The Black Experience In Design

The Hive and OBSA Present:
The Black Experience in Design

Excluded from traditional design history and educational canons that heavily favor European modernist influences, the work and experiences of Black designers have been systematically overlooked in the profession for decades. One year ago, The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression & Reflection was published as the leading anthology on the topic, spotlighting over 70 Black designers, artists, curators, educators, students, and researchers, who represent a wide cross-section of Black diasporic identities and multi-disciplinary practices.

Join Kareem Collie, co-editor of The Black Experience in Design and former Hive faculty, for an evening of candid and thought-provoking conversation with peers. This is a hybrid event with pizza for in-person attendees! Everyone will be entered into a raffle to win a copy of The Black Experience in Design book!

Registration required!

Click here to RSVP!

About our panelists:

Kareem Collie is a designer, researcher, and educator. He is currently a User Experience Design Lead at IBM. Kareem has over two decades of experience designing, directing, and leading design projects in branding, advertising, user experience, and creative strategy.
As an educator, Kareem explores the intersections of design, creativity, culture, and communication. He served as the Director for Design and Creativity at the Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity at the Claremont Colleges, from 2017-2021, helping to reimagine the role of design in the liberal arts. In 2016 he served as a Teaching Fellow at Stanford University’s d.school, where he delved into human-centered design and design as discourse. And, from 2006-2012 he taught graphic design at Pratt Institute. He is also one of the editors of the Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression & Reflection, which has received accolades from Fast Company, Print Magazine, and The Non-Obvious Book Awards as one of the best design books of 2022. Kareem has a Master’s degree from NYU and a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from Pratt Institute.

Jennifer White-Johnson is a disabled and Neurodivergent Afro-Latina art activist and design educator whose visual work aims to uplift disability justice narratives in design. Jen uses photography, zines and collage art to explore the intersection of content and caregiving, emphasizing redesigning ableist visual culture. Jen has presented her disability justice activist work and collaborated with a number of brands and art spaces across print and digital such as Twitter, Target, Converse, and Apple. Her photo and design work has been featured in The Washington Post, AfroPunk, Art in America, Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation and is permanently archived in libraries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and National Museum of Women in the Arts in DC. and most recently acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. In 2020 she was an honoree on the Diversability’s D-30 Disability Impact List and In 2021 she was listed as 20 Latino Artists to watch on Today.com Jen has an MFA in Graphic Design from The Maryland Institute College of Art. She was born in Washington D.C. and currently lives in Baltimore with her husband Kevin and 10-year-old son Knox

Quinlin Messenger’s creative identity is rooted in his African American, Native American and Jewish heritage … he channels and honors these legacies as a steward for justice, engaging communities and projects with a sensitivity and focus towards healthy living, social & environmental empowerment, and legacy cultivation.
In 2020, Quinlin founded JUST – a collaborative platform to realize an equitable future built on a legacy where people and Mother Earth coexist with honor and respect for a shared integrity. Founded around ideals of stewardship as a practice of justice, JUST reminds us that we all have the responsibility to cultivate healthy capacity for all, and respect the well being of our planet.
As the Creative Director of JUST Design, Quinlin aims to spark equitable change through Sustainability, Architecture, and Community Engagement, and believes design is a tool for social and environmental transformation. Understanding the historical, current, and future contexts of projects is integral to Quinlin’s process and approach, integrating co-creative and eco-centered practices to address the deepest challenges our communities and ecosystems face.

Chris Rudd is an award-winning designer, community organizer, and founder of ChiByDesign, a Black-owned and people-of-color-led design firm in Chicago. Chris has a deep background in social equity work, systems change, and youth development. He’s worked with youth and community residents on the south and west sides of Chicago, supporting them to design new anti-racist infrastructures to enable an equitable future.
In addition to his role at ChiByDesign, Chris is also a Clinical Professor of Practice and Lead of Community-led Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology Institute of Design (ID), where his work focuses on developing the co-design practice at ID and the anti-racist design field. Chris is a former Stanford Institute of Design (d.school) Civic Innovation fellow, Chicago Urban League IMPACT fellow, and a 2021 Illinois Science and Technology Coalition Researcher to Know.

Lesley-Ann Noel was trained as an Industrial Designer at the Universidade Federal do Paraná. She holds a Ph.D. in Design from North Carolina State University and a Masters in Business Administration from the University of the West Indies. She is an Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University College of Design. She is co-Chair of the Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group of the Design Research Society. She is one of the co-editors of The Black Experience in Design for Allworth (2022) and the author of the forthcoming Design Social Change, which will be released in the Fall of 2023. She has created several design tools for critical reflection, such as The Designer’s Critical Alphabet and the Positionality Wheel.