Essay by Randa Hadi

Beyond the Hero: Collective Archives, Collective Futures

Much of Western design history has been written through singularity: the heroic figure, the lone innovator, the “master.” This is not unique to design; it echoes art history, architecture, and science, but it is particularly visible in how we are taught design. The Bauhaus. The Swiss grid. The great men of typography: Herbert Bayer with his universal type, Josef Müller-Brockmann’s grids, Jan Tschichold’s Die Neue Typographie, Emil Ruder’s typographic manuals, Wolfgang Weingart’s experimental letterforms. The designer as celebrity: Milton Glaser with his “I ❤️ NY,” Saul Bass and his iconic film titles, Paula Scher’s bold typographic posters, Massimo Vignelli’s New York City Subway diagram. These are the names that circulate in classrooms and books, often spoken with praise, respect, and admiration. But what if we move beyond the individual hero and into a collective future? 

For many of us, design was never just about icons. I grew up in Kuwait, in my grandmother Jawahir’s house, surrounded by an unspoken curriculum of design: her yellow-and-green kitchen, her wooden chairs with their textured fabric, her careful placement of rugs, each one expressive and saturated with memory, and her layering technique of photo albums, creating collages and tapestries of ancestral lineages. My mother, a civil engineer by training but an artist at heart — painted watercolors in the evenings and invited me to join her. My aunts embroidered. My uncles worked with wood. My cousin built houses on SketchUp. My family are all storytellers; storytelling is, to me, the ultimate form of design. These were not “heroes,” but they shaped my earliest understandings of design — as something alive, relational, crafted in and shared through community.

What happens when we stop looking for heroes in design? What if the most radical acts of design have never belonged to solitary figures, but to the collective? What if archives could hold multiple futures at once, and what if building them was less about preservation and more about connection, reclamation, and reimagining?

These questions have been circulating in my mind as I move between roles: designer, researcher, curator, architect, facilitator, and archivist — though that last word feels complicated to claim. They are also the questions at the heart of our work at BIPOC Design History, a project that creates courses centering Black, Indigenous, and People of Color voices in design. At its core, our work resists the narrative of the designer-as-hero complex, the myth that design is shaped by a handful of “geniuses,” often white, often men, often Western/European whose names and objects are repeated endlessly in classrooms, leaving no room for the richness and expansiveness of BIPOC design histories.

What happens when we stop looking for heroes in design? What if the most radical acts of design have never belonged to solitary figures, but to the collective?

The danger of this narrative is that it flattens design into a lineage of
isolated figures, as if innovation were the product of genius rather than the accumulation of many hands, voices, and contexts. When design history is told this way, it erases the collective — the workshop, the classroom, the neighborhood print shop, the family kitchen table, the studio — all the places where design actually lives. When we recognize this, we also see how collective making, collective learning, and collective archiving are acts of resistance — not just against a narrow version of design history, but against the capitalist and colonial frameworks that taught us to value heroes in the first place. To shift from the hero to the collective is not just to diversify the archive; it is to recognize that collaboration itself is a form of resistance against the colonial and capitalist frameworks that teach us to center our life and time around productivity and efficiency, leaving us siloed from our communities precisely because they recognize the transformative power of congregation of any form.

COLLECTIVE LEARNING AS RESISTANCE

Consider the course I curated at BIPOC Design History, Design Histories in Southwest Asia and North Africa: Voices from the SWANA Diaspora. The classes layered perspectives from across the region and diaspora, weaving history with contemporary practice, cartography with storytelling. I often return to Sherine Salla’s session, where she showed the detailed twelfth-century maps of Muhammad al-Idrisi. His maps orient the world differently, centering North Africa, challenging our current assumptions about geography. 

What if his maps, and other SWANA cartographers, rather than the Eurocentric Mercator projection, had become standard? How differently would we understand our world today? Maybe our sense of center and periphery would feel less fixed and more fluid. Maybe borders would appear less rigid, more porous. Maybe we would grow up understanding Europe not as the inevitable “center of the world,” but as one region among many. Maybe the maps themselves would tell us different stories, ones that resist colonial distortion and make room for other truths to surface. 

For me, al-Idrisi’s maps have flipped my worldview, subverting my own reality and how I see, relate to, and expand my world. When I first came across al-Idrisi’s maps, I was intrigued, fascinated, and curious about his intricate and ornamental depiction of water and land. He was able to hold multiple truths in his maps: intuition and fact, subjectivity and objectivity, and collective shared space and recognition of a place. He was somehow able to draw out the invisible and make it visible. 

Screenshots from How to Build an Archive: Detail from the spreadsheet archive showing a digital Palestinian-inspired Tatreez (Arabic for embroidery); Palestinian Feminist Collective, a transnational community organizing toward Palestinian liberation through feminist principles of solidarity, care, and justice.

The act of surfacing and engaging with these histories is collective resistance. It reminds us that there have always been multiple ways of knowing and representing, even if they were erased or sidelined. And it leaves me with further questions: What other ways of seeing the world have we lost because they didn’t fit colonial frameworks? What truths about land, kinship, or belonging might we recover if we listened to those erased voices? I don’t have one answer. But for me, the act of asking, and of archiving these questions, is already part of the work.

ARCHIVING OTHERWISE

This brings me back to the question of archiving. I’ve long asked myself: Am I an archivist? The term feels both necessary and heavy. Archives have historically been instruments of control: deciding what counts, who is remembered, what is preserved. For BIPOC communities, archives often carry violence — the violence of erasure, exclusion, or misrepresentation. But what if an archive were not a vault of permanence, but a site of relation? What if archiving were less about capturing memory and more about tending to it?

These questions sit at the center of my project, How to Build an Archive. It is not a traditional archive but a toolkit, a proposal, an ongoing experiment. It gathers fragments: notes, images, recipes, glitches, videos, objects, questions. It is personal but also porous, designed to invite others in. This project expanded my view on what an archive can be: a living, breathing entity, never still, always in flux, in relation to something else. How to Build an Archive stemmed from my frustrations around access to knowledge about archiving practices — gatekept, locked up, only for a few to dive into. But what happens when we open up access to archiving so that it becomes communal? What happens when the collective gets to decide what information we should preserve? What happens if the materials, information, and stories within the archive are interwoven and intermingled? 

During my residency at High Desert Test Sites, for instance, I began archiving shadows, tracing the movement of my own body through film photography and camcorder footage. In other moments, the archive takes the form of screenshots of software glitches currently existing on my computer in a folder called “screenshots archive,” or photos of family recipes that carry memory across generations. Each fragment holds a different register of time — fleeting, ordinary, intimate — but together they become a practice of resisting erasure. To me, the act of archiving is not just about saving the past; it’s about opening up multiple possible futures.

Screenshots from How to Build an Archive: Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, a living archive of seeds and stories, safeguards ancestral knowledge as an act of resistance and remembrance; Palestinian Sound Archive preserves field recordings, voices, and music that trace the living sonic history of Palestine.

I often think about the difference between institutional archives and community-driven ones. Institutions promise preservation but often exclude, gatekeep, or sanitize. Community archives may be ephemeral and messy, but they are alive. They carry memory in ways that resist assimilation: through food, through oral storytelling, through a shared Are.na board full of links that might seem disparate, but together form a constellation.

In this sense, archiving becomes an act of care — and care itself is resistance.

BEYOND DESIGN, TOWARD MULTIPLICITY

My practice slips between categories: design, research, pedagogy, archiving, art. I take screenshots of digital glitches. I document my working process through video and writing. I collect fragments that don’t always resolve into a finished object. These gestures counteract the capitalist demand for neatness, productivity, and finality. They also remind me that design is never just about the designed object. It is about relationships: between people, between histories, between what is remembered and what is forgotten.

When I think about collective projects — cookbooks, zines, digital platforms like Are.na — I see them as extensions of this philosophy. They are archives in motion, practices of knowledge-sharing that resist singular authorship.

The word I keep returning to is multiplicity. To be in multiplicity is to refuse resolution. It is to allow many truths, many voices, many timelines to coexist. It is to hold both the grief of what has been erased and the joy of what can be reimagined. 

The word I keep returning to is multiplicity. To be in multiplicity is to refuse resolution. It is to allow many truths, many voices, many timelines to coexist. It is to hold both the grief of what has been erased and the joy of what can be reimagined. Design, when practiced collectively, expands beyond itself. It becomes pedagogy, world-building, resistance, care. It becomes an invitation to imagine otherwise.

So I leave you with questions, not answers: What if design were always already collective? What if archives were not about preservation but about relations? What if every act of design was also an act of care? What if we embraced collective consciousness to expand our worldviews? What if we gave ourselves permission to subvert our realities and to dream up new futures?   

SEE ALSO: How to Build an Archive: howtobuildanarchive.com • A History of Arab Graphic Design by Bahia Shehab and Haytham Nawar • Decolonizing Design by Dori Tunstall • Seeking Mavis Beacon (film) by Jazmin Jones and Olivia McKayla Ross • Kinstillatory Gathering by Karyn Recollet • The Body as Archive by Pélagie Gbaguidi • Queer Arab Glossary by the Queer Arab Glossary Collective • Contemporary designers and artists: Sherine Salla, Dina Benbrahim, Munirah Al Shami, Wael Morcos, Marwan Kaabour, Ibi Ibrahim, and many more whose work continues to remind us that design is not a solitary act but a collective one. 

Randa Hadi is a Kuwaiti designer, researcher, and informal archivist whose practice weaves memory, migration, and fragmented narratives into visual and spatial form. Trained in architecture and graphic design, she builds digital and material archives that hold what might otherwise be lost: glitches, whispers, family histories, and the shadows between them. Through exhibitions, publications, and speculative interfaces, their work traces how stories travel and transform, asking what we choose to remember, and what remembering can remake.