to make the best impact on the world.

We started off with her current work at Education Trust, and from there dove into a number of topics: Black women and creativity, NYC design culture vs. DC design culture, how travel has shaped her design thinking, and a lot more. We even talk a little about the current season of network and cable television! Sela says that designers should always make themselves a part of the deeper conversation, and I think this episode is a great example of that.


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