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UNFOLD a CoDesign Collaborative publication

STAFF

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Liana Mestas Interim Executive Director

Aidan Borer, Chair

Adam Bookman Graphic Designer & Photographer Contractor

Melissa Casburn

Kat Gudiel Development Operations Contractor Josephine Holmboe Director of Design Impact

Ashley Dunn, Vice Chair Catherine Clarke Eric Corey Freed Amy Heymans Josephine Holmboe Leila Mitchell Karen Robichaud Alan Scott Tracy Swyst George White

CONNECT Give • Contribute Expertise • Volunteer Learn more: codesigncollaborative.org Reach out: info@codesigncollaborative.org @codesigncollaborative @codesigncollab

MISSION Our mission is to inspire social change through the transformative power of design. Our vision is to help more people design for good.

COMMUNITY Our community represents a national cohort of creatives who share our mission and vision. We work to build community and provide learning, resources, tools, and best practices for centering social impact in design.

OUR WORK We drive social change by empowering our community of creatives. Through virtual and in-person professional development, thought-provoking lightning talks, community-building events, and a biannual publication, we provide the tools, spaces, and collaborative opportunities to design for good.

FROM THE EDITOR Rania Adwan

A Sufi cleric once described American exceptionalism as a burden of responsibility. Freedom, he argued, is meaningless if it serves only ourselves. Whatever privileges, protections, or liberties we possess ought to be used in service of something greater. I wholeheartedly agree-exceptionalism, American or otherwise, is meaningless without the weight of what you owe. Dissent is one expression of that responsibility. For a decade, I’d made it my day job to disrupt the system, bringing strategic design to police reform. I saw firsthand what bastardized power looks like, how the cops are often the least of our problems, and that trauma-that agitation that gets read as difficult, the shutdown that’s misconstrued as being uncooperative - is overlooked information. By the time I’d been handed the guest editor reins, that lens had widened; we were being ICE’d here in the US and genocided in Palestine, Sudan, and Congo. The pain is personal, and it is universal. Nothing here is new, not the struggle, not even the tools. Fascism might be new to some, but for others, they have always been its target. And, once you know, you see it everywhere. To echo a friend and another guest editor, writing about a different topic, J.R. Uretsky: “Everything is designed, and therefore everything can be dismantled and redesigned.” Design can and should be a revolutionary act. This issue is an atlas of that force, charting where it’s been, what it’s building, and where it could go. I’ve tried to build this collection to meet you wherever you are on the resistance spectrum. If you’re new to the fight, I hope it pushes you forward.

If you’ve been here a while, I hope it honors what you already found to be true. Wherever you are, do something. Then do more. The atlas I made for you is also the one I made for myself. Here’s what I mean. For so many reasons, I find it impossible not to see injustice everywhere. I also found the weirdest things to puncture that weight and keep going. I hadn’t realized, for example, that I was consuming dissent in art and design all along. My partner introduced me to Caroline Casey’s Visionary Activist, a gloriously wacky show on Pacifica Radio’s KPFA, where current events collide with history, music, astrology, and the most absurd sound effects. The Paul Robeson episode was the lightbulb moment. And the light stayed on: dissent has a lineage, I just hadn’t been paying attention. I wanted to anchor this issue in what came before. Anna Johannes traces the Capitol Crawl, the 1990 disability rights protest, and Rae Alexandra writes about women too often erased from public memory. Between them, they show us just some of the shoulders we’re standing on. I’ve struggled with what it means to take on the system. Is it enough that we demonstrate No Kings if we still have Amazon subscriptions? Are we better off for boycotting? Can you resist the system while still participating in it? If you aren’t totally removing yourself from it, can you rebel? Jocelyn Rice and Jacquelyn Ogorchukwu Iyamah offer an answer, building alternatives in fashion and architecture, respectively. While Eden Elam continues the line of thinking with her personal take from D.C., Zoe Donaldson extends the logic, bringing it back to workplace systems and everyday decisions. Community as healing was confoundingly vague to me. What does it mean, and where do you even begin? I take out my frustration

and find some rest weeding at my neighborhood community garden. It was there I was handed a zine about the Diggers, a nearly 400-year-old English movement that believed land and food should be shared, not owned. The idea traveled far and wide, from Nicaragua’s fields where workers sang translations of a folksong about the group, to Northern California’s post-war subculture and my little garden. Forced to put down my phone and focus on the foliage. The revolution, it turns out, is in the soil. Tyler Galloway and Melissa Casburn, in their respective pieces, take on tools that have served the fight before, think zines and posters, hand-pressed and hand-passed forms of communication: part how-to, part origin story, part refusal to accept the status quo. Early in this process, Christian Howard, an interdisciplinary artist, game designer, and meditation teacher, pushed me toward something I’d been neglecting: dissent through play, through joy, through lighter energy. How grateful I was, then, when Ryan Swanson and Maeghann Coleman from The Urban Conga answered the open call. In their piece, they demonstrate the same principle of play as both a tool and a non-negotiable in co-designing public spaces. The ‘winners,’ they tell us, (re)write history. I learned from Jennifer Rittner, another former guest editor and CoDesign Collaborative council member, that archiving is itself an act of resistance. The system counts on erasure. Our stories, told and preserved, are the counter. Corrina Espinosa and Molly Valentine Dierks are using augmented reality to reinstate public art removed and share their work with us here. Sustainability is my hardest lesson. Grief and rage take turns; one exhausts me into the arms of the next, and apathy awaits when both are done with me. The system is counting on that sequence. 5

Exhaustion is compliance-by design! We are overexposed and overwrought, and in Rachael Dietkus’s piece, we learn about the cost of care on social workers and what it means to hold others while being stretched thin yourself. In turn, Tracy Swyst offers ways to catch your breath before returning to the fray. Dissent is embodied, Dr. Tyfahra Milele reminds us that the body often resists before language arrives. Trauma has its own intelligence. At its most primal, dissent is simply the body saying no before we have words for it. This issue is what I found when I went looking for myself. The contributors pushed my thinking and understanding even further than I could have on my own. Let this collection make the invisible visible, the distant personal, and the personal urgent. Exceptionalism without responsibility is just privilege. This is a call to arms, and it isn’t always polite.

“Because the question isn’t whether we’re implicated, but what we’re going to do about it.” References: Interview, Buddha at the Gas Pump, https://batgap.com/llewellyn-vaughan-lee/. ² J. R. Uretsky, in Unfold: The Inclusive Design Issue (CoDesign Collaborative), https:// codesigncollaborative.org/publication/inclusive-design/. Uretsky is a queer artist, performer, musician, and art curator living in Providence, Rhode Island. ³ Caroline Casey, “Embodied Positive Mars,” The Visionary Activist Show, KPFA Pacifica Radio, https://kpfa.org/program/the-visionary-activist-show/. ⁴ Christian Howard, guided meditations, Insight Timer, https://insighttimer.com/christianhoward/ guided-meditations. Howard also offers a beginner meditation series: Meditation for Beginners with Christian on Apple Fitness+: https://fitness.apple.com/us/workout/meditation-for-beginnerswith-christian/158308. 5 Jennifer Rittner, “The Policing Issue,” Design Museum Magazine (CoDesign Collaborative), https:// codesigncollaborative.org/publication/the-policing-issue/. Rittner is a writer, educator, and communications strategist currently serving as Associate Director and Assistant Professor at Parsons School of Design. 1

CONTENTS COMMUNITY

FEATURES

From the Editor

Contributors

Supporters

Snapshots By Tyler Galloway, Eden Elam, Tracy Swyst, Nick Cheney from Blackfish Gallery, Tyfahra Milele, PhD and Sabiha Basrai

Soft Power in a Digital Third Space By Corrina Espinosa & Molly Valentine Dierks

The Way We Crawled: Dissent Through Vulnerability Anna Johannes, PLY

Have a great design impact story? editor@codesigncollaborative.org Interested in advertising opportunities? advertise@codesigncollaborative.org 7

33 41

Care As Dissent

By Rachael Dietkus

A Case Study: Refusal As A Design Practice By Jocelyn Rice

Actionable Design for Inclusive Spaces By Jacquelyn Ogorchukwu Iyamah

The Art of Protest By Melissa Casburn

Play as Power: How Play Can Serve as a Design Tool for Dissent By Ryan Swanson & Maeghann Coleman

Designed Out: Women, Cities, and Public Memory By Rae Alexandra

Agree to Disagree— But Do It Better By Zoe Donaldson

UNFOLD, A CODESIGN COLLABORATIVE PUBLICATION, SUMMER 2026, ISSUE 002 (ISSN 2998-8365) IS PUBLISHED BIANNUALLY BY CODESIGN COLLABORATIVE, PO BOX #9188, 25 NEW CHARDON STREET LOBBY, BOSTON, MA 02114. POSTMASTER: SEND ADDRESS CHANGES TO CODESIGN COLLABORATIVE, PO BOX #9188, 25 NEW CHARDON STREET LOBBY, BOSTON, MA 02114. 8

CONTRIBUTORS

Rae Alexandra is an award-winning Reporter/Producer for KQED Arts & Culture and the author of Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area, which was published by City Lights in March 2026. Rae was born and raised in Wales, began her career as a music journalist in London and has resided in Northern California since 2002. Sabiha Basrai is a graphic designer and social justice organizer living on occupied Ohlone territories (Oakland, CA). She has been involved with economic justice, immigrant rights, and anti-war organizing since the mid-1990s. For the last 20 years, Sabiha has been a co-owner of Design Action Collective where she works at the intersection of graphic design and social justice activism. Sabiha is a Muslim woman and the daughter of Gujarati immigrants. She continues her work for immigrant rights as a member of the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action. Sabiha is also a member of the Center for Political Education’s Advisory Board, a parttime faculty member in the University of San Francisco’s Department of Art & Architecture, and a docent with Letterform Archive.

Melissa Casburn is a seasoned leader with three decades in tech and 20 years in digital design. Skilled in design, strategy, and operations, systems thinking, and creating order in chaos, she serves as the Head of Innovation & Experience at Coforma, working to address human needs through thoughtfully designed products and services. Nick Cheney is an arts writer affiliated with Blackfish Gallery, the longest running artist owned/operated gallery in Portland, OR. Maeghann Coleman, AIA, is a principal of The Urban Conga and a practicing architect. Her experience spans aviation, education, public institutions, and communityimpact projects. She focuses on health and well-being in the built environment, using human-centered design to shape inclusive, engaging spaces that foster meaningful, memorable experiences for all users everywhere. Molly Valentine Dierks explores evolving landscapes of intimacy, distance, and connection through immersive installations. Her work has been featured in exhibitions, museums, and publications, nationally and internationally. As a public artist, she utilizes the material vocabulary of signs, infrastructure, and massproduction to mine ways of ‘being’ within larger systems of labor.

CONTRIBUTORS

Rachael Dietkus is a social worker, writer, and public interest technologist challenging assumptions about design, technology, and power. Founder of Social Workers Who Design, she advocates for traumainformed, care-centered approaches to systems change and explores what it means to build institutions, services, and futures worthy of public trust. She is also the author of the forthcoming Trauma by Design (MIT Press). Zoe Donaldson is a writer, editor, and marketer. She works for The Ready, a work design company that helps companies benefit from change, not just bear it. She’s based in Durham, North Carolina, where she lives with her partner and their dog. Eden Elam is a DC–based designer and strategist who brings a systems-oriented, relationship-driven approach to shaping brands, narratives, and cultural initiatives. Holding an MFA from Parsons School of Design, Eden authored an award-winning thesis (Spark Award, 2025) on redesigning the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form to promote clarity and ease for high school students. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of AIGA DC and on the Executive Alumni Council of The New School University.

Corrina Espinosa is a new media artist, curator, and Professor of Digital Art at the University of Colorado Boulder. Through augmented reality, interactive electronics, collage, glitch, and artificial intelligence, she explores contemporary life as a mediated, unstable, and increasingly simulated experience. She is the founder and director of Denver Digital Land Grab. Tyler Galloway is a Professor and Chair of Graphic Design at the Kansas City Art Institute. With a BFA in graphic design from Missouri State University and an MGD from North Carolina State University, his practice focuses on design for social and political change. Jacquelyn Iyamah is a researcher, writer, and designer who reimagines spaces as sites of racial liberation through architecture and interior design. She developed Interior Race Theory, which explores how interiors shape our racialized experiences. She also serves on the board of the Open Architecture Collaborative, which designs spaces for communities experiencing systemic racism.

CONTRIBUTORS

Anna “AJ” Johannes is a Paralympic medalist, entrepreneur, inclusive design strategist and authentic storyteller. Co-founder of Culxtured and On The One Hand (OTOH), she brings a rare blend of elite athletic achievement and brand expertise to reshape how the world tells disabled and Para sport stories. Tyfahra Milele, Ph.D. is the founder of Humanize Us All and creator of Emergent Dynamics™, a framework for understanding how people and systems respond to changing conditions. Her work bridges organizational culture, equity, complexity, and human development to help communities move from inherited patterns toward more humanizing possibilities with care. Jocelyn Rice is a mother and interdisciplinary creative behind Black Earth United. Her clothing blends Black American cultural expression, liberation history, earthrooted design, and Diasporic memory. Featured in Vogue, Backpacker, REI, and MoCADA, her work honors ancestral spirits while reminding us of our responsibility to past, present, future, and nature.

Ryan Swanson is the founder and principal of The Urban Conga, an award-winning multidisciplinary design studio focused on creating inclusive, humancentered opportunities that transform once-overlooked or underutilized situations into stimulating, creative outlets that evoke our innate drive to discover, explore, and empathize with others. His work spans architecture, urban design, public art, and social practice, using play as a catalyst for social interaction, community engagement, and shared ownership. He integrates play-based methodologies into both the design process and the spatial opportunities in which he creates. Tracy Swyst builds the systems, teams, and processes that support ambitious organizations in moving faster and smarter. Her career spans healthcare innovation, life sciences, and design operations. Partnering with executive leadership, Tracy transforms complex, cross-functional challenges into clear, executable solutions.

SNAPSHOTS We had more to say than the page could hold, which feels about right for an issue about dissent. Scan the QR code to read the full stories online.

WHAT THE STREETS TAUGHT ME ABOUT DESIGN For over a decade, Tyler Galloway served as principal designer for Stand Up KC—one of the founding members of the nationwide Fight for $15 movement. What he learned is that the same principles of identity design that serve capital can just as effectively fight it. Experience a decade of lessons, live from the streets with Tyler Galloway.

THE DISTRICT VANGUARD: DEFYING DEFEAT THROUGH DESIGN The District Vanguard is a digital anthology canonizing Black artists and designers in Washington, DC and a direct act of resistance against the unregulated arts economy that decides who gets seen. Read the full story by Eden Elam.

RESILIENCE BY DESIGN Resilience isn’t strength, it’s stamina. Build your capacity for the long game with Tracy Swyst.

THE URGENCY OF ART When political pressure mounts, artists reach instinctively for the same tools. Read about what that tells us about our moment with Nick Cheney of Blackfish Gallery.

THE PALETTE OF DISSENT: THE RIGHT TO ONE’S OWN REALITY Dissent is not a threat to alignment; it’s the heartbeat of it. Tyfahra Milele, Ph.D. on competing realities, epistemic sovereignty, and designing systems where every paradigm can breathe without erasing the others.

DESIGNING FOR DISSENT: A CONVERSATION WITH SABIHA BASRAI Design has always been political. The question is who gets to say so, and at what cost. Guest Editor Rania Adwan sits down with Sabiha Basrai—designer, organizer, and co-owner of Design Action Collective—to talk about twenty years at the intersection of graphic design and social justice: what the industry did and didn’t do when the world got harder, who has always had to resist and who is only now arriving at it, and what solidarity actually looks like inside design practice. Thank you to Kenyan Street Studios for audio editing and support. Listen to the conversation.

Soft Power in a Digital Third Space By Corrina Espinosa & Molly Valentine Dierks

As designers/artists, we were–alongside many of you– shaken to learn the Trump administration was in the process of destroying public monuments that celebrated inclusion and diversity. The administration’s erasure of inclusive public culture has continued, from federal monuments to museum programming to public art. In response, and in the spirit of creative defiance, in March of 2025 we began discussing how we could use design in virtual space to resurrect those same monuments. The first of these was the BLACK LIVES MATTER PLAZA, a beautiful street mural with letters thirtyfive feet high and two blocks long in the political heart of Washington, DC. In response to a movement to recognize the importance of Black lives and citizens, the installation was commissioned by Mayor Bowser to acknowledge “people who are craving to be heard and to be seen and to have their

humanity recognized.” An act of unity, it was painted by seven artists, working with the DC Department of Public Works and the MuralDC Program, in 2020. Five years later, it was destroyed, not by direct federal order, but under threat of losing federal funding, demanded by Republican congressman Andrew Clyde as the price of DC’s compliance. The removal was part of a broader white nationalist agenda that includes the sanctioning of a violent ICE paramilitary, the censuring of diversity initiatives and narratives, and decreased access to and funding for essentials like education, health, and clean environments. The scraped, vacant blacktop where the monument once was left us feeling disheartened, angry, and powerless, both as artists and US citizens. After discussion, we decided to take action, using our skills in digital media, and passion as designers and public artists.

Espinosa co-founded in 2022 specifically for artists to reclaim space, digitally, when physical space is gentrified, lost, stolen or otherwise unavailable. The renegade spirit ingrained in the platform is made clear in its motto,

Images of DC Black Lives Matter Plaza before its destruction in 2025. Image credits[top: Tasos Katopodis, Getty Images | bottom: images from ‘Guide to Black Lives Matter Plaza’; WashingtonDC.org/ Visit-DC]

We created “Soft Power” to digitally revive, in altered form, two chosen monuments through augmented reality: the BLACK LIVES MATTER street mural in DC, and the Orlando, Florida rainbow crosswalk, created in memoriam to the forty-nine people killed at the LGBTQIA+ Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016.

Soft Power “Soft Power” is hosted on a DIY digital platform called Denver Digital Land Grab, which 19

“We are taking space, we are NOT asking permission.” The power of Augmented Reality (AR) is its greatest strength. It exists in a realm somewhere between digital and analog worlds, making it virtually impossible to remove. There are no laws that govern virtual space, and the platform intentionally bypasses corporate entities: the app store cannot simply remove it, and Trump’s administration cannot pressure-wash it away. This tech, however, does come with limitations. “Soft Power” is a site-specific virtual

installation, which means viewers must be physically present at the Capitol, or the location of the (now closed) Pulse nightclub to experience it. Not only do you need to be there, you also have to know it’s there. Unlike the original monuments, ours are invisible until activated through a mobile device, which means a large part of our project is a grassroots campaign to spread the word through a variety of methods, including social media, stickers, posters, and word of mouth. “Soft Power” only addresses the erasure of certain monuments, those with social and political significance that champion inclusion, acceptance and diversity over exclusion, oppression, racism, or nationalism. Contrary to Confederate statues dismantled by citizens and governments over the past decade, the DC BLM Plaza and the Pulse rainbow crosswalk were rooted in inclusivity, rather than in the commemoration of people and regimes that upheld systems of slavery and oppression, that victimized and silenced entire populations.

The same narratives of domination that uphold confederate leaders as “heroes” are part of structures rooted in international powers, termed either “hard”—using military and economic force to dominate—or “sharp”: aggressive policies that disempower and manipulate, often by distorting, obfuscating,

Images of the rainbow crosswalk, created in 2017 in memoriam of the 49 people killed on June 12, 2016 at PULSE, an LGBTQIA+ nightclub and community institution in Orlando, Florida.3 Image credits: [top: Getty Images, BBC.com |bottom: WESH2 News, affiliate of NBC]

and controlling narratives and information. Contrary to “hard power” and “sharp power”— powers of exclusion and dominance—“Soft Power” is the power of inclusion, celebration, and true democracy. It is the power created by freedom of speech, and a rich landscape of cultural expression and celebrated histories; defined as the power of a nation to attract, versus suppress, coerce, or dominate. In “Soft Power”, scanning a QR code doesn’t bring the monuments back. It reveals reimagined versions of them. The rainbow crosswalk becomes joyful animated rainbow cubes and floating orbs, and the Black Lives Matter mural becomes large, upright block letters elevated in front of the nation’s Capitol, hovering before the plaza. This is why we chose the title “Soft Power”. We do not aim to replace or re-write these monuments, but to reference them: to cultivate similar feelings of hope, togetherness, and strength that engendered their creation.

“Soft Power”: Rendering of the AR Installation before the Capitol’s East face, on the Capitol Grounds. Videos and snapshots of the experience can be found by scanning the “Soft Power” QR code.

With “Soft Power”, access to these digital monuments is an invitation, a choice. Having removed the public’s choice to engage in the BLM and Pulse monuments, the Trump administration seeks to whitewash history. ”Soft Power” replaces systematic exclusion with inclusive design, joining other acts of artistic and social solidarity to revive voice, choice, and the joyful, collective, creative occupation of public spaces.

“What erasure removes from public space, “Soft Power” returns, not as restoration, but as reimagination.”

Scan to see what refusal looks like.

References: WashingtonDC.org, “Guide to Black Lives Matter Plaza,” accessed March 11, 2026, https:// washington.org/visit-dc/black-lives-matterplaza. Kyle Chayka, “The Mimetic Power of DC’s Black Lives Matter Mural,” 1

The New Yorker, June 9, 2020, https://www. newyorker.com/culture/dept-of-design/themimetic-power-of-dcs-black-lives-mattermural. 2

Michael Ray, “Orlando Shooting of 2016,” Britannica, February 13, 2026, https://www. britannica.com/event/Orlando-shootingof-2016. 3

Wikipedia, “Hard Power,” last modified December 3, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Hard_power; Wikipedia, “Sharp Power,” last modified April 5, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Sharp_power. 4

Rachel Owens, “How Can Democracies Defend Against the Sharp Power of Autocrats?” Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, April 29, 2024, https:// fsi.stanford.edu/news/how-can-democraciesdefend-against-sharp-power-autocrats. 5

“Soft Power”: Rendering of the AR Installation near PULSE, hovering around the crosswalk. Viewers can experience a recreation of this work (non-site specific) by scanning the article’s QR code.

Council on Foreign Relations, “What is Soft Power?” accessed May 16, 2023, https:// education.cfr.org/learn/reading/what-softpower.org/Visit-DC] 6

The Way We Crawled: Dissent Through Vulnerability By Anna Johannes, PLY

Like most civil rights in American history, disability rights were not handed down by lawmakers out of generosity. They were demanded by our elders, who placed their bodies on the line in acts of courage to prove that we, too, are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. On March 12, 1990, dozens of disabled activists left their wheelchairs, crutches, and powerchairs at the base of the United States Capitol. They pulled themselves, step by hot step, up the eighty-three stone stairs to the entrance of the building where lawmakers debated their humanity. Some were adults who had spent decades organizing. Some were veterans of earlier civil rights battles. And one was just eight years old. This breakthrough generation crawled to prove the building was inaccessible, and that the country was too. The Capitol Crawl, as it would later be known, is often remembered through that single searing image: disabled

activists leaving their assistive devices at the foot of the Capitol steps. But the moment was not accidental. It was designed. It was strategic. It was dissent shaped through vulnerability, making visible what the country preferred not to see, and still does not. It was the culmination of generations of resistance, both known and unknown, carried forward by elders whose names we know and by countless others whose lives were hidden behind institutionalized walls and whose stories history never bothered to keep. This moment demands dissent. The question is not whether we resist, but how. To answer that, we must look to the history of the most marginalized, for those who were forced to innovate survival in a world not built for them and who transformed that survival into strategy. The Capitol Crawl was not spontaneous. It was the culmination of generations of resistance and community. 24

Before we climb those eighty-three steps, we must first understand the history that came before it. As R. G. Collingwood wrote, “the only clue to what man can do is what man has done.”

and cognitive differences were understood as part of the human condition, woven into daily life and communal roles. In cultures built on interdependence, exclusion was inefficient. Barriers to one were barriers to all.

“Disability has always been part of American history. What has shifted is not its presence, but how power has chosen to interpret and control it.”

Colonization introduced a different design. As the nation expanded westward and industrialized, productivity became moralized, bodies were measured by output, independence was equated with worth, and yet, as the country demanded growth, it also produced disability at scale.

The Path That Led to the Crawl As historian Kim E. Nielsen explains in A Disability History of the United States, disability was neither rare nor automatically stigmatized in many Native communities prior to colonization. Physical 25

War, forced labor, industrial accidents, unsafe factories, infectious disease, and poverty left countless people with acquired disabilities. After the Civil War alone, tens of thousands of veterans returned home injured and uncompensated. Some were celebrated. Many were quietly discarded. Black veterans in particular were denied their pensions, recognition, and care. Disability and race intersected within systems that determined who

Protestors ascend the steps of the U.S. Capitol during the Capitol Crawl protest on March 12, 1990. Photo by Tom Olin.

was worthy of support and who was disposable. The question was never simply medical. It was political. Who counted as a full citizen or human? Who did not?

declared, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” That sentence was not metaphor; it was policy, another attempt to engineer disability out of existence.

Then came the eugenics movement, one of the most chilling examples of design weaponized against human difference. The United States became a global leader in the pseudo-science of genetic “purity.” In 1927, the Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell legalized forced sterilization. Carrie Buck was sterilized against her will and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Institutionalization followed the same blueprint. Throughout the early and mid-twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of disabled people were confined to state-run facilities, segregated from families, education, employment, and community life. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, those judgments hardened into more public policy. So-called Ugly 26

Laws criminalized disabled people and others deemed undesirable for appearing in public. Disability was reframed as social contamination and our visibility itself became punishable. And yet resistance never disappeared. It lived first in individuals. In artists and intellectuals who challenged invisibility in ways policy never could. It lived in Frida Kahlo, living with chronic pain after polio and a devastating bus accident, refusing to let her body be reduced to tragedy. She painted herself fractured, adorned, unapologetically present. In a culture that preferred disability hidden, she made it visible. And in Helen Keller. Long before she was flattened into a digestible children’s story of perseverance, she was a radical adult. A socialist, suffragist, anti-war activist, and labor organizer, Keller understood that disability rights were inseparable from economic justice and political power. Resistance also found its strength in community. 27

In 1935, during the Great Depression, members of the League of the Physically Handicapped staged sit-ins at Works Progress Administration offices after being denied jobs solely because of their disabilities. They occupied federal buildings and refused to leave, insisting on employment rather than charity, dignity rather than pity. Their defiance did more than secure attention in the moment. It laid the groundwork for future generations to push further. By the late 1960s, influenced by the broader Civil Rights Movement, disabled activists were no longer asking for benevolence. They were asserting rights. And quietly, in upstate New York, something was unfolding that would accelerate that shift even more. In 1971, Camp Jened, later referred to by its campers as “Crip Camp,” became a gathering place for young disabled people who would eventually emerge as leaders in the disability rights movement. For many who arrived at Camp Jened, it was the first time they were surrounded by other

disabled young people. In that shared space, experiences that had once felt isolating began to reveal themselves as patterned. Inaccessible schools. Segregated classrooms. Lowered expectations. What had been framed as individual limitation began to look like systemic exclusion.

hundred disabled activists and their allies occupied a federal building in San Francisco for twenty-six days, demanding that Section 504 regulations be signed. Many of the organizers had roots in the community networks forged at places like Camp Jened, so they did not do it alone.

Through conversation and shared recognition, a generation began to understand that if their oppression was collective, their response could be as well, and that realization was powerful. Future organizers, including Judy Heumann and Jim LeBrecht, passed through those cabins and carried that awareness forward. They left with a renewed energy and purpose to demand change.

The Black Panther Party delivered hot meals. Labor unions showed up. Led by Brad Lomax, a Black Panther and disabled activist, embodied what legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw would later define as intersectionality—the overlapping systems of oppression that shape lived experience. Disability, race, class, and poverty were not separate battles. They were interconnected architectures.

In 1973, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act became the first federal civil rights law protecting disabled people from discrimination in federally funded programs, yet the government failed to actually implement it. And as we well know today, laws without enforcement do not guarantee justice. In 1977, more than one

The 504 Sit-In proved something transformative: when resistance is designed to include those most marginalized, and when movements align rather than compete, power multiplies. By the time activists gathered in Washington in 1990, the movement was seasoned. 28

Organized. Strategic. The Capitol Crawl did not erupt spontaneously. It was the culmination of centuries of exclusion and decades of coordinated resistance. It was shaped by those institutionalized and silenced, by artists and radicals, by Black and Brown activists who linked movements, by queer and trans activists like Marsha P. Johnson, by students who demanded entry, and by teenagers at summer camp who realized they were not alone. The path to the steps of the Capitol was long, paved by those who refused to disappear.

The Capitol Crawl By 1990, the disability rights movement was organized and tired of waiting. The Americans with Disabilities Act had stalled in Congress. Negotiations dragged. Promises softened. Advocates had testified, lobbied, and compromised. Still, the bill hung in limbo. So, activists escalated.

On March 12, 1990, hundreds gathered in Washington, D.C., for a day of protest. They rallied, spoke, and marched toward the United States Capitol. Then, at the base of the Capitol steps, something deliberate happened. Dozens of disabled activists left behind their assistive devices, wheelchairs, crutches, walkers, and powerchairs. One by one, they lowered themselves to the ground, and they began to crawl. Anita Cameron later recalled how hot the stone steps were that day, how the marble burned their hands. Some activists pulled themselves upward using only their arms. Others inched forward on elbows and knees. This discomfort was intentional.

“These activists chose vulnerability as their weapon.” The crawl was designed to make people uncomfortable;

it was designed to show the parts of disability the world expects us to hide and suffer alone. It showed that there is a community of people with disabilities and they were there to fight for all of us. Approximately sixty activists participated in the crawl itself. Dozens more were arrested that day in acts of civil disobedience inside the Capitol complex. Many were members of ADAPT, a group known for its unapologetic tactics. They had chained themselves to buses to demand lifts. They had blocked traffic. They were even sometimes referred to as the “Black Panthers of disability,” a comparison they embraced as an honor. But the crawl was not simply militant. It was communal. It wasn’t one person overcoming adversity, but instead a collective act. A visible declaration that disability was not rare, not isolated, not a private misfortune to be endured quietly. It was a community of fellow human beings. And they had arrived.

on those steps disrupted the narrative that access was optional or negotiable. It exposed the lie that barriers were minor inconveniences. No policy memo could have made the case as clearly. The crawl made inaccessibility undeniable. It made democracy’s exclusions visible. It was not a spectacle for sympathy. It was designed for dissent. The image was chosen deliberately, the vulnerability deployed strategically, the coalition built intentionally.

Prominent disability rights activist and ADAPT member Lillibeth Navarro during a protest in Los Angeles. Photo by Tom Olin.

The image of disabled bodies 30

The Legacy of Vulnerable Dissent

exclusion was normal or inevitable.

Four months later, on July 26, 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law. It was a landmark win, not just for disability rights, but for the country’s understanding of itself. The ADA prohibited discrimination in employment, public accommodations, transportation, and more. It reshaped public space through ramps, curb cuts, accessible bathrooms, captioning, and through a fundamental premise: disabled people are entitled to participate in public life. America’s landscape changed for the better because disabled activists refused to accept that

“A law is not the same as liberation.” The ADA has not been meaningfully updated since its passage, and enforcement remains uneven. Even more concerning, Section 504, the groundbreaking protection that helped frame disability as a civil rights issue, now faces renewed resistance, proving that rights secured through decades of organizing are not immune from erosion.

Disability Independence March in Manhattan, July 1993. Photo by Tari Hartman Squire.

We are once again living in a moment that demands dissent. Rights are debated as if they are optional. Protections are treated as negotiable. And we are being pulled farther and farther away from each other, manipulated into giving in to fear instead of love, encouraged to see one another’s survival as competition rather than shared interest. The Capitol Crawl offers a blueprint for how to respond. Not with spectacle for its own sake, but with humanity. It showed that vulnerability is not a liability; it is leverage. It showed that when systems refuse to move, people can still move them, not through force alone, but through collective action, through the deliberate choice to show up for one another. The only way we get through these times is together. And that does not happen by accident. It takes work. It takes design. It takes the intentional decision to lift up people who are not in the room, and to refuse to talk about justice while leaving

the most marginalized out of the conversation. I want to leave you not just with history, but with a charge. Find the people who are not in the room and bring them in. Resist the pull toward fear. Choose love, even when it is hard. Remember that the activists who built our movements were not extraordinary because they were fearless. They were extraordinary because they showed up anyway, for each other, for you, for me, again and again. That strength is available to all of us. It is, in fact, what is being asked of us right now. And when it feels like too much, when you find yourself at the bottom of your own staircase wondering how you will ever make it to the top, remember that you are not climbing alone. You never were. So, I offer you the words of disability rights activist and elder, Alice Wong:

“Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

Care As Dissent By Rachael Dietkus

In over two decades of working within public institutions, I’ve watched the same pattern recur with enough consistency to call it structural. Someone raises a concern about pacing, or about a community not yet consulted, or what might befall a vulnerable person if what we are building goes to production before it’s ready. The room doesn’t necessarily erupt, but it does shift. No one disagrees. No one responds. The momentum simply resumes. The concern has neither been accepted nor rejected; it’s simply been outlasted. This is how institutions handle care: not by refusing it, but by absorbing it and carrying on. This is the pattern I want to examine. Not because it’s spectacular, but exactly because it is unremarkable—occurring daily across design studios, civic technology organizations, government agencies, and social innovation laboratories. And it is precisely its unremarkability that makes it so corrosive. When care becomes ambient friction, practitioners learn to ration it, timing it strategically, preemptively justifying it, or quietly abandoning it to

preserve standing. In doing so, we lose something that cannot be recovered through process improvement or team retreats. We lose our moral legibility, our capacity to see ourselves clearly in the work we are doing. And we begin, often without noticing, to grieve the version of the profession we believed we were entering. Design is not inherently ethical. The field has been characteristically slow to absorb this truth. Good intentions neither guarantee good outcomes nor insulate practice from complicity. A meticulously designed onboarding flow can still systematically exclude people without reliable internet access. A carefully worded consent form can still obscure the actual scope of data collection. A research protocol can still extract testimony from people in states of crisis without offering reciprocity, protection, or even acknowledgment of what was taken. Design decisions are not made in a vacuum. They are shaped by the institutional architectures that house them, and many 34

of those architectures, across government, healthcare, education, and civic technology, are neither neutral nor benign, carrying embedded histories of exclusion. They operate under the compounding pressures of speed, visibility, and scalability, which tend to crowd out the slower, more relational ways of working that ethical practice requires. And they are almost universally without formalized ethical infrastructure: no shared vocabulary for surfacing concerns, no protected channels for dissent, no organizational culture that values the principled pause. What this institutional vacuum produces, in practice, is the privatization of ethical labor. The moral weight of the work falls to whoever is willing to carry it, whether it be the researcher who asks, Who is missing from this study? To the designer who interrupts a sprint to say, I don’t think we’re ready to ship this. To the practitioner who names what the team has tacitly agreed not to name. These individuals are not being difficult. They are practicing care. And in systems organized around throughput 35

and delivery, that reads as resistance. Public health and organizational development have a term for people who work this way: positive deviants. The concept describes individuals who, operating within the same resource-constrained systems as their peers, achieve markedly better outcomes—not by circumventing the system, but by refusing to reproduce its most harmful norms in small and deliberate ways. They don’t make loud performative exits to demonstrate their concern or issue manifestos. They remain within the institution and dissent from within, holding fast to a different standard for what the work is meant to do. I often think about positive deviance when I consider what it means to practice trauma-informed design inside institutions that were never built to receive it. The designer who declines to proceed with user research until proper informed consent is established. The product manager who resists pressure to excerpt a participant’s story for a pitch deck. The researcher

who refuses to aestheticize someone’s suffering for an executive presentation. These are not grand gestures, instead they are quiet acts of fidelity to the people the work is meant to serve, the values that originally drew us into public-interest work, and to an understanding of design as a practice with genuine stakes for real lives. This is what care as dissent looks like in practice. Not rupture or departure. Presence, sustained with integrity. But it carries costs that the profession has been reluctant to name honestly. To understand what those costs look like from the inside, it helps to consider how trauma actually moves through a person—not as a single event, but as a cycle. The illustration below, drawn from clinical social work and trauma research, maps that cycle to show the nervous system’s initial response to an unwanted event, the immediate aftermath, and the disruptions to healing that follow—activation, shame, avoidance, and re-experiencing along non-linear pathways.

For practitioners in design and public-interest fields, this cycle is not abstract. It’s what can happen when someone is repeatedly asked to act against their values inside systems that offer no acknowledgment of the cost. Notice what appears in the upper right of the map: the empathic witness, held inside a heart, surrounded by a judgmentfree care network. That’s not incidental, it’s the destination the cycle is reaching toward— and, not coincidentally—what care-practicing designers are earnestly trying to be for the people their work affects. Practitioners who work this way—who hold the line, quietly, on behalf of the people their work affects— are at elevated risk of what researchers in military and healthcare contexts call moral injury. Unlike burnout, which is a deficit of energy and motivation, moral injury is a fracture in one’s foundational sense of the world’s intelligibility, in the belief that one’s values and one’s actions can cohere.

The distinction matters because institutions have become adept at responding to burnout through wellness programming, flexible schedules, and generous leave policies while remaining structurally unchanged. Moral injury, on the other hand, cannot be addressed through a meditation app or a long weekend. It genuinely requires confronting the conditions that produced it, which is no small feat.

I’ve watched this fracture develop in designers who entered the field with a genuine conviction that design could be a vehicle for equity, access, and care. Over time, they are told indirectly, almost always through accumulated institutional signals, that their ethical instincts are inefficient, their concerns are a professional liability, and their care is a kind of immaturity to be managed. The dissonance between the profession they believed in and the one they inhabit becomes difficult to bear. Some leave, while others 37

stay and become progressively quieter. It is the quieting that concerns me most. When care is habitually misread as obstruction—when the practitioner who raises an ethical question is managed around, sidelined, or subtly punished for the disruption —an institution loses more than a dissenting voice. It loses its capacity for honest self-appraisal. It becomes, by structural degrees, less able to perceive the harm it is generating. This is how institutional trauma propagates: not through deliberate malice, most of the time, but through the normalized practice of treating care as a problem requiring administrative resolution. What, then, does responsible dissent look like for practitioners who intend to remain—who h ave chosen, deliberately, to work within the system rather than exit it? It begins with articulation. Naming one’s values explicitly, to oneself and where circumstances allow, to one’s team not as general

commitments to justice, but as specific, operational constraints. A designer might write: I do not conduct research without meaningful informed consent. I will not ship a product that forecloses access for the people who most need the service. I will name harm when I observe it, regardless of the professional cost. Kept somewhere visible (e.g., a notebook, a document shared with a trusted colleague) these commitments become harder to quietly override under pressure. They create a record. A floor. It requires community. Positive deviants rarely sustain their practice in isolation. Consider the difference between a researcher who alone resists a directive to skip consent procedures, and one who has two colleagues who will back her when she raises it in the meeting. The second researcher is still dissenting, but she is not singular. She is part of a small, informal ethical infrastructure that the institution does not formally recognize but cannot entirely suppress. Communities of practice in design can serve this function not merely for 38

professional development, but for the cultivation of ethical solidarity among practitioners who might otherwise interpret their own discomfort as personal failing. It requires discernment about what is negotiable and what is not. Full ethical alignment is not always achievable if timelines are immovable, resources are depleted, scope is fixed upstream. The question is not How do I achieve the ideal? but What can I protect? What must I refuse? Where is the floor below which my practice will not go? A project manager who cannot stop a rushed launch can still insist on a documented harm log. A researcher who cannot slow a timeline can still ensure that participants receive a followup. These are not consolations. They are principled acts within constraint, and they require that the floor be identified before the pressure arrives, not during it.

And it sometimes requires naming harm directly to a manager, a team, an organization as information (not an accusation). This is causing harm. I need to say that on the record. Systems cannot coursecorrect if no one within them is willing to speak. This is the dissent that care demands: not the dissent of rupture, but the dissent of remaining in honest relationship with the work and with the people it affects, even when that honesty is institutionally inconvenient. There is grief in this work, and it deserves to be named as such. Not as a footnote, but as an occupational reality. It accumulates across a career, across the projects you could not protect, the participants whose experiences were handled carelessly, the communities whose needs were structurally excluded before the work even began. There is also the grief of one’s own silences, those moments when you knew something and said nothing, when the cost of speaking felt too high and you calculated accordingly.

This grief is not evidence of weakness or insufficient resilience. It is the emotional honesty required to continue doing the work without collapsing into cynicism or the more insidious numbness of institutional accommodation. Grief, when held in community rather than suppressed in private, is also generative. It reorients us to what we care about and why. It is, in this sense, a form of recommitment to ourselves and our integrity. Care is not soft. It is not supplementary infrastructure to be layered on top of the real work once the deliverables are met. Care is structural. It is the ongoing practice of remaining in an accountable relationship with the people our work affects—in the research session, in the design critique, in the launch decision, and long after the handoff, when the consequences of what we built are still unfolding in people’s lives.

“In systems organized around extraction, velocity, and performance metrics, care will always register as dissent.“ That is not an anomaly to be corrected. It is a diagnostic. It reveals with precision what those systems have evacuated, and it clarifies, for those of us who remain, exactly what we are there to protect.

References: The concept of positive deviance initially appeared in nutrition research literature in the 1960s. Monique Sternin and Jerry Sternin further developed it during their public health work in Vietnam in the early 1990s and later elaborated on it in organizational development contexts. 1

On moral injury, see Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam (New York: Scribner, 1994); and Ludmila Praslova, “Feeling Distressed at Work? It Might Be More Than Burnout,” Fast Company, 2022. 2

On institutional betrayal, see Jennifer J. Freyd and Pamela Birrell, Blind to Betrayal (Hoboken: Wiley, 2013). 3

A Case Study: Refusal as a Design Practice By Jocelyn Rice

Design teaches us what’s acceptable.

refusing those choices becomes its own kind of resistance.

Every object carries decisions within it, whether we see them or not. Decisions about whose labor gets erased, whose land we’re allowed to treat as disposable, and what harms we’re willing to normalize. The clothing industry has worked this way for centuries, even though it doesn’t say so out loud. The system wraps itself in desire and aspiration, while the conditions that make the clothes possible–forced labor, environmental destruction, and exhausted land–stay cloaked in the background.

Black Earth United is my design practice and outdoor apparel project that was born out of this refusal. It is my ongoing attempt, however imperfect, to work differently by grounding the work in accountable relationships with materials, people, and land rather than endless growth.

Distance makes this possible. The distance between the person wearing the clothes and the person who crafted them. The distance between the garment and the land that grew the fiber, even between what we want and what it costs. Once that distance exists, harm becomes abstract. Responsibility becomes easy to forget. None of us live outside of this system, but design still gives us choices about how we move through it. If design teaches what’s acceptable,

Black Liberation as Design Infrastructure Black Earth United is rooted in Black liberation ethics, where responsibility is collective and lived out daily within the community. Thinkers like Maulana Karenga describe liberation not as personal escape or individual freedom alone, but as shared selfdetermination lived in relationship with others. Harriet Tubman’s life also shows us that freedom isn’t an idea we admire from a distance; it is a conscious choice, something made again and again through action and refusal. Black Quantum Futurism, developed by Rasheedah Phillips and Moor Mother, extends that 42

lineage by questioning how we usually understand time. In dominant systems, time is linear: progress, growth, acceleration. Within Black Quantum Futurism, time works differently. It’s layered. The past isn’t behind us, and the future isn’t guaranteed. What we do now sits inside a continuum of consequence that stretches far beyond this moment. Regenerative design moves in a similar direction. It asks designers to understand land, materials, and people not as resources to consume but as living systems with which we remain in relationship. Design stops being only about making objects; it becomes about shaping the conditions under which life continues. Once you take those perspectives seriously, the questions shift. It’s no longer about how quickly something can be produced or how widely it can scale. Instead, we start asking whether the systems we design allow responsibility, memory, and care to survive over time. Like any liberation practice, this work is imperfect. It requires correction. It requires accountability. And it requires 43

the willingness to change course when something reveals itself to be out of alignment.

“When scale grows faster than relationships can hold, responsibility disappears. Scaling deep attempts to keep responsibility visible.” A Case Study in Regenerative Design Black Earth United was never designed to scale wide. It was designed to scale deep. Scaling wide pushes outward; more products, more markets, more production. Scaling deep moves differently. It strengthens the relationships already present: the makers involved, the materials available, and the communities the work remains accountable to.

Collections are produced in micro-batches sized to the

real capacity of the people making them, not speculative demand. Every collection is funded upfront through a flat production investment, for example, $10,000 for a forty-piece run, so labor doesn’t get squeezed by last-minute margins or market volatility. Production timelines allow room for rest, family obligations, and life outside work. In most fashion systems, that would be called inefficiency. Here it’s simply part of the design. Slowness isn’t an accident of this system. It’s an active position. The dominant clothing industry is organized around accelerated cycles of fast creation, faster consumption, and even faster disposal. Slowness interrupts this rhythm. Relationships move at a pace they can actually sustain. Makers have space to care for themselves and their families. Materials can be worked with rather than forced into compliance. And people who purchase the garments enjoy pieces designed for longevity. Speed is usually celebrated as progress. But in fashion, speed often comes at the expense of

invisible harm. Slowing down removes that. Relational accountability sits at the center of this practice. Designers, makers, and wearers aren’t separate from one another. Decisions happen inside a network of relationships where responsibility remains visible. When accountability can’t be pushed somewhere else, design decisions start to change. The materials themselves carry memory. More than 90 percent of the fabrics used are reclaimed, recycled, or deadstock textiles that have already been extracted once and are given another life, instead of requiring new extraction from land already under pressure. The fashion 44

and textile industry produces an estimated ninety two million tons of textile waste each year, much of it ending up in landfills or incinerators rather than being reused. Working with existing materials means adapting constantly. Yardage is irregular. Colors shift from roll to roll. Sometimes the design simply has to change. Instead of forcing materials into an imagined ideal, the work responds to what already exists. Constraint becomes part of the design language. It interrupts the gluttony of endless choice that fuels extractive systems. Storytelling completes the cycle. Every garment carries the context of who made it, where the material came from, and what knowledge informed its construction. In an industry that profits from the invisibility of labor, making that labor visible is itself a political act.

Five percent of profits are returned to initiatives within the Black community that support future-making and cultural continuity. Inputs become outputs. Outputs become inputs again. The system isn’t closed, and it’s certainly not perfect. It’s simply the best arrangement we’ve found so far while remaining within an economy that rarely rewards responsibility at scale.

Ethics as Lived Practice James Baldwin once wrote: “People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become.” Values, then, can’t be cosmetic. They live inside the systems and brands we build. They determine who carries the cost and who is shielded from consequences. Black Earth United doesn’t claim to exist outside those realities. The work still operates within the same industrial structures that produce harm. The effort is to reduce damage while remaining honest that no design practice in global supply chains is innocent.

Garments aren’t treated as isolated objects. They’re relational artifacts carrying the stories of land, labor, and lineage. Production isn’t separate from education. Storytelling isn’t separate from making, and the people who wear the garments aren’t passive consumers but participants in an exchange that carries both responsibility and value.

Designing Outside Linear Time Much of the clothing industry imagines the future through prediction: forecasting trends, anticipating demand, and accelerating production cycles. But that future remains linear, more growth, more output, more consumption. Black Quantum Futurism invites another orientation. The past travels through us. The future is rehearsed through daily decisions. Design becomes work across time. Each garment carries knowledge forward while resisting the amnesia that fast fashion depends on. The conditions of making matter as much as the final object.

What Refusal Makes Possible When design refuses extraction, other possibilities begin to appear. Designers start working with communities rather than anonymous markets. Decisions follow relationships rather than scale. Impact is measured through lived consequences instead of distant metrics. Refusal becomes a discipline practiced through everyday choices. This work isn’t easy. It asks us to confront how deeply we’ve been conditioned to equate value with productivity and expansion. Often, it means moving out of step with dominant systems. But it also opens space for something rare: design accountable to life rather than extraction. Design teaches us what’s acceptable. The real question isn’t what future we imagine. It’s the patterns we’re willing to interrupt while time is still listening. References: ¹ United Nations Environment Programme, “Unsustainable Fashion and Textiles: Focus on International Day of Zero Waste,” March 30, 2023

Play as Power: How Play Can Serve as a Design Tool for Dissent By Ryan Swanson & Maeghann Coleman Mention the word ‘play’ to architects working in public spaces, and you’ll hear responses that run the gamut from ‘nice to have’ to ‘inappropriate for serious civic spaces’, from ‘would if we could’ to ‘this isn’t a game’. We see that reaction as revealing something deeper about how our cities are structured around control, predictability, and an expectation that people will quietly fall in line. In our experience, play in civic architecture is a return to what cities are actually for: people. We came to understand this not through theory, but through a ping-pong table. When we first began exploring this work around play, one of our earliest projects was a custom ping-pong table designed for a public park. It seemed simple, but to our surprise, we encountered immediate resistance: concerns that the unhoused community might use the tables inappropriately, or that a pingpong ball might hurt someone walking by. We immediately thought these weren’t actual concerns but instead impulsive responses to the negative connotation of the word ‘play.’ 47

As the principals of The Urban Conga, a multidisciplinary design studio focused on sparking community interaction and social activity through open-ended play, our work draws from five fundamental forms of play that structure how people discover, explore, and empathize with the world: fantasy play, game play, constructive play, social play, and physical play. Research shows that playful interaction strengthens social trust, improves mental health, and encourages collaboration. Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp and others have identified play as a primary emotional system in the brain, one that evolved specifically to help humans practice social negotiation, cooperation, and conflict resolution. As Brian Sutton-Smith, a developmental psychologist focused on play, once said: ‘The opposite of play is not seriousness; it is rigidity.’ That ping-pong project validated what we were learning; the pushback we encountered was a demonstration of just how deeply our social and urban systems define play as a reward available

only to certain people in specific spaces.

“Play, being a form of agency, disruption, and freedom, becomes an act of dissent against these systems.” Play flattens social hierarchies that often govern public space. When two strangers rally a pingpong ball or collaborate in a game, we see expertise, age, and status temporarily dissolve. This makes play a natural mechanism for equality and collective belonging. It fosters the kinds of interactions that mirror democratic ideals: openness, cooperation, improvisation, and shared authorship.

We installed that pingpong table anyway, and the unhoused population they were worried about ended up being the stewards. With this encouragement we started 48

to rethink how cities might become Playable Cities, the idea that play can be woven into urban life at every scale, not cordoned off in designated spaces. A tool for dissent as it disrupts systems and invites people to unite, engage, and cocreate and redesign their own environment and experiences.

The Hive. Photo © Urban Conga Inc.

Through our work, we’ve also learned that play does not become democratic or disruptive on its own. For it to exist, communities must be at the forefront of the design process, which can be challenging to implement in

practice. But it is imperative to the work, so much so that we’ve integrated play methodologies as a critical tool not only in the physical spaces, but within the co-design process in which these spaces are created. And since all communities aren’t created (or sustained) equally, every community requires a tailored approach to truly leverage the opportunity. That might mean using play therapy techniques for one community rather than physical play, or creative build workshops in another. In this way, play methodologies become the act of resistance to creating and facilitating a safe space where the quiet person in the back has as much power as the loudest voice in the room, and where shared experiences become tools of collective authorship of our environment.

Case Study: The Hive This understanding of play as a form of agency and social connection directly shaped our approach to The Hive, a community-led redesign of a city-owned alley in Albany, NY’s West Hill neighborhood. Brought on by the Van Alen

The Common Corner. Photo © Urban Conga Inc.

Institute and selected by local community organizations, we are tasked with transforming an underutilized and disinvested city-owned alley within a residential block into an openended, programmable space designed with and for West Hill residents. The alley had been left in poor condition. Easily overlooked, it had bad draining and overgrown tree canopies, becoming a magnet for people dumping trash and debris and illegal activities. Despite being city-owned property, the alleyway was labeled a ‘common alley’ falling

under an outdated law that placed day-to-day maintenance responsibilities on residents, with no resources or training. Wealthier neighborhoods have the time and money to manage their alleys. Lower-income neighborhoods like West Hill don’t have access to the same resources. Residents who reported issues were often the ones forced to handle them and face fines when they didn’t, hardly encouraging engagement or any trust toward the city. The systemic inequities and resulting distrust made traditional 50

engagement approaches ineffective, so we turned to play to start the conversation. For this scenario, we found that practices that employed fantasy play and play therapy allowed residents to better communicate and share their stories. Through play, we created a welcoming and hopeful space to explore the traumas of gun violence and inequality that impact daily life in the community. As the design process shifted to the next stage, the priority became creating a place where the different groups involved could come together and, hopefully, find common ground. For this,

The Hive. Photo © Urban Conga Inc.

we threw some good old fashioned block parties, used farmers markets to initiate multigenerational conversations, hosted on art-making experiences, and provided opportunities for residents to share ideas, stories, and visions that shaped the alley’s design. The skepticism was rife, and the project was soundtracked by declarations of: ‘Why do they deserve this?’ or ‘this won’t ever actually happen,’ but we galvanized community energy around what was initially meant to be a temporary solution. In the end, the city had no choice but to fully invest in the project. 51

By using play as a collaborative tool for dissent, The Hive established a new model for rethinking city-owned alleyways, centering the voices of those most directly impacted at every stage. The abandoned alley was transformed into a series of open-ended, programmable nodes that serve as the neighborhood’s hive, giving the community space to play together and allowing them to reclaim both the alley and its identity.

Case Study: New York City Housing Authority Developments Collaborating with the New York City Housing Authority

The Hive. Photo © Urban Conga Inc.

(NYCHA), we used play to transform historically underinvested open spaces into thriving public places led by and for the community. NYCHA was created in 1934 and became an integral part of the city’s infrastructure, with one in every sixteen New York City residents living in these public housing facilities. In the 1990s, over-policing, public safety regulations and a lack of general upkeep led to NYCHA’s open spaces being largely stripped of communal activity and social play. Often gated off or left unmaintained, people started to view these unused and derelict spaces as a waste of space or worse, doubling down on a broader view that play was a reward only certain people could access. It’s this kind of systemic exclusion that reinforces social hierarchies and continues to limit residents’ opportunities to assert ownership of their communal spaces, and suffocates any energy to think otherwise. Until recently, when the City of New York and NYCHA agreed to develop several initiatives to help remedy the situation, 52

including NYCHA’s Connected Communities program (focusing on activating and improving open spaces in developing physical and social connections between residents and their communities), and the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety (MAP) (developed to reduce violent crime and improve the quality of life in high-crime NYCHA developments). But these programs still operate within existing structures that often limit who and what happens in these spaces. That’s where play comes in, a tool for empowerment and experimentation With a shift in focus for these open spaces, we were brought on with the Public Housing Community Fund and The Center for Justice Innovation to transform these spaces into not just a public amenity, but a collective expression of lived experience. Every step of cocreation cultivates ownership, pride, and empowerment, with community shifting roles from mere users of the space, to its authors and stewards. 53

Through the process, every space develops its own playable identity, whether it’s about the neurodiverse experience, connecting with nature, or hope for the future, but they are all designed to be flexible enough to allow others to make them their own.

New York City Housing Authority Collaboration. Photo © Urban Conga Inc.

Open-ended play keeps people engaging with these spaces in new ways over time, continually renewing their relevance and vibrancy. Through both the process and the resulting spaces, these projects challenge what NYCHA developments can become, countering systemic neglect that often leaves the people that live there feeling invisible or powerless.

Dissent doesn’t always appear as protest, and we’re seeing that more and more. It’s not often you get to interrupt the status quo to adjust it, move the goal posts differently—through a game, a meme, insisting on gathering in places not meant for gathering, or better yet, reclaiming spaces for what they were intended—coming together. As designers, our job has never been to dictate; but we are here to facilitate— set it up, then step back and let communities create the spaces they want and need. As Jane Jacobs said, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” We share with you play as one way of getting there. References: Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961) 1

Agree to Disagree— But Do It Better By Zoe Donaldson

Conjure an image of disagreement in your mind. What do you see? A presidential debate, all barbed points and counterpoints? A tense moment around the family dinner table? Any gaggle of the Real Housewives finger-pointing? A small misunderstanding that blows up in the blink of an eye? The mental models we have for conflict tend to be moody canvases. There’s more shadow than light, more anxiety than possibility. But this portrait is painted with too blunt of a brush. Because disagreement also holds the promise of enriching our relationships. Reach the other side of a disagreement and you can find: • Fresh perspectives • Surprising truths • Stronger bonds • Sharper decisions • Never-before-imagined ideas Disagreement itself isn’t the villain (even though when we’re deep in it, it can fill us with panic or frustration). It does, however, produce friction. It’s the human equivalent of striking two flinty rocks together.

One expression of this friction is a sense of discomfort— the existential itch of being misaligned with something or someone. In its largest and loftiest form, perhaps this itch takes the form of dissent, when the misalignment you feel and must remedy isn’t personal, but systemic. But another expression resembles heat—the sparky energy we need to see the unseeable, challenge what’s broken, and imagine something better. These forms aren’t unrelated. We must move through itch to get to inspiration. Rock, meet rock.

“The problem isn’t that disagreement is bad; it’s that we’re surrounded by bad disagreement.”

We see it on the news. We experience it at school, at HOA meetings, and in YouTube comment threads. It can look like all-caps conflict or whispery back-channeling. Toxic disagreement closes us off and down. It makes our worlds smaller, more rigid, even less safe. Plus, disagreement in general seems to take more than it gives, so we avoid it like a bad garbage smell. We even call it unhealthy, evidence of a broken system or relationship. Most people don’t have access to spaces where difference can thrive, where friction builds trust instead of breaking it. These spaces can be hard to come by because they require careful design. And because moving through disagreement can transform existing power structures. The less space we have to practice voicing dissent, being heard, co-designing solutions, and seeing change (any change) take root, the more calcified a norm can become. If we—as individuals, as teammates, as neighbors—want a world of brighter ideas and healthier outcomes,

we must become more skillful disagree-ers.

disagreement regularly shows up to the party.

I work for The Ready, a work design company that helps organizations execute in complexity, so I often think about disagreement in that context. Turns out that deliberately shaping how day-to-day work gets done regularly involves navigating disagreement.

Because you can’t alter a team’s meeting structure and expect easeful, problem-free adoption.

This is a feature, not a bug. Some of our most common work practices and mindsets are inherited from more than one hundred and fifty years of bureaucracy. The idea that more control equals more accountability or that managers exist to give people permission are industrial-era relics (search “Frederick Taylor” and “scientific management” and you’ll get the idea) no longer fit for how companies operate. We believe how you coordinate, run meetings, make decisions, and set strategy are design choices that either block or unblock the flow of work. They’re not set in stone. They’re malleable. But when you adjust these dials,

You can’t introduce a multidirectional feedback rhythm and expect teammates to intuitively know how to evaluate one another. You can’t commit to three priorities and expect a standing ovation from the owners of the to-be-shelved pet projects. When you crack open the nitty-gritty of how work gets done, it becomes harder to avoid conflict, big or small. But tension only turns from sand in the gears into rocket fuel if there’s a clear way for that metamorphosis to happen. Consider these scenarios: •

Two colleagues don’t like each other. It’s an open secret. They’re both smart and everyone knows the team’s impact would be greatly amplified if they collaborated. Instead, teammates waste energy acting as their go-between. 58

•

A manager’s mood controls the weekly stand-up meeting. If he’s stormy, the gathering will be scattered. If he’s cheerful, maybe a decision or two gets made. He’s also close with the team’s senior manager, so no one wants to risk political capital pushing back on his behavior. The team can’t move work forward, because they don’t know who gets to say when something is “done.” Conversations about “ownership” are swirly, short, and territorial.

Maybe you’re familiar with these dynamics. Maybe you’ve experienced them. If so, it’s less likely you alone are the problem. What’s more likely: You didn’t have legible ways to share candid feedback, make tough decisions, or name tension before it curdled into something worse. When teams and systems have clear scaffolding that support transparency, and that ground relationships in shared purpose, naming a breach or disagreeing 59

with a decision feels more like an act of care than sabotage. This scaffolding doesn’t have to be big. At my company, we use working agreements to set expectations for how teams work together and reduce ambiguity. It’s a powerful practice that makes the implicit explicit and increases accountability. Remember that team that couldn’t move work forward? Imagine if they had two working agreements that said, “We practice equal talk time in this meeting” and “We share disagreements in this room to make our shared work better.” Imagine if these agreements lived at the top of the agenda for their weekly meetings. These small provocations could be just enough structure to interrupt disruptive patterns and turn frustration into fresh ideas. Some people are more comfortable voicing dissent. Some people, due to their authority, position, or social identity, can engage in conflict with greater security than others.

“This is why cultivating a culture of generative disagreement can’t come from individual effort alone.” It comes from designing environments that support this courageous behavior again and again. Scan the QR Code to discover more

Disagreeing well takes skill and practice. The loop reinforces itself: the more openly you communicate, the deeper the trust. The deeper the trust, the more likely you are to communicate openly. That’s a cycle worth designing for.

you approach next steps intentionally, not reactively. It’s not about crafting an ironclad argument so you can “win.” It’s about exploring the root cause of your feelings and steering toward a generative conversation and, hopefully, outcome. For most of us, our days and weeks revolve around work. Ideally, our experience of work should be a rich source of human connection and healthy collaboration. It should expand our skills and be a proving ground for how engaging with and moving through hard things can result in great things. Work, therefore, is a powerful design opportunity. If our workplaces are refineries for healthy disagreement, those skills stay with us far beyond the office walls.

This worksheet helps you ground your thoughts when you feel disagreement with someone. Pausing to breathe, think, and write down what you’re experiencing can help 60

Actionable Design for Inclusive Spaces By Jacquelyn Ogorchukwu Iyamah Every so often, I walk into a building with a friend and without saying a word, we exchange a knowing glance–both of us instantly sensing that something feels off. It’s an unspoken acknowledgment of the way the space whispers, “You don’t belong here”. What I just described is often referred to as “The White Space”. A term used to speak to the ways in which schools, workplaces, stores, hotels, restaurants and more are entrenched in whiteness. When I speak of the white space, I’m not only referring to places where white people are the majority because sometimes, they aren’t even present. It’s about how space itself can be designed to center white beliefs, feelings, and behaviors. We live in a society where white supremacist values shape nearly every aspect of life, and the built environment is no exception. Buildings are ideology made visible. Harmful belief systems can get coded into gates, windows and doors, entryways, hallways, lighting, decor and more. Buildings can oppress, they can police, they can exclude, they can fetishize, they can enforce hierarchy. As sociologist Albert Fu urges in his 2022 essay Can Buildings Be Racist?, “Buildings can be just as, if not more, racist than other forms of visual culture.” 61

I’ve walked through predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods where public housing rises like a fortress, tall towers punctuated by small, barred windows and harsh lighting that evoke imprisonment. I’ve entered schools where statues honor colonial figures, plaques preserve their legacies, and rows of rigid desks replicate colonial orders of learning. I’ve shopped at stores where metal detectors envelop your body, diasporic foods sit isolated in “ethnic” aisles at the back of the store, and products commonly used by people of color are locked behind plexiglass. Yet when design studios, publications, or conferences address the intersection of race and architecture or interior design, there are people who insist that race has no place in design discourse. There is an assumption that racism is a people problem and not a design problem. But buildings are shaped by people, who can (intentionally or unintentionally) design buildings that facilitate racist experiences.

Those who avoid this truth are not necessarily “apolitical.” They readily engage with other forms of equity in architecture and interior design, such as sustainability, wellbeing, or accessibility. From what I’ve observed, these topics rarely trigger discomfort, most likely because they do not require individuals to interrogate their own whiteness. The result is that racism becomes taboo in equity design work, revealing not neutrality, but a practiced avoidance. Architecture educators, B.D. Wortham-Galvin and Jackie McFarland writing in their essay White Out: Architecture’s Enduring Resistance to Blackness, observe that, “While the profession and discipline find it easy to rally around issues of sustainability and efficiency, conversations about race are minimal to nonexistent.” This omission shapes how we define and measure a building’s success. High-performance standards such as LEED and WELL evaluate efficiency, sustainability, and wellbeing, but without explicit attention 62

to race, their frameworks remain incomplete. In the end, they feel performative. A building can meet every technical benchmark and still massively underperform in the lives of Black, brown, and racially marginalized communities. What does it mean to be an airport that supports sustainability if touchless soap dispensers calibrated to reduce consumption cannot even detect dark skin? What does it mean to be a hospital that supports wellbeing if the anatomical diagrams on the walls are of white people’s bodies? What does it mean to be an apartment that supports accessibility if low-income residents of color are segregated through secondary entrances? When reading Belonging by bell hooks, I resonated deeply with a question she poses; “Can we embrace an ethos of sustainability that is not solely about the appropriate care of the world’s resources, but 63

is also about the creation of meaning, the making of lives that we feel are worth living?” In the context of my work, I interpreted this question as a challenge to find ways to ensure that “performance” in architecture is measured by how well a building affirms the lives of racially marginalized people. Because the practice of architecture and interior design in the Global North often defaults to white ideologies, one of our most urgent tasks is interrogating how every element of a building – its site, circulation, lighting, thresholds, and more – can harm our communities. Between 2024 and 2025, I began developing the RED Inquiry™ (RED stands for Racial Equity Design) as a practical tool with critical questions to help designers examine each touchpoint in a building through a racial equity lens.

“To ask these questions is to dissent. It is to reject the assumption that performance is objective.” Each question exposes the values architecture has long claimed as universal and invites us to imagine otherwise. The RED Inquiry™ begins here – the refusal to design within the limits of what the field has deemed acceptable.

In a world where these inquiries are truly embedded into how we design buildings, we would feel it. We would feel that the building is not just about technical performance, that it is about making our lives feel worth living at every touchpoint, whether that’s approaching, moving through, and experiencing.

presence. In place names that signal welcome and inclusion rather than divisiveness and exclusiveness. In gates that do not tower to intimidate. In surfaces that soften rather than repel and in doorways that signal welcome instead of suspicion. As we move through the building, we would feel it in the spatial rhythm that shows it trusts us. In reception desks that bend towards us rather than confront us. In way finding that allows us to move without being questioned. In hallways that make room for us, so we are not pushed to the side. In places that allow us to rest instead of rushing us.

As we approach the building, we would feel it in the spatial introductions that justify our 64

As we experience the building, we would feel it in the spatial affirmations we sense around us. In lighting that does not criminalize our skin but recognizes its warmth. In color that expands the room rather than restricts our presence within it. In materials that carry our cultural memory instead of erase it. In art and decor that reflects us instead of dismissing us. Most of all, we would feel it in the disappearance of our internal questions. The quiet questions that we often ask such as: Am I welcome here? Am I safe here? Am I myself here? By bringing inquiries of dissent into the touchpoints of a building, we raise our expectations for how spaces can hold Black, brown, and racially marginalized people. And when expectations rise, new standards follow. In the words of poet and activist June Jordan, “revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations.”

References: Albert S. Fu, “Can Buildings Be Racist? A Critical Sociology of Architecture and the Built Environment,” Sociological Inquiry 92, no. 1 (2022): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/soin.12478. 1

B. D. Wortham-Galvin and Jackie McFarland, “White Out: Architecture’s Enduring Resistance to Blackness,” Charrette 5, no. 2 (Autumn 2019): 83–98. 2

bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place (New York: Routledge, 2009).

June Jordan, “Next Time the Rainbow,” New Statesman, January 6, 1989.

The Art of Protest By Melissa Casburn

In 1986, the founders of the Silence=Death Project, committed to raising awareness about AIDS and HIV, created a poster and pasted it up across New York City. It featured their name under a bright pink triangle, a symbol which had been stitched onto the concentration camp uniforms of LGBTQ+ people who were being persecuted in Nazi Germany, serving as a visual reminder of their specific transgressions. Coincidentally or not, President Reagan gave his first address on the topic of AIDS/HIV in 1987, six years into his presidency and six years after AIDS was first identified, and after forty thousand people had already died from AIDS-related complications. The poster remains an arresting and iconic piece of protest art from an era that witnessed the unnecessary deaths of so many who were ignored and abandoned by the United States federal government. It also serves as part of a wider reclamation of the pink triangle, previously a symbol of political oppression and death.

The power of art and design to convey a message is undeniable: the raised fist, the peace sign, the pussyhat. We use aesthetics to collapse a complex message down into something portable and transferable, to send and share a complex message with very few words. The history of protest materials designed for mass distribution goes back to the invention of the printing press, and the wheatpasted poster is just one of many substrates.

Pamphlets & Zines Pamphlets, zines, and other distributable literature should be viewed in the context of their origins. They came into existence long before we had social media, before the internet made sharing instantaneous and expected. Even zines, a relatively new form that became a political tool in the 1960s, gained ground because newspapers, TV shows, and magazines were centrally controlled by corporations, networks, and publishing houses: systems of power that can suppress voices of dissent. 68

and judicial corruption and published thousands of copies of their political and economic arguments during the 1640s and 1650s.

Protest literature emerged at scale in the 16th century, long before the advent of mass media, and was typically used for political, religious, or social critique. Common characteristics included cheap paper (due to limited funds), typesetting mistakes caused by sloppy printers, and the use of typography and woodcuts to increase visual impact. An early example comes from the Levellers, a populist movement that emphasized equal rights, religious toleration, and reformation of political 69

Martin Luther, the leader of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation movement, used intricate woodcuts to help his pamphlets stand out on crowded market stalls, even though they increased production costs. Re-using art across multiple pamphlets maintained visual impact while keeping costs more even. Modern literature uses graphic design techniques, photography, and color printing to draw readers in. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a key organization in the Civil Rights Movement, released a trifold pamphlet emphasizing the need for non-violent protest, featuring images of Black and white Americans calmly marching together and staging sit-ins. Zines are small, self-published booklets with roots in the Harlem Renaissance of the early 20th century, which was a celebration and proliferation of

Black art, culture, and writing, and the science fiction fan communities of the 1930s. They were repurposed for political commentary by the 1960s counterculture movement, the 1970s punk scene, and the feminist Riot Grrrl movement of the 1990s, substantially aided by the release of the photocopier and the home printer as well as the increasing ubiquity of copy shops. Although much speech has moved online via blogs, personal websites, and social media platforms, zines still exist as one of the most accessible forms of political expression.

“At their most basic, only a pen and paper are required, and no permission is needed to express and publish your ideas.”

As online surveillance becomes increasingly sophisticated and constant, zines (still) have the power to grant anonymity that is often necessary for blunt political expression.

Do it yourself Pick a topic and start writing! Zines are often illustrated with drawings, paintings, or collages made using everyday supplies, such as markers, magazines, scissors, stickers, tape, and glue. Digital processing and printing can add color and polish, but they are not required.

Banners & Signs The Suffragettes, fighting for American women’s right to vote, elevated the art of bannermaking. Mary Lowndes, stained glass artist and founder of the Artists’ Suffrage League, traded in plain calico banners for richly colored pieces made of shimmering silk and velvet, often celebrating women’s contributions to art, medicine, science, sport, and society. She embroidered them and added ribbons and tassels to draw attention during sunny outdoor marches, using heraldic designs 70

to parallel her movement with medieval values such as chivalry and loyalty. Another highly accessible type of protest art, signs are ubiquitous and often handmade. They are easy to make and customize–often with materials as basic as markers and spare cardboard–and easy for others to read, even from a distance. They can be hung in windows, staked on lawns, and carried during a protest march. The “I Am a Man” protest sign is an iconic symbol of the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike, in which Black workers demanded dignity, fair wages, and better conditions, asserting their humanity against systemic racism and exploitation.

Striking Memphis sanitation workers carrying the “I AM A MAN” signs. Photo by Ernest C. Withers.

This slogan echoed the abolitionist slogan, “Am I not a man and a brother?”. It was then evoked in 2015 by the “Je suis Charlie” signs defending freedom of the press, in response to the terrorist attack on France’s Charlie Hebdo magazine. Well-crafted messages hold durable power.

Do it yourself •

When making signs, focus on readability and a concise message.

•

Keep your color palette limited and high-contrast.

•

Place your message on both sides so it can be read from any direction.

•

Use cardboard or foamcore sheets for the surface.

•

Permanent markers and other waterproof art supplies will prevent smearing if the weather turns bad, and cardboard tubes make handles safer than wooden sticks if you’re planning to carry your sign in a crowd.

Wearables Mass-market apparel production, home printers and craft machines, and print-ondemand services have made it easier than ever to spread messages on buttons, hats, t-shirts, tote bags, and other wearables. But the history of signaling dissent through apparel goes back a very long time. An eighteenth-century precursor to the 2017 pussyhat, red “Liberty Caps” were knitted by French market women oppressed by the increasingly authoritarian government and worn as signs of support for the coming revolution. This year, Minnesotans protesting ICE aggression have breathed new life into the knitted red cap. The newest version adds a tassel and uses a square shape, as a nod to the topplue or nisselue (woolen caps) worn by Norwegians in protest of Nazi occupation of their country. Perhaps one of the most wellknown and widely used protest slogans, which found its way onto buttons, apparel, signs,

banners, posters, building walls, and even soldiers’ helmets, is “Make Love Not War.” While its exact origin is debated, what’s true is that it was coined and popularized in the 1960s in response to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. It has proliferated not just across many surfaces but also in conjunction with many different visual expressions, as people continue to explore its meaning more than fifty years later.

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Make Love Not War badge.

In 2019, the actor Don Cheadle sparked a nationwide response when he wore a shirt that read simply, “Protect Trans Kids” while introducing the musical guest on an episode of Saturday Night Live. The move was celebrated by activists as well 72

as organizations fighting for LGBTQ+ rights and protections.

Do it yourself Creating your own wearables can be as simple as grabbing a marker and drawing on a t-shirt. There are many other methods if you have the time, money, and inclination: take up linocut or screen printing to put your own designs on apparel and tote bags. Print your designs onto iron-on transfer paper using a LaserJet or inkjet printer. Ask your local library if they have a buttonmaking machine available for community use.

Artists often work in conjunction with city officials to produce long-lasting art communication messages of change and community. In 2019, climate activists painted murals directly on two blocks of San Francisco’s Financial District as part of a Strike for Climate Justice protest that demanded banks divest from the fossil-fuel industry and invest in companies focused on technologies for ecological renewal. The work of Shepard Fairey, an American activist and artist, has reached many people over the years, particularly the

Street Art & Posters Broadsides, a precursor to today’s protest posters, are one-sided printed sheets historically used to distribute, publicize, and incite action regarding political, social, and moral causes. Common from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, they served as tools for public debate and mass communication. Today you might see them stapled to telephone poles or pasted to the side of a building. 73

OBEY Giant” street art wheatpaste campaign designed by Shepard Fairey. Photo courtesy of Shepard Fairey / Obey Giant.

“Hope” poster that he created in 2008 for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. But he was already known worldwide for his 1996 Obey Giant image seen on stickers and posters, intended to evoke, in his own words, “more of an Orwellian connotation.”

All of these analog tools of dissent are alive and well today, promoting messages and inspiring action alongside

In 2026, residents of Portland, Oregon, revived the image in response to aggression by ICE agents, circulating a “Don’t Obey” version featuring a graphic frog image, a reference to the inflatable frog costumes worn by many local protestors.

Do it yourself Like signs and zines, posters can be made with easily obtainable paper and paints or markers. Keep the message short and powerful for maximum impact. It’s also easy to pick up a pack of sticker paper and print stickers at home, or use a print-ondemand service and choose from designs uploaded by others. Check with local organizations that fund public art to see what opportunities are offered in your region.

digital distribution channels that have emerged and strengthened over the past few decades. Many of the protest messages we receive online, in news or on social media, are conveyed through pictures of signs, banners, posters, and other physical items. Art helps make protest messages clearer, more emotive, and more powerful. Designing together builds community and creates rallying points that spur larger actions.

Designed Out: Women, Cities, and Public Memory By Rae Alexandra

Back in 2020, San Francisco’s Department on the Status of Women released a report revealing that, among the city’s parks, buildings, streets and art named after people, only 13 percent were for women. Women were granted just 7 percent of street names, 9 percent of monuments, and 14 percent of buildings. The report came two years after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to increase the number of statues depicting historical women to at least 30 percent. That still hasn’t happened. In the eight years since, just one relevant statue of Maya Angelou has been added. As someone who had long felt frustrated about the many ways women had been routinely written out of history, I knew in my bones that the dearth of female representation in city landscapes was not there because women hadn’t done enough. The true achievements

of women were simply not being honored or even acknowledged in many cases. I felt compelled to do something to try and change this. As a staff writer for KQED— the San Francisco Bay Area arm of NPR and PBS—I started channeling my anger into research. I decided to profile a few forgotten historical women for a series I called Rebel Girls (in honor of the 1993 Bikini Kill song). What was originally intended to be a five-part essay series for Women’s History Month slowly morphed into fifty five profiles. Once I had started, I found it very difficult to stop. I simply hadn’t counted on just how many audacious, brave and irrepressible heroines I would discover, starting from the very earliest days of the Gold Rush, marching right up to the present day. In March 2026, San Francisco’s City Lights published my first book based on the Rebel Girls series: Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area. I hope it inspires more equal representation in public spaces. But I also realize now that, told in chronological 76

order, these essays don’t just reflect the achievements of exceptional Californian women over the past 175 years. They also provide an overview of America’s history and social progress. These women are a reminder of what we lose when we allow only the wealthiest or most powerful to design the cities we all share.

Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area is out now via City Lights and is available wherever books are sold.

Monuments matter. Depictions matter. Honoring our elders matters. The aesthetics of our public spaces indelibly impact how we see ourselves. The excerpt from Unsung Heroines below provides a pertinent case in point. In 1915, San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition heralded itself as a showcase of modernity and progress. But for the duration of its nearly yearlong run, the sprawling fair sold tickets to games and presentations so blatantly racist they sparked a Black-led demonstration that reverberated across the Bay Area. In the amusements section of the fair—known as the Joy Zone—booths like The African Dip, Soa Kum and Dixieland used enormous racist effigies on their exteriors to attract visitors. The Dixieland booth even peddled old lies about “the antebellum days in the South,” when “the slaves were about the happiest and most carefree beings on earth.” Nearby, in the Palace of Food Products, at the Sperry Flour Booth,

Black women sold pancakes while dressed in full “mammy” attire. After four months of witnessing these displays, Black communities from around the Bay Area converged on San Francisco’s Ferry Building and formed a parade. The turnout was enormous. The Oakland Sunshine reported, “Everybody shut up shop and [got] themselves across the channel.” A jubilant demonstration of flower-covered floats, choirs, flag-waving schoolchildren, streetcars full of Black women’s clubs and everyday workers moved down Market Street and, at Van Ness, entered the Joy Zone. The parade then proudly marched across the entire fair. This was Alameda County Day: an event intricately organized not just to dispel the stereotypes on show at the fair, but to illustrate Black people’s contributions to the city, county and state. Leaving race out of the event’s title was a very specific decision— organizers had scrapped plans for a “Negro Day” just months earlier. Participants had no interest in being tokenized. This

wasn’t merely about skin tone; it was a demand to be seen and treated as fellow, equal citizens.

Illustration by Adrienne Simms, courtesy of City Lights.

The chairman of the committee that organized Alameda County Day wasn’t a man at all. She was a 35-year-old Black woman by the name of Myra Virginia Simmons. Her day jobs might have been decidedly low-key —the Oakland resident sold newspapers and worked as a domestic cook—but to women and people of color around the Bay Area, she was a formidable campaigner and community leader. 78

At the time of Alameda County Day, the San Francisco Chronicle called the event “a revelation.” Journalist Delilah L. Beasley wrote in the Oakland Sunshine: “The mere fact that colored children marched through the streets of San Francisco, carrying the Stars and Stripes, showed a decided advance and change of feeling toward the colored race in these parts.” Myra had already served in an impressive number of capacities by the time Alameda County Day occurred on June 10, 1915. She was chair of the Women’s Civic and Progressive League in Oakland; president of the Colored American Equal Suffrage League; a sometimes speaker before the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union; a leader of the Alameda County Colored Americans; and president of the Civic Center Auxiliary, a Black women’s club. Prior to Alameda County Day, the Civic Center Auxiliary had also taken the lead in a large protest against the conditions in San Quentin for inmates of color. Later it led protests alongside the NAACP against 79

the glorification of the KKK and vilification of Black men in the 1916 movie The Birth of a Nation. But the majority of Myra’s activist energy was spent on gaining voting rights for women. Myra Virginia Simmons inherently understood how public space could be used to push false narratives. She knew instinctively that the most effective way to eradicate ugliness was to drown it out using beauty. She astutely recognized that public displays incorporating smart symbolism could be used to effect change. More than anything, Myra Virginia Simmons is an important reminder that when ordinary individuals decide to take a stand, equality becomes possible. At a time when public memory remains contested, her strategy feels less like history and more like instruction.

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