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Question & Answer with Ezra Kong of the Design Futures Forum
In May, the Design Futures Forum will be in person in St. Louis for the first time! We sat down with Design Futures Forum executive director Ezra Kong to learn more about the Forum and its impact on emerging practitioners in design and the built environment.
The Forum is only open to student participants, but all are welcome to join for Mallory Nezam’s public Keynote Lecture on Tuesday, May 21st at 6p in Steinberg Auditorium on the WashU campus. A reception will precede the talk from 5-6p in the Weil Commons. If you’re moved by Design Futures’ work, we also encourage you to support by making a (tax-deductible) donation!
PDB: What is Design Futures?
EK: Design Futures is a community of practice looking to grow capacity for students in the built environment to explore and live into what it means to be engaged in social movements as a designer, to do community-based design, and be a practitioner of things like spatial justice. At Design Futures, we’re big on building community across peers and between students. Students really get to know each other, sharing similar interests, navigating the field, and growing together. We also build relationships between the 20 practitioners who participate in the forum to teach and mentor students.
Most of this takes place in the five-day student forum, which each year brings together 60 to 65 students from 14 different universities.
PDB: You used some specific words in that explanation. Can you tell us a bit more about what you mean by ‘built environment’ and ‘spatial justice’?
EK: Sure! The built environment is the three dimensional space around us, which includes public art, city planning, and architecture. It can also be a lot more expansive — thinking about the physical world we interact with every day.
Spatial justice comes from an understanding that our current built environment — the way we’ve designed our cities and physical communities — reinforces systems of oppression. Within spatial justice, we’re interested in how we can counter and reverse those systems of oppression. We think about what it looks like for our physical environments to be liberatory and equitable. We must start with an understanding of the historical context that planning, architecture, and design had a part in reinforcing and building inequity. Spatial justice allows us to ask questions about how we can create different worlds that serve communities of color and others that are most impacted by white supremacy and other systems of oppression.
PDB: What’s one thing you’ve learned from Design Futures that you use in your work or life?
EK: Every time I’m in a space with our students, practitioners, and faculty, it helps grow my radical imagination of what is possible, and what it means to be a designer in these times. From my experience as both a former student and as somebody who works professionally in this field, many people are only interested in putting justice and equity and design into boxes and not thinking particularly expansively about what it could look like at a more radical level. Design Futures is an important community for me because it’s a space where people are encouraged to think in a generative way — thinking big and ambitiously about the potential of what we could be doing. This is hugely motivating and important, because we can only go as far as we imagine.
PDB: What do student participants take away from Design Futures?
EK: The forum is an intensive week of learning and rigorous reflection. Student participants learn a lot of practical, short-term and long-term skills around what it means to do this work in community-based design. But one of the most valuable things that people gain is finding like-minded peers, practitioners, and faculty to connect with, and building community. It’s not an easy thing to be passionate about these topics, because you don’t always feel the most supported. It’s really helpful to find people to help motivate you to keep moving forward, carving out spaces where we can do this work meaningfully.
The community aspect is the most important part of it. We’re intentional about the forum being a heart-centered space, because we’re really interested in people building relationships, knowing that will last long after people go home. For example, last year two student attendees who have now graduated are collaborating to lead a workshop at the Forum this year. One of the first student attendees, from 12 years ago, went on to join as a university faculty member at Design Futures and is now on our Board. There are many stories like these!
PDB: Why are you excited to have Design Futures in St. Louis this year?
EK: I love St. Louis! It’s where I studied. It’s a place with a ton of history and a lot of wisdom to offer to students in terms of what it looks like to invest in a community and in a particular place. There’s been a lot of history here with social movements and community building. It’s a great place to learn from!
Find out more about Design Futures online, join us for the keynote on Tuesday, May 21st, and make a donation to support Design Futures!
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