Knowledge Making Against Digital Colonialism

This class will focus on questions of access, knowledge production, and knowledge protection using Digital Colonialism as its methodology. What are the ways we can protect cultural and ancestral knowledge while giving access? How can we turn around power structures...

Free

New

Patterns to Freedom

Through the vast landscapes and diverse cultures, Sudan’s rich history is steeped in tradition and tainted with political unrest. Patterns to Freedom covers the historical and cultural significance of design and the influence it had in the context of the...

New

The (Arab) Queering of Design Practice

It has taken many years for queer subjects from the SWANA region to be represented in design practice. It has taken even longer for queer voices from the design community to emerge. Marwan Kaabour and Wael Morcos both operate within...

Art is Revolting: Visualizations of Protest in Iran

In their quest for basic human rights, modern-day Iranians are combatting the extreme treatment of a brutal and oppressive regime in a way which mirrors that of their ancestors — through revolt. This lecture highlights the struggle for freedom, women's...

New

The ‘Myth’ of Global Design History

Criticised for its lack of diversity, the design history canon has sought to redeem itself by integrating a ‘global’ notion to make up for excluding the histories of nations in the Global South. But what constitutes a global design history...

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Woven in Feminism: Amazigh & Al Sadu Symbols

This lecture discusses feminist craft practices across Morocco and Kuwait—from aesthetic and functional value to political value. The visual language of Amazigh design in rugs is used as a feminist tool of collective memory, resistance, and innovation within an oppressive,...

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Typographic Expression Across Time: From Archives to Contemporary Practices

The course focuses on the significance of incorporating Arab cultural and historical elements into design work, particularly in the field of type design and typography, utilizing the diverse visual archives available. This approach enables designers to produce exceptional works that...

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A History of Arab Graphic Design

Arab graphic design emerged in the early 20th century out of a need to influence, and give expression to, the far-reaching economic, social, and political changes that were taking place in the Arab world at the time. But graphic design...

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Disorientating SWANA: A Journey Through Maps

South to North, East to West, where does SWANA begin, where does it manifest? Maps are more than a neutral representation of Earth; they are flattened, edited, labelled, distributed, and along the way, they are imbued with layers of subjectivities....

New

Otros Susurros Desde los Andes

A typographic-dingbat journey, titled Abya Yala: Visual Chronicles, through the little-known stories of the original cultures that inhabited the Andes. Vanessa Zúñiga develops her design from the semiotic and morphological analysis of the archaeological pieces’ visual signs. Then she translates...

On Typography and Language in Peru

This class will be an overview of the rich visual culture of Peru through the lens of typography and language. We’ll look at visual and written communication from pre-columbian times until the early 21st century, and explore the aesthetics of...

In/dependence: An Incomplete Survey of Cuban Design

Cuban graphic design is complex; its breadth and depth links to politics, geography, nationalism, inventiveness, economics, and much more. This complexity, in addition to 60+ years of a communist dictatorship that continues to trigger a Cuban diaspora expanding the globe,...

Latinx Identities and Self-Reflection in Traditional Design Learning Spaces

This lecture refers to otherness in traditional design and art canons and looks at the invisibility of Latin American/Latinx identities, cosmovisions, and voices in design education, with a focus on the female experience. Erasure of non-white, non-male, non-western identities and cultures in...

Caribbean Contrast: Puerto Rican and Cuban carteles and their representation of distinct political relationships with the United States

Cuba and Puerto Rico are the two wings of a bird, they receive flowers and bullets over the same heart. —Lola Rodriguez de Tió The poster—an important medium for social, political, cultural, and economic communication—was adopted in the twentieth century...

On Queerness & Race in Brazilian Art & Design

Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, is “full of potential and imagination.” It is a land brimming with regional customs and traditions and multiple histories and encounters both clash and coalesce. This pair of lectures dig through layers of...

Free

Diseñando Identidad: Community Education, Design, and Politics in Puerto Rico

In the mid-twentieth century, Puerto Rico’s first elected governor, Luis Muñoz Marín, developed a radical educational program that leveraged design, film, and art to provide basic education for predominantly rural Puerto Rican communities. DIVEDCO (the Division of Community Education), a...

Arte y Diseño Latinx: Comunicación Cotidiana

Comunicacion Cotidiana is a hybrid conversation that analyses the distinct ways in which people in Latin America use imagery, typography, and local materials to communicate with distinctive nuances that reflect keen awareness of audience, location, and language. In our Charla/Chat, we...

Radical Design Pedagogy: Towards an Autochthonic Black Aesthetic for Graphic Design Pedagogy

Since Cheryl D Holmes Miller's 1987 Black Designer's Missing in Action, there have been far too many calls for increased access and visibility of Black folx in Graphic Design education and the field at large. In 1998, Sylvia Harris offered educators...

Behind and Ahead of the Times: Histories and Futures of Black Futurity

The Black experience(s) in the United States cannot easily be extracted from how we are collectively situated in time: it is shaped simultaneously by the weight of past and present oppressions and the precarity of our futures. White supremacy would...

Funk, Blaxploitation, & Hip Hop Aesthetics

From the bass heavy riffs of Curtis Mayfield’s SuperFly 1973 soundtrack to the scratch and synthesized Brox rhythms of 1970s and 1980s DJ’s like Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash—the histories of Black music and Black design have been intermixed. Many scholars have foregrounded Phase...

Black Revolutions: Organizing the Production of Black Design

The cover of the August 1969 issue of Ebony declared the age of The Black Revolution. As a commodity, however, the issue of Ebony embodied the ethos of Black capitalism. The flagship publication of the Johnson Publishing Company, was the largest Black-owned...

Iterative Identity: Art Deco, World’s Fair, and American Limits on Humanity

One of the key promises of the American Dream made by the automobile industry in the 1930s–1950s was the individual freedom of a car owner on an open road. This was marketed with innovations in advertising, exhibition design, and product...

Strikethrough: Typography Messages of Protest for Civil Rights

In the 1960s and 1970s of this country, everyday activists took to the streets with placards in their raised arms with urgent messages made visible in typographic form. This selection of protest graphics will focus on a Black experience. However,...

Free

The Great Migration: Harlem Artists Guild, and the 306 Group

The harsh impact of Jim Crow laws in the South of the United States triggered a mass exodus of  Southern Black Americans to northern cities seeking equality and economic opportunity. Cities like Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia were well known...