Building Inclusive Design Cultures

Course Description

This course explores how design businesses and other professional design environments can foster more inclusive practices. In the past decade, organizational cultures have become highly visible for the inequities they have fostered in their structures and practices. The #metoo movement gave voice and needed visibility to historical patterns of sexual oppression and exploitation in workplaces and across greater society. #Oscarssowhite demonstrated the problem of race-based casting and institutional biases towards white (and often male) actors, directors and industry professionals, while the Black Lives Matter movement and thousands of camera phones have exposed the exclusive and oppressive cultures that permeate the legal justice system. By learning from the past and looking forward, the course give students practical tools to respond to anti-inclusive systems and practices and collaborate with others to shift cultures towards enhanced inclusion.

Course Length - Online 5 weeks

Learner Outcomes

• An understanding of the historical and contemporary role of oppression, privilege and bias in fostering non-inclusive and problematic organizational cultures
• The moral and market-based cases for enhancing diversity in all institutions
• How to improve design business performance by prioritizing diverse and inclusive workplaces
• Skills to become a reflexive and collaborative leader of diverse teams
• An understanding of common challenges and barriers to inclusivity, including the role of hierarchies (both managerial, and class, gender, and race-based) in complicating inclusive efforts
• Strategies and approaches for leading and building inclusive cultures based on mutual respect

Applies Towards the Following Certificates

• Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice in Design Certificate : Required Courses