Digitally, analog... it's just like a big stew that's really amazing and people love it and people stop with the whole like, this is bad, this is good, this, like, Where do you see the future of design?
I think it's really messy in the most beautiful way that you can think about.
Luisa Ortega Subdiaz UW Design, Class of 2026
Ramon
Tejada: DominicanYork designer and associate professor at the Rhode Island School of Design
A note from the designer:
I’m passionate about the ways in which design can alter the way we live, by allowing us to imagine a different, more just world. Ramon embodies this with the belief that this reimagination must begin at the point of our practices, with a questioning of where the principles we trust and ways of working come from. Then, a necessary welcoming of other ways of making. He calls this process, the “puncturing” of the design space. I approached this broadsheet with these intentions.
“Maybe the designer as an activist becomes about propagating these stories that are usually not in design spaces, privileged, or even given a platform to be there.”
In collaboration with Polymode Studio, Ramon facilitated the series, the Incomplete History of Latinx Stories of Diseño Gráfico, which centers work and histories of art, along with the different ways of thinking that come from Latin America.
“It came out of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands. The ‘incomplete’ is actually the thing that we love a lot, because that gave us a way to do this without necessarily covering everything, because no project is going to do that, it's just an invitation for people to start doing more, and then we all just keep adding to it.”
“I'm like, look, you don't even give us a platform to sit there and hear that story. Because we always have to gravitate to going back to Germany or Switzerland or England or France or wherever. Um, and I think that that could be a really amazing way, but I also think that looking at what other designers are doing and how they've done it...I think it's pretty amazing sometimes.”
“We start to make work that I think incorporates more of who we are or who you are, the context you’re coming from, the people you really are interested in talking to, engaging with, whether that’s your grandmother or your mom or your chosen family, your friends. Instead of this thing that we’re doing, the universal work that’s gonna go out to the masses.
I’m like, sometimes “the masses”, I don’t give a sh*t about the masses.
So when you’re asked, “who’s the audience?” I’m like, why are you going to ask me who the audience is? Like the audience is going to be some generic white guy. I don’t give a sh*t about making work for generic white guys.”
“So to me that was interesting to start to thinking, ‘how do I rip this thing so that everybody can come through and we can all go?’”
At the Rhode Island School of Design, Ramon teaches a class called, Unmaking Studio. Here, he encourages his students to break from the habits, tools, and ways of thinking that have been canonized within design. In the class he proposes new norms: no adobe softwares and no deadlines or finished products.
“...So we all want to talk about Capitalism. And then we all go and make work the same way we’ve done it. So, are we really talking about it? I wanted to make a class that resisted the speed at which we work.
THEN you start to have a conversation. How do I fold these ideas into the work that I’m making exactly in the practice of doing it?”
“There's other ways to make. There's other conditions that you can set up for yourself that give you a sense of purpose, a sense of agency to make work in the way you want to.”
“A lot of the times it’s about intentionality. What’s my intention here? What am I trying to do? Why am I doing it? Should I be doing this now? Let me process that. This is a slower thing. I don’t need to do this right now. Maybe I need to learn a lot and then make decisions...”
“Part of what I’m trying to do is elevate, right? So maybe that’s the moment when you’re like, you know what, I’m going to make a project where I’m going to interview some people. Right? I’m a big fan of making for your parents...mom and dad, a grandparent. I have a lot of students who’ve made interviews with their grandparents, which I think is amazing.
Say you’re elevating your grandmother, who is an artist. No, she’s not this quote-unquote artist, but she’s a goddamn good cook and you want to interview her about elevating her ideas about cooking for example, right? I think that that’s really incredible to do.
Or you say I’m gonna make a book about Latin American short stories or you know, Mexican American writings. I’m not gonna pick a book about like Charles Dinkins.
Like, who gives a sh*t about Charles Dinkins?
I’m saying that like jokingly, right? Like... Dickens is great, but again, nobody needs to, to make another audition of Charles Dickens. There’s like a gazillion of them. But I do need to make a new addition of this group of short stories that nobody’s ever read.”
“The copy machine is literally the best tool ever. You don't need Adobe to do anything. You just need a copy machine and you can make posters, you can
OH MY GOD, you can make tons of stuff. And it will be amazing.”
