Why Harvard GSD’s Black in Design Conference Is Needed Now, According to Its Student Organizers

Diversity continues to be lacking in architecture, though the demographics of the profession are slowly changing. Despite politicians largely ignoring the injustices felt by many racial and ethnic groups, some designers are embracing this moment to discuss the role that architecture plays when it comes to equity, equality, identity, and agency.

These themes and many more are the focus of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) African American Student Union’s (AASU) second Black in Design conference, which starts today and runs through the weekend. Last held in 2015, the conference is branded as an event for “designing resistance” and “building coalitions.” This year’s event will welcome nearly 500 students and practitioners from around the country.

Three members of the five-person conference organizing community and GSD students—Natasha Hicks, Marcus Mello, and recent graduate, Amanda Miller—spoke with ARCHITECT to discuss their goals for Black in Design, and what they hope the greater architecture profession can learn from the event.

What do you expect will be some of the highlights of this year’s conference?
Natasha Hicks: The highlight of the conference will be discussing how we’re building coalitions across disciplines, and looking at our agency as designers to see how we can form networks with different artists, policy makers, social workers, physiologists, and more.

Marcus Mello: I would add that this year’s keynotes are very special people. We’re kicking off Friday night with a talk by Hamza Walker, the executive director of LAXArt, an alternative art space in Los Angeles. We’re excited to bring in an artist and see what he has to say about the conversations that we’re trying to have. The second keynote is Black Lives Matter advocate and civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson. He’s such a powerful figure and we really see his work tied to the built environment, and we want to make that come across during Saturday night’s keynote.

Given our current political and social climate, why is this event important?
MM: After the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, the AASU was really active and the work that we were doing was in response to these shootings. And the violence has not stopped. Issues and dialogues around race have really intensified, and this conference can bring people together.

NH: We started officially planning after the election in 2016, and I think over the past year, it feels like every day we wake up and there’s a new crisis. In a lot of these crises, whether a natural disaster or related to xenophobia or racism—the built environment plays a part.

As students, we’ve been having a lot of conversations as to where our agency lies, particularly about how we connect to other fields. It’s really important to diversify and talk to voices in different disciplines and build these networks to better attack these problems.

How will you address some of the key themes through the conference programming?
NH: We’ve organized our panels is around four different themes: Exploring and Visualizing Identities; Communicating Values; Mobilizing and Organizing; and Design Futuring. Hopefully there will be synergy throughout the day.

Amanda Miller: We’re continuing the conference on Sunday with a workshop component—sometimes at a conference you hear wonderful things, but then you go home and wonder how do you continue this? We’re hoping to provide takeaways that attendees can apply in their own projects.

NH: The workshop is hosted and run by the Just City Lab here at the university, which is directed by [urban planner and researcher] Toni Griffin. We are going to have 16 case studies that are run by different teachers, returning speakers from 2015, or Harvard’s Loeb Fellows. Each case study is based on different cities that people are doing projects in, and we’ll be identifying different metrics and indicators for equity within those cities and the specific projects. Then we will talk about different action items that we can take to our own cities to address these issues.

The conference was conceptualized back in 2015, but what does the name Black in Design mean now?
MM: For me, the name Black in Design refers to what it feels like and what the reality is of being a black person in the design world. There’s so much underrepresentation that you can feel kind of siloed in your own profession and in your own field of education.

AM: When we talk about diversity it can become general. It’s important to have moments where we’re celebrating certain groups, and that’s what is exciting about Black in Design. We saw that this as a space that hadn’t been fully articulated on a platform such as Harvard GSD, so there is a big opportunity here to use the resources that we have—and the privilege, frankly—to make a statement about what we as a student group believe in.

What can the architecture community take away from this event?
AM: The strong takeaway is that there is a serious lack of representation in architecture. I, myself, am a licensed architect. I went back to grad school a few years after working, and I think that there aren’t enough spaces to address this. The questions to ask are: What are other ways to approach this? How is this a larger problem, as well as a narrow problem? How do we get people that don’t necessarily identify with this racial identity to become part of this conversation? How do we build not only coalitions across design fields, but across ideologies, and across how we identify ourselves?

MM: From a pedagogy standpoint, we want those who teach and practice architecture to know that these issues are important to us. We want to see them more actively discussed in and out of the classroom. In school there are more opportunities to be have the conversations that will be happening at Black in Design, and I see the conference as another venue to address these topics.

NH: There is a missing link in a lot of architectural education when it comes to conversations about race: how the built environment interacts with race; and how experiencing space is very different depending on your racial or socioeconomic identity. I hope we can start having these conversations and promote greater awareness.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.