Contextual background
Together with two colleagues we have been awarded an EDI Grant as an Associate Lecturer at BA Graphic Branding & Identity for two years in a row. While art and design education is becoming more diverse, there is still more to be done to effectively break the glass ceiling. There is a need to challenge the often taken-for-granted assumptions that underpin curricula in art and design, which can inadvertently perpetuate exclusionary practices (Richards & Finnigan, 2015).
Evaluation
With our grant we wanted to create a safe space to educate students about creative resilience within the design industry and motivate them embrace one’s own identity and share best practices on inclusive design. We designed a lecture and workshop series inviting diverse voices and perspectives from creative communities to give students insight into their practice and share the impact they made to ultimately inspire and break down barriers for students with disabilities themselves.
In the first year we decided to focus on the under-presentation on women in the industry. Despite the fact that women currently account for around 60% of students enrolled in university arts and design courses, only 22% of the UK’s creative and design workforce is female (Design Council, 2018). With the project Women Up we intended to ask students to investigate the gender-specific misrepresentation of LCC alumni by going through the LCC archives as well as interviewing female LCC alumnis. Those interviews were meant to form a showcase of their creative talent through a range of informal show&tells as well as public facing exhibition.
Women Up was set up as a non-mandatory and extra-curricula activity which students could sign up to. There has been a great turn-up for the kick-off meeting which included an introduction to by an LCC archivist which brough up relevant footage to investigate. However as the term went on the students’ priorities shifted and from initially seventeen students only one turned up at our first show-and-tell and we didn’t have the workforce to exhibit our findings.
Moving forward
When applying and planning for the grant the second year we made the following changes in the proposed project set-up to increase participation and engagement: We renamed the project to Alt+Shift and were aiming to discuss a wide range of EDI issues. We not only widened the subject areasm, but also built the EDI sessions into the curriculum. With those two elements we have witnessed a very positive change in the students’ engagement. We have successfully delivered all three panel discussions and one workshop as planned in our project proposal with an attendance ranging from 45–90 students from all three year groups of the BA. Our sessions seem to have striked the right balance between introducing them to new yet relevant EDI topics, and combining them with relevant course’s subject matter and pathways of the students into industry. It has been refreshing to students to have a platform for inspiring designers to come in, not to showcase their best work, but for honest and unfiltered ‘behind the curtains’ conversations about how they emotionally appreciated their journey with disabilities into the industries, which obsticales they encountered and how they managed to change it from within. We also recorded all session and turned them into podcast to make them more accessible and long-lasting (please click link to listen: https://shows.acast.com/altshift/episodes/altshift). During the Q&A sessions at the end of each of those four session the students expressed of a new sense of agency and empowerment to help shape the design world into a more diverse and inclusive space.
References
Design Council (2018) Design Economy 2018: Executive Summary. Available at: https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/fileadmin/uploads/dc/Documents/Design_Economy_2018_exec_summary.pdf (Accessed: 20 March 2025).
Richards, A., & Finnigan, T. (2015). Embedding Equality and Diversity in the Curriculum: An Art and Design Practitioner’s Guide. Higher Education Academy.
Figure 1. Huber, Antonia (2024) alt+SHIFT Lecture Series, EDI Grant 2024, BA Graphic Branding and Identity, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.