Empowering Minorities to Shape Urban Landscapes

The park benches they selected were shaped like horse­shoes. I assumed the design was to encour­age peo­ple to face one another and strike up a con­ver­sa­tion, but I was wrong. A per­son can­not sleep on a curve. The bench was designed to be “bum proof” in order to keep the “wrong” kind of per­son out of this “inclu­sive” community.

Design is every­where and it has the power to gal­va­nize com­mu­nity or to thwart it. It can empower or it can dis­en­fran­chise. Today there is a grow­ing aware­ness about the role that design plays in our day-to-day lives. The pro­fes­sion is wak­ing up to the idea of human-centered design, which focuses on the needs of the com­mu­nity as a whole and a belief that good design is that which serves the greater good.

There’s only one prob­lem: Large swaths of our com­mu­ni­ties are not par­tic­i­pat­ing in the design process.

Take archi­tec­ture. There are about 105,000 reg­is­tered archi­tects in the United States. According to The Directory of African American Architects, a data­base spon­sored by the Center for the Study of Practice at the University of Cincinnati, there are 1,829 licensed African American archi­tects in the coun­try. Of those, less than 300 are women. The stats are not much bet­ter in other design fields — land­scape archi­tec­ture, urban plan­ning, prod­uct design.

Why?

Michelle White believes two things con­tribute to this dis­par­ity: expo­sure and access. White is the prin­ci­pal of the Henry Ford Academy: School for Creative Studies (HFA) in down­town Detroit. Her pub­lic char­ter mid­dle and high school opened in 2009 and cur­rently serves 690 stu­dents. Ninety-eight per­cent are African American. “We don’t have many minori­ties in the design field and so there are few role mod­els in the career to show kids the pro­fes­sion,” she says. “There is also a lack of access to the skill-building and aca­d­e­mic devel­op­ment needed to go into tech­ni­cal fields, includ­ing archi­tec­ture and design.”

White helms a school aimed at giv­ing Detroit’s pub­lic school stu­dents expo­sure and access to design think­ing and the pro­fes­sion. The cur­ricu­lum was devel­oped in part­ner­ship with design firm IDEO and Stanford’s d.school and uses design and the arts as a foun­da­tion. Students spend the aca­d­e­mic year solv­ing a design chal­lenge that car­ries across all sub­jects and out into the city itself. Seventh graders have cre­ated a new com­mu­nity gar­den and a series of pub­lic ser­vice announce­ments on bul­ly­ing. Eleventh graders focus on entre­pre­neur­ship, with many of their design pro­to­types rais­ing funds for Detroit nonprofits.

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