Event Description:
The Black in Design conference, organized by the Harvard Graduate School of Design African American Student Union, recognizes the contributions of the African diaspora to the design fields and promotes discourse around the agency of the design professions to address and dismantle the institutional barriers faced by our communities. The fourth biannual conference, Black Matter, will take place virtually on October 8-10, 2021.
Black Matter celebrates the cultivation of Black design and creativity from the magical to the mundane. The conference aims to lift up Black spatial practices and experiences that operate below the surface of design discourse, bringing nuance to the trope of Black excellence and acknowledging the urgent political, spatial, and ecological crises facing Black communities across the diaspora.
This year’s conference will host discussions, exhibitions, and performances at the intersections of technology, history, and design, with focus on encouraging new design practices. Black Matter offers a dynamic virtual environment where geographically distant participants are connected synchronously to share their ideas and creative work, forming a global constellation of Black consciousness. Learn more about this year’s conference at blackmatter.tv.
Speakers:
Moderator: Dorothy Berry currently serves as Digital Collections Program Manager at Harvard’s Houghton Library. She graduated from Indiana University with an MA from the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and an MLS from the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. In 2020-2021, she was honored with Library Journal’s “Movers and Shakers” Award, and the Society of American Archivists’ Mark A. Greene Emerging Leader Award. Her work has focused on the intersections of information science and African American history, ranging from newspaper database research on the earliest mentions of African American concert music performances, to inventory design for the cosmetic kit of Hollywood’s first Black woman makeup artist, to exhibit curation highlighting transatlantic art inspired by African American film. Archival materials open the door to history in visceral and unfettered ways; she is committed to a career of expanding access to those materials through creative and innovative ways focusing on digital and physical methodologies that unite stakeholder communities with their often displaced heritages.
Emanuel Admassu is a Founding Partner of AD—WO and an Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP, where he teaches design studios and theory seminars in urban design and architecture. He has previously taught at RISD Architecture and Harvard GSD. Admassu’s teaching, research, and design practices examine the international constellation of Afrodiasporic spaces.
Felecia Davis is an Associate Professor at the Stuckeman Center for Design and Computation at Pennsylvania State University and director of SOFTLAB. Her work in communicating with computational textiles through architecture has been recognized for connecting art with science and was recently featured by PBS in the Women in Science Profiles series. Davis is currently working on a book that examines the role of computational materials in our lives titled Softbuilt: Networked Architectural Textiles. Davis was a contributor to The Museum of Modern Art’s group architecture exhibition “Reconstructions: Blackness and Architecture in America.” She is principal of FELECIADAVISTUDIO which has received several finalist awards for her architectural designs in open and invited architectural design competitions. She has exhibited and lectured about her work in textiles, computation, and architecture internationally, including at the Swedish School of Textiles, Microsoft Research, and the Media Lab at the MIT.
source
UCcA1don221rKq1EmbvQB27g
