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 ways to continue Searching For a Black Aesthetic in American Graphic Design. We now live in an age of a rising tide of Black Design Pedagogy, where the legacies of Radical, Intersectional Black Feminism. Simultaneously, the recent cluster Black Design Faculty at OCAD University, led by the first Black Dean of Design of any program in the world—Dori Tunstall—shows that progress sometimes happens quickly and sometimes slowly. Meanwhile, many Black Design educators have done been doing the work for years. Audrey Bennet brings an update to her Towards an Autochthonic Black Aesthetic for Graphic Design Pedagogy that brings us back to this course’s beginning. Her work shows that by studying the ethnomathematics of African design, art, and architecture, as seen in the research on African Fractals by Dr. Ron Eglash, we can shift the underlying cultural grids of design education. This talk offers strategies and examples 0f educators and designers who are drawing inspiration from Black cultural aesthetics.