BIPOC Design History, an educational platform created and facilitated by design scholars, aims to bring historically marginalized voices to the forefront. By exploring design histories that center BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) individuals, the classes open up space to explore bodies of creative work that are not often taught in most contemporary design programs. The perhaps editors had a lively conversation with four instructors: Silas Munro (Black Design in America: African Americans and the African Diaspora in Graphic Design 19th Century – 21st Century); Ramon Tejada (Incomplete Latinx Stories of Diseño Gráfico Borderlands / La Frontera*); Randa Hadi (Design Histories in Southwest Asia & North Africa: Voices from the SWANA Diaspora); and Brian Johnson ((re)Creating Turtle Island: Native American Design Through Remembered History). Like their classes, our conversation brought together a wide range of ideas, concepts, questions, and possibilities for how we might rethink design history and imagine new modes of education that support more diverse communities in and outside of the classroom.

---

perhaps: Tell us a bit about the goals of BIPOC Design History. How did the project come into being? What was missing from design education and practice?

Silas: All of us have gone to some pretty amazing design schools, but if you look at the design curricula, there weren’t representations of our lineages there. 

Ramon: We all sat in these ridiculous history classes, which, by the way, were usually taught through the lens of art history — looking at slides, memorizing, taking tests. None of those images showed anybody or anything that looked like any of the people I know. Even in New York City, graphic design was atrociously white. In a city where you can’t move an inch without seeing a person of color, that makes no sense.

Silas: I never had Black faculty at RISD or CalArts. But then, conversations with ​​Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton, one of a handful of other Black students at CalArts, turned me on to some of the first texts that would inspire BIPOC Design History. One was Saki Mafundikwa’s African Alphabets in 2006. And then, Ron Eglash’s African Fractals. I began seeking out friends, family, and other scholars worldwide, uncovering a whole set of histories that were not included in “normal” design curriculum or even in studio critique conversations. In the years that followed, I became an accidental design historian, teaching at places like Vermont College of Fine Arts and Otis College of Art and Design. I co-authored a book about W. E. B. Du Bois’s data visualizations. When the pandemic hit and George Floyd was murdered, the urgency just accelerated. In late June 2020, I posted a tweet asking if folks wanted a BIPOC history course, and the responses went viral. One of the people who responded was Tanvi Sharma. We ended up doing a crazy sprint in December 2020 to make a microsite, enlist speakers, and schedule class dates for Black Design in America. The response was overwhelming, so I was like, Brian, Randa, help . . .

Brian: One day, Silas says, you want to start this school? And I was like, cool, let’s draw up some paperwork. We need a person of color who’s a lawyer, who understands IP law. We have to be able to defend this in case something happens, because we might be attacked by doing this. Silas reached out to different people to give talks, and that’s how it was made.

Silas: Ramon was such a fixture as a student in the first course — he
was always sharing in a powerful way and dropping resources from his Decolonizing Design Reader. As we wrapped up Black Design in America, it made sense for there to be another course.

---

BIPOC Design History Reader, 2024. Designed by Randa Hadi, Sadeem Yacoub, Silas Munro, Brian Johnson, and Edgar Casarin. Courtesy of BIPOC Design History.

---

​​Ramon: Silas called me up one day and wanted to do a LatinX class. I love history, but I’m really challenged by history books these days, particularly design history books. There’s still so much missing. So I started gathering people to get this class together. I was really interested in trying to get as many different voices as possible. Latin America is a gigantic piece of land. There are dozens of countries in the whole region. And within those countries, there are smaller subsets of cultures: multiple, multiple, multiple Indigenous cultures that have their own structures and systems and visual languages. How are we going to tell the story in a continent that’s so diverse?

Randa: There was an urgency to this information being out there. We’re responding to what people are saying, both inside and outside of the classroom, which is why we thought it was important to start aggregating those resources. I was also a learner, first and foremost, because there’s a lot of information that I wasn’t aware of, didn’t have access to, because of erasure.

---

From left: Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall, with illustrations by Ene Agi, Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook, MIT Press, 2023; Jon Key, Black, Queer, and Untold: A New Archive of Designers, Artists, and Trailblazers, Levine Querido, 2024; Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America, Princeton Architectural Press, 2018; Ron Eglash, African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design, Rutgers University Press, 1999.

---

perhaps: Has working on BIPOC Design History changed your conception of design, or how we define it? Other concepts, like craft, sometimes get conceived of as oppositional to design, but this can be problematic. How do you think about these kinds of boundaries?  

Brian: Design is a deliberate planning and creation of something that solves a problem or meets a need. It involves research, ideation, planning, prototyping, and iteration. Design develops a solution that has a function or use, or is just aesthetically pleasing. To me, this definition of design is also the definition of craft. Take, for example, a basket weaver. You have a craft that specializes in processes and skills that were learned over years of practice and iteration and experimentation. What fiber is best? How do I find it? How do I harvest it? How do I dye it? How do I bend it? How do I shape it? It also takes a high level of understanding, complex math, algebra, strategic forethought, skill, and dexterity. It takes a deep knowledge of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of the area that you live in. The maker has to understand the people who are going to use this object. So, what is the purpose of the basket? Does it have multiple uses, but can it also tell a story? Can it also hold our culture and our lessons? You can answer yes to all of those questions. Craft is design. The only difference is power. The European or colonial hierarchical system asserted that the fine arts are better than applied craft or applied arts. Social class structures then asserted that intellectual work is greater than manual labor; craft is more manual, thus not as good. Then this leads to gender and cultural bias. Textiles, ceramics, basketry — primarily, these were done by women, so you have an issue of misogyny. Non-Western cultures are considered just completely not worth it. They’re savage, they’re uncivilized, they don’t ascribe to Western norms. Coloniality has placed these silos that destroy the breadth of what creativity has to offer.

Ramon: Design can be defined in different ways in different communities. I like the idea of the lowercase “d” design. Capital “D” design is the material that’s in all those books that we study. Those are supposed to be the “standard.” But I think it’s all design if it’s serving a function for a particular community, whether I can understand it or not. If I’m not a member of that community, why would I understand that? Design doesn’t need to be universal. I don’t even know what that means. There’s no way you can do that. We don’t speak the same language; some people in the world don’t even use the same alphabet.

Randa: Language shapes how we understand design. Terms like “clean” design, “minimal,” or “universal” — they carry assumptions of values, and they reinforce exclusion. And now, we’re having to do the work to unlearn that language that’s been imposed on us. I think about that more broadly, too, how a lot of the terminology that’s used in the workspace is rooted in vernacular taken from the military. Similar to divide and conquer. At Polymode, we actually use “split and sparkle,” which feels a little bit more gentle and not so military.

Silas: And a little more gay!

Randa: A lot more gay, actually. I think there’s also subjectivity in the language that we use. As someone who also speaks Arabic, and is also learning a little bit of Spanish and Portuguese, I often notice how certain concepts can’t be translated into English, and it reminds me, too, that design, which is basically a language, carries cultural specificity, and if we only use one language or design vocabulary, we erase the nuance and the possibility of expansion to this kind of more holistic overview of design. I think it’s important for us to be in that state of constantly learning, reclaiming language around design, reintroducing words, and redefining things. In a way, I feel like we are doing that collectively, which feels really powerful. To me, the labels become less important than the practices themselves. What is it that we’re actually making? What are we communicating? Who are we connecting with?

---

From left: Baskets, clockwise from center: Madeline Tomer Shay, Fancy Basket, 1990s, courtesy of Theresa Secord Collection, Hudson Museum, University of Maine; Sarah Sockbeson, Basket, Fancy, 2013, courtesy of Frances Robinson Mitchell Collection, Hudson Museum, University of Maine; Theresa Secord, Penobscot, Storage Box, 2023, collection of the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine Museum purchase, Lynne Drexler Acquisitions Fund; Sarah Sockbeson, Glowing Sunset on the Carrabassett, 2011, courtesy of Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance; Jennifer Sapiel Neptune, Basket, Miniature, 2007, courtesy of Hudson Museum, University of Maine; Mbuti People, Bark Cloth Paintings, 1900s, bark cloth and pigment. Courtesy of Andres Moraga Textile Art; Photos by Sebastian Bach and courtesy of the Ford Foundation Gallery.

---

perhaps: Another way of phrasing that might be: who gets to be a designer, and who is called a crafter? 

Randa: Societally, you can’t call yourself an artist unless your work is up in institutions. There are certain criteria, but why can’t my grandmother be an artist? Why can’t she be a designer? Why can’t she be a craftsperson if she’s already doing these things? She doesn’t have a degree in it, but why does that actually matter? We fall into these rules that are placed onto us. Why can’t my experience, my interests, and my curiosity be what is actually guiding me in calling myself something?

Ramon: When I think of design in the Global South, I realize that a lot of designers, particularly in Latin America — not to generalize — are not just graphic designers but also multidisciplinary. In the US, in the Northern Hemisphere, we have been pigeonholed into specific places: You’re a textile designer, you’re a ceramicist. You’re an architect, you’re a graphic designer. But, Mexican art and design is riddled with architects, who are also painters, who are also graphic designers, who are also working with textiles. And it’s incredible, because they were asking, what is the medium that best helps me to tell this? To talk about this story, or this narrative? History can help you to do that, and to tell the stories in different ways. And I think that that’s all a function of design, and thinking of ourselves as designers who are really interested in so many crazy things. It’s an incredible thing, I think, to realize that as a designer, you kind of have to be interested in everything.

perhaps: This speaks so much to the language that is used around design, whether in formal contexts or even informally. How do you think about the connections between design and language?

Silas: Design was redefined for me in 2021 when my cousin Dorcas made matoke, a staple dish in Uganda that is made with a type of banana more savory than a plantain. The way she cooked this banana was a process of design. The banana is roasted in the leaves from the previous time the dish was prepared, along with fresh green leaves. Traditionally, there’s a fire built in the ground to steam the dish before it’s mashed. Dorcas built this structure underneath out of snapped stalks, which she wrapped in these beautiful folds of green leaves. Just the way that she built this kind of grid of leaves, I thought, “Oh my god, this is design.” That’s connected to some of the things Brian was talking about: women in the domestic landscape, being in intentional connection with the land and people, creating something that’s sustenance, and that also communicates something and is ritual. There are all these value judgments we’re unpacking in BIPOC Design History coursework. What I’ve been taking away, especially after your last course, Brian, is the importance of questioning everything, and that, to me, is part of bringing Indigenous ways of knowing into the conversation. 

---

Mary Sully, Henry Ford, Edwin C. Hill, and John Philip Sousa, 1930s, colored pencil, ink, crayon, paint, 34 ¾ x 18 ¾ inches each. Photo by Sebastian Bach. Courtesy of The Mary Sully Foundation and Ford Foundation Gallery.

---

Brian: I feel like we also came to this because of our work with Dori Tunstall and Decolonizing Design. There was this push to decolonize, to start breaking it down, but then after my course ((re)Creating Turtle Island), we’ve started to tweak that lens. Instead of deconstructing, or negatively impacting something, we would rather Indigenize: insert something, add something more to the dialogue so it’s more generative and not extractive. We want to then change that dialogue; it’s us making more space. And Native American and Indigenous cultures, especially within Turtle Island, are not homogeneous. There are hundreds of cultures speaking hundreds of languages, and we all see things in similar and different ways. It’s just that we like to use blanket terms to easily discuss something when it’s actually not beneficial — we find commonalities to meet in the middle. But my definition with you today could also change by this afternoon, right? 

Randa: There’s multiplicity in definitions. Often during conversations, we’ll throw out a word and just assume that someone knows how we’re defining it. I’m trying to get into the habit of defining words in the moment. As an example, if I’m talking about red, describing what kind of red I’m talking about. There isn’t this assumption of a “universal red,” because my red could look totally different from Brian’s red, from Silas’s red, from everyone else’s red in this room. 

---

BIPOC Design History course mash-up, 2025. Designed by Sundhya Anthony. Courtesy of BIPOC Design History.

---

perhaps: In your work, researching and teaching these kinds of histories can be really difficult on a personal and cultural level. At the same time, there’s a lot of joy to be found, shared, and talked about. How do you balance the conflicting emotions that come with this kind of work?

Brian: We can’t fully upend all of what imperialist culture and capitalism have done to us. We can’t just blow up the system while we’re literally on the plane. I think there is a way of inserting ourselves into the dialogue using an additive word; then, does the BIPOC Design History space allow us to also forgive each other? We need to learn in a space where you can still be vulnerable, where you can still make a mistake. You can make amends, and then grow from that. So, we all come with a sense of both vulnerability and awe.

Silas: Some of this is really personal because during the course of the classes, I’ve lost both parents. I was just in Uganda to do a burial ritual for my mom. Some of the joy of doing this work has been connecting with different generations. Both ancestral memory and the presence of people like Colette Gaiter and Saki Mafundikwa, along with their experiences, create a lineage of voices that bring powerful and healing insights. This is achieved by invoking the Ghanaian idea of sankofa, which involves going back and bringing things from the past into the present. Having these four different courses and different perspectives, whether it’s an African perspective, SWANA, Latiné, or an Indigenous perspective, has been so healing and has helped us work through collective traumas. We’ve been seeing solidarity across different ways of being. You can see your experience in someone else, even if they have a different ethnocultural perspective. You find that you share a common understanding of pain, and that you can help transcend it and see each other’s experiences in a new light.

---

From left: Silas Munro, Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest, Letterform Archive Books, 2022; Saki Mafundikwa, Afrikan Alphabets: The Story of Writing in Afrika, Mark Batty Publisher, 2006.

---

Ramon: I think it’s actually even more rewarding, because you start to see how history ends up being more multidisciplinary as well. You’re engaging in the totality of how communities, human beings, have developed ideas, languages, ways of seeing — and that it’s not the same. It also gives us an opportunity to have a conversation with the ancestors. You have to go back home and really start to dig through that incredible archive and elevate it. It requires a lot of unlearning. It gives you a better perspective, and I think it makes you a better designer. 

Brian: Some of that is a choice, too. You have to turn to the hardships, to the sadness. My Native past was erased from me. There are 2,300 Monacans that remain. We were not given Federal recognition as a tribe until 2018. That doesn’t diminish the fact that I’m as Indigenous as other tribes. We have no language. Tutelo died in the 1870s. We are trying to awaken it from its slumber, but it will be a new, modern version of the language. We can either be stressed and squashed by the sadness, by the fear, or we can make a choice to call out the elephant in the room and then say, I’m gonna work through this. Yes, I’m surrounded by fear, but did you notice how pretty this is? Did you notice that the sun still came up today? Did you notice that I can still take a large, deep breath? I can feel the earth under my feet? You can consciously say, yes, this is harrowing, and I felt it, and I’m really sad about that. I didn’t cause these things to happen. I am not perpetuating these things. But I can then also say: let’s talk about the goodness that’s also around this.

Silas: In your course, Brian, you held space for people to process the hard things. It’s complicated to hold space for that. You can be in the conflict and be in the painful moments, to give us time to chew on that. I feel like there is a cathartic part of that, learning by doing. 

Randa: So much of doing this work of facilitating, curating, researching, and putting together these courses means confronting histories that were intentionally erased — and obviously at different scales, at different levels of erasure. I want to be clear that colonization, genocide, and trauma for Indigenous, Black, SWANA, and POC folks is different. I don’t want to paint it as being at the same level. But I think that discovering something about your culture or your lineage can be both joyful, but also painful. It’s almost like you’re finding a gem, but then there’s also grief in realizing that it was hidden from you. It’s important not to be in that headspace of what if, what if, what if. It’s just really daunting. But I think that’s why the balance feels crucial: taking pauses, making space for rest, finding joy in the small moments to sustain the work that we’re all doing. I do think that there’s joy in teaching, in witnessing students connect the dots, and sharing stories together. Asking these big questions that I think we’re often scared to ask because there’s so much complexity and nuance. It’s fucking complicated, you know?

---

From left: Frank Reyes y Yovanny Polanco, Igua Bar, concert poster, Dominican Republic. Photo by Ramon Tejada; Burhan Karkoutly, Palestine Lives, c. 1978, print, 17 x 11 1/2 in. Image courtesy of the Palestine Protest Project Archive.

---

perhaps: There are so many difficult things happening in the world right now. Can this kind of work change how we think about possible futures, set us on a different path, or help us develop new ways of being?

Brian: It relates to how we approach teaching time. From a very Western standpoint, time is linear. It goes from A to B to C to D, and it keeps moving in a one-directional sense. Absolutely not! That’s trash. Time is a circle; it is cyclical, and it’s also a cylinder at the same time, it wraps on itself. The lesson changes as you age, and when we think about teaching time as past, present, and future . . . no, they are all happening simultaneously. Our small, little human brains can’t wrap around that.

Silas: When I am facing all the challenging ideas of these problematic things in the past, and present, I think there is still hope that learning from history can help us iterate in new ways. That is the power of design, this idea of iteration, of reshaping or recycling the past to create a new experience in the present that can lead to a new future. I’m thinking of a timescale not for next week or next month, but seven generations from now. How will that change the way that I think about treating someone else, or how does that make me think about a design process that’s not about an eighteen-month cycle of packaging design, necessarily, but about eighteen years, or eighteen generations?

Randa: I love this conversation about time. I grew up in Kuwait, where we used the Hijri calendar, which is an Islamic calendar based on the moon. I remember being in high school and middle school, and having to contend with two different forms of time. What does it mean for a calendar to be constantly in motion, versus the Gregorian calendar, which is fixed? It doesn’t actually move; it’s always the same. Versus the Hijri calendar, which is constantly in motion. That’s why Ramadan is always ahead each year.

Brian: This also makes me want to go back and change my entire definition of design that I started with. Design becomes the liminal space between. It’s not the start and it’s not the end. It is the process.

---

---

perhaps: Can we talk about design as a form of resistance? We live in this political moment that is calling for resistance; how can we use design to push back?

Brian: BIPOC Design History is full in the face of what we are going through. No, we were not given this at RISD. We were not given this at any other school. Of all the things that show resistance, it’s twofold. Show up and learn something new to allow your brain to be plastic, and to change, and to evolve, and to grow. And also, at least for me, is to live my truth. So there’s a difference in understanding, like, yeah, I want to go out, and I want to use design to sort of fix everything. That level of Pollyanna doesn’t work for me. I feel like I have to kind of do all the things. I do have to resist, but I also have to think about care. I also have to take care of other people. Like, it’s little incremental changes versus, I’m just gonna get some kind of big weapon and just break it all down. I think it’s both/and. That’s why I love just holding space for BIPOC Design History, and then saying, cool, I’m still going to be an out-queer person who is Native, who is growing my hair long, to resist this idea of what masculinity is, especially white masculinity with how you have to look, and yeah, this [my hair] is a lot to take care of, but it’s also holding a level of what was cut off from me when our ancestors were sent to boarding schools. So I feel like living in that truth and being in that space is just a mode of design. 

Randa: Knowledge and literacy are power. There is a form of resistance in actually learning and having access to this knowledge that we didn’t have previously. We’re archiving every single resource, every single question that people are dropping in the chat into our resource page that anyone can access. We’re also pointing it back to the person who dropped the link in the chat, who dropped the question, who dropped what we call a nugget of knowledge, for people to look at and to know the citation of who this is coming from. This becomes a resistance to or a critique of institutional archiving, which operates in a very different way. There, you have one individual who decides what is important or not important. To us, everything that’s being said is important, and we’re trying our best to just capture all of it and keep it in a space where people are able to visit and revisit and relearn. This collective knowledge is also a network or an ecosystem of different entry points into learning design history, not just through talking, but through visual references. There are so many music references and film references that are in the collective knowledge. It becomes really expansive — you can fall into a rabbit hole and spend hours. That, to me, is a form of really powerful resistance.

Silas: The citational practice is such a powerful form of resistance, and we’re not the only ones that do that. I was thinking about Mindy Seu, who is not part of BIPOC Design History, but she frequently discusses the concept of collective voice. I also think about the literal protests, like Colette’s talks about Strikethrough, which evolved into a comprehensive publication and exhibition that Polymode worked on, exploring the history of protest and civil rights. Protest is something that can be passed on. We haven’t even used the word “ally” yet in the conversation, but that’s also one of the things that I’ve seen come out of BIPOC Design History — how allies can navigate and be supportive, how to hold space for their part of the process, or how we all can have a form of allyship in the way that we live. That’s a form of protest, too.

---

From left: Aqa Mirak, Fereydun Tests His Sons, c. 1535, opaque watercolor, gold, and ink on paper, Tabriz, Iran. Courtesy of the Aga Khan Museum; Kay Khusrau and Fariburz with Chained Prisoners, 1493–94, painting, Gilan, Turkman dynasty. Courtesy of the British Museum.

---

Randa: The way that BIPOC Design History started was very much about responding to the current moment. I know that Silas did that with his class, and I know that Ramon was also doing that in his class when he was curating it. I was also looking at what was happening politically in the SWANA region and bringing that to the forefront. I invited someone to speak about Palestinian typography, the Women, Life, Freedom Movement, and the Sudanese Revolution. It’s important that those come to the forefront and highlighting them is a form of resistance. Instead of not talking about it, instead of siloing ourselves and existing in the space of, oh my god — what is actually happening? — we’re opening up dialogue for hard and difficult conversations. I don’t think we often have that opportunity in a class or institutional setting, because there are obstacles. Opening things up for vulnerable and deep discussion and dialogue feels like it’s fighting against that.

Ramon: At this particular moment, design can create community. Look at the ways that design has always been a part of many communities. Some communities literally embedded their stories into artifacts because that was the only way that they were going to be able to survive — everything was being demolished. When I think of design, I think of teaching as well. The space of the classroom is like a workshop, and we can talk about a lot of things in this workshop, and you can use your knowledge of form-making. You can use that to tell these stories to empower, to elevate your people, in essence, to elevate your community.

---

EXPLORE: BIPOC Design History