"Critical, Culpable, Unsettling:" A year-end update from MASD’s interim director

What we're reading, collaborating on, and imagining for 2025.

Dear all,

In January, Thomas Gardner invited me to lead MASD during his sabbatical year. I spent much of the spring and summer sharpening my perspective on the potentials and hazards of social design as a discipline. My approach is rooted in Lauren Williams’ call to move away from innocence in design practice, and to embrace a more “critical, culpable and unsettling” orientation to our work. Since August, this is how we have responded to Williams’ charge:

• We’ve collaborated with leading designers whose practices are rooted in justice, Black feminism and queer identity. Learn more about our visiting faculty:

  • Sloan Leo Cowan, of FLOX Studio, joined us as our community designer in residence to explore facilitation as a site of design practice. They will host a community gathering and offer a public lecture in the spring.

  • Kennedy McDaniel (‘22) joined us to lead a zinemaking and documentation workshop series.

  • Jess Obayan, of Design Impact, joined us to offer a workshop series and personalized consultations with students on design leadership and professional practice.

  • Longtime collaborators Annemarie Spitz and Myra Margolin joined us to lead our seminar series on design methods and social theory.
    

• We’ve initiated and deepened relationships with institutions building community power in Baltimore:

  • We opened the semester with a visit to Red Emma’s, the worker cooperative radical bookstore, and will close the semester on Thursday with a tour of The Peale, Baltimore’s Community Museum.

  • The Press Press Toolkit for Cooperative, Collective & Collaborative Cultural Work has informed the way we think about tactics for cultural organizing.

  • Our fall collaboration with the JACQUES Initiative, a community outreach program affiliated with the University of Maryland School of Medicine, explored pragmatic and speculative strategies for community engagement. The project is documented here (designed by Shannon).

  • Four of our students have fellowships with local organizations: Arts Every Day (DJ), Requity (Audrey), Immerse Universe (Carley), and MICA’s Center for Creative Impact (Mashal).

• We’ve been strategic and transparent about how to allocate the program’s finite financial resources, while also holding a value that people must be compensated well. We’ve secured nearly $50K in program support, thanks to collaborations with:

  • Innovation Works / Ignite Capital (Fall 2024 Practice-Based Studio, led by faculty Ana and Dai)

  • Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (workshop supporting their high school interns with a design-centric perspective on data analysis, led by Kaelyn and Alston)

  • Bloomberg American Health Initiative (four-part workshop series for BAHI graduate fellows on doing justice work in contested contexts, led by Christina, Thomas and Dai)

  • MICA Faculty Grants (Lucas Grant for Faculty Teaching, Baltimore Engagement Grant, Creative Entrepreneurship x2)
    

• We’ve grounded our work in an analysis of classic and contemporary writing about social design. These are our fall 2024 readings.

  • In addition to these texts, we’ve studied materials and methods that respond to the limitations of the traditional human-centered design approach. Those included card decks (the Black School Process Deck, Beautiful Trouble Strategy Cards), frameworks (design justice, liberatory design, equity-centered community design), and abolition as a value and program of change (eg One Million Experiments).

We invite you to join us in the spring. We will be hosting a community gathering with Sloan Leo Cowan, tentatively scheduled for March 10. Social Design Exchange is April 24, which will celebrate students’ individual and collective efforts in the program alongside a collaborative publication on the nature of social design today. We are planning to visit Washington DC, Philadelphia and New York along the way. We’re always on the lookout for co-conspirators: Join us.

In peace and fortitude,

Christina Jenkins (bio), MASD interim director ‘24-25; with

• Students Alston Watson, Audrey Randazzo, Carley Bran, DJ Fleming, Kaelyn Ching, Mashal Zahra, Shannon Willing (MASD ‘25); Imani Jackson, Beth Pieper (MASD ‘26); and

• Faculty Ana Mengote Baluca (MASD ‘23) and Dai Danhi (MASD ‘22)

PS: Interested in joining the MASD ‘26 class? Our first application deadline is January 19, 2025.