Design Consciousness: Working with Diverse Populations

Architectural designers are often positioned as the individual genius who can solve all problems through design. This attitude is antithesis to those who want to design through a social justice practice. A social justice practice requires designers to work with diverse groups of people, whether they are coworkers, community members, or individual clients. This course focuses on a design practice working with diverse populations by focusing on human behavior in the environment and lenses for conceptualizing problems and interventions. The course also focuses on social practice with particular attention to issues of power, oppression and privilege. This course introduces students to a set of powerful tools that will help them understand complex systems that control human behavior at different scales (macro, mezzo, micro), using different theoretical lenses to find solutions and build empathy by having a better understanding of people’s lived experiences. The course aims to develop students’ cultural humility and structural competence. To develop cultural humility, we spend time critically reflecting on our own experiences, assumptions and biases. The practice of self-reflection helps prepare us to work competently and effectively with people from a variety of backgrounds and social locations. Structural competence is cultivated by learning about power, oppression and institutions to develop an understanding of how inequities are built into our societal structures and communities. We acknowledge that the learning we begin in this course is just the beginning of the life-long learning required to be a social justice designer who practices with cultural humility and structural competence.