UIUC University Housing

The eight-hour Racism Untaught workshop moves participants through all five steps in the design research framework. The workshop first onboards participants with an exercise on power and privilege. Participants then move on to the first step in the toolkit, Context, where participants are given the cards that outline over 70 different elements of racism. This allows participants to analyze an artifact, system, or experience and learn how we perpetuate racism in our everyday lives and then how to break down racialized design. They further contextualize using the Levels of Oppression, linking their racialized prompt to beliefs, agentic action, institutions, and cultural ideologies of oppression. Next, participants move into step two, Define, where they are prompted to analyze which theories and design research methods they might use to further contextualize the prompt they were given. After which, they create a thesis question which moves them to step three, Ideate. Participants work through ideas to address their thesis question, re-imagining a form of racialized design. They then use a quadrant map to discuss how well their idea moves from anti-oppressive thought to anti-oppressive action and from good intent to positive impact. Next, the participants move to the fourth step, Prototype, creating their first iteration of an idea that re-imagines a form of racialized design. Lastly, participants further analyze the potential impact their solution could have in the last step, Impact.