Sick and Tired: Reflections on Design, Illness, and the Fight for Racial Justice

Designer and social worker, De Nichols, capstoned Design Futures Forum with a reflective talk about sustaining personal and collective well-being in the fight for racial healing and justice in the United States. De shared lessons from civil rights leaders and fused insights from her personal challenges of navigating design activism with a chronic illness. By introducing a framework to assess the collective trauma in the built environment, De proposed a set of provocations that designers might consider as they design toward a more just and healthy future.

Roles of Design Research During the COVID-19 Pandemic

For the Harvard GSD Design Research Forum’s 2020 colloquium, I share thoughts on five roles that design researchers can serve as the world navigates the #covid19 pandemic. In this audio recording, I discuss how these roles can help generate data, expose bias, synthesize information, clarify truth, forecast new possibilities, and evaluate current processes and systems of power. I also identify a range of U.S. audiences and demographics for which each of these roles might elevate a deeper sense of personal agency due to histories of marginalization and targeted violence.

Creative Binationality: Lessons and Stories from Artists at the Border

During the Loeb Fellowship’s 2019 Fall Study Tour trip to San Diego and Tijuana, one of the most undeniably impactful features of the experience was the interweaving of art and creative practice that has grounded so much of the activism and cultural life at the border. De Nichols writes about how art infuses life in the two cities.

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