Experiences of Historically Excluded Students in Design (RPA Pilot/ Seed Project)

Although designers are responsible for creating the products and spaces that people of all backgrounds use and interact with on a daily basis, design remains a predominantly white- and male-led field. There is a clear and urgent need for the design education community to engage with research on racial dynamics, as demonstrated by the recent activism of design students. In the summer of 2020, students in multiple undergraduate design schools around the country presented lists of demands to their institutions. While concerns have been vocalized by design students, very little literature discusses differentiated experiences of design students by race, and the existing examples are many decades old. This project aims to bridge the 2020 student demands and academic research by investigating the racial dynamics within the culture of design disciplines and seeking to understand how that culture contributes to the maintenance of design disciplines as majority white. This project will aim to answer the primary research question: What do student experiences reveal about the roles that racial and gender dynamics play in design education? The study will collect data in three methods in order to best build a case for sustained external funding: (1) a survey, (2) collection of 2020 demand letters from various universities, (3) interviews. Similar to work previously done in the field of engineering education, our work will apply feminist and critical race theory to analyze the interviews of design students with the goal of understanding the role that racial and gender dynamics play in design education. This project is designed as a pilot study to collect initial data which can support a grant proposal for external funding from the National Science Foundation Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE), solicitation number NSF 23-510.