By Chris Daemmrich, Visiting Assistant Professor of Design Thinking, 2021-2023

From summer 2021 to summer 2023, I have worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor for Design Thinking at the Taylor Center. I’ve been faced with challenges in this role that I never would have imagined. I’ve also been presented with opportunities I never could have envisioned. The experience has been transformational for me, and I hope that what I have contributed over these past two years has pushed the Taylor Center and other units of Tulane University in new directions. I’m grateful for the time I have spent with the wonderful staff and faculty of the Taylor Center, a dynamic and talented team with whom it has been a pleasure to work closely. As I move forward in my career I will always look back on these two years with fond memories of the amazing people this position has allowed me to collaborate with, within and beyond Tulane.  

 

COVID and VISIONS 

In the beginning, there was the COVID-19 pandemic. For more than two years this respiratory illness and the effects of its transmission throughout our society had major effects on just about everyone, just about everywhere. Education was transformed beginning in the spring of 2020, when ‘Zoom school’ became the norm in a matter of weeks. Physical isolation for students and professionals who could afford it, and unprecedented vulnerability for masses of working people who could not, starkly illustrated the class divides of our society.  

The disparate effects of the pandemic on Black communities and other communities of color, a disaster enabled by decades of racist disinvestment, were further dramatized throughout 2020 and 2021 as consciousness of racism unseen for generations emerged among White Americans in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. It was in these exceptional social and political circumstances that I started work at the Taylor Center in the summer of 2021.  

Before I even came on campus I spent a week as part of a VISIONS [Vigorous Interventions in Ongoing Natural Situations] PACE [Personal Approach to Change and Equity] training with many of my future Taylor Center colleagues. My experience in VISIONS was important because it grounded my relationships with fellow participants in shared values of justice, equity and inclusion. VISIONS also gave me a sense of the Taylor Center’s institutional history, as so many trainers and fellow participants had previously interacted with the Center through its relationship with Grow Dat Youth Farm. Throughout my time at the Center, the consistent development of these relationships through VISIONS’ Train the Trainer (TTT) process, and the opportunity to work with VISIONS’ Jabari Brown and Jeanne Firth as consultants, were some of the experiences I would come to value the most.  

 

The World’s Greatest Graduate Assistants 

Though I had to make my initial hires virtually from my brother’s apartment in Houston due to the impacts of Hurricane Ida on New Orleans, the graduate assistant team I began working with in the fall of 2021 would become another group of my favorite people to work with throughout my time at the Center. Throughout their time working on community-based research projects, primarily with economic development and public health nonprofit Broad Community Connections, Taylor GAs Jonteja Venning, Jaime Jimenez and Noah LeJeune excelled as representatives of the Center and the university in the community. As GAs for Design Thinking Programs, Noah and Omana Douce-McDermott organized over a dozen virtual and in-person Design Thinking Breakfasts which broadened Taylor’s reach into New Orleans and far beyond.  

 

 

During their time under my supervision in 2021-22, GAs participated in an informal ‘book club’, reading articles, watching documentaries, and listening to podcasts relevant to the work they were doing and the places in which they were doing them. In my second year, I formalized this into an actual book club, in which we read ‘Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans’ by Clyde Woods during the fall of 2022, and ‘Franchise: The Golden Arches and Black America’ by Marcia Chatelain in the spring of 2023.  

Each week, GAs completed written reflections on the reading and other activities, which we discussed at our check-in meetings. Throughout our time together I was consistently impressed with their curiosity and capacity for thoughtful reflections. I am proud of the work each of these amazing graduate assistants did during their time with Taylor, and am not surprised that all have gone on to gainful employment since.  
 

Facilitation and Teaching 

In the fall of 2021, I worked with Taylor faculty Julia Lang and staff Sam Fleurinor and Lavonzell Nicholson to create and co-facilitate a series of community engagement workshops for Tulane’s Teacher Preparation and Certification Program (TPCP). This was my first introduction to working collaboratively with other members of the Taylor team and an outside partner. I deeply appreciated working with team members who were enthusiastic to use this opportunity to advance TPCP’s conversions on racial equity in curriculum, an experience which set the tone for later workshops I would lead at Taylor for organizations like Tulane’s Office of Donor Relations, a Tulane summer high school biomedical research program, and the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans.  

 

 

Thanks to the support of Dr. Edson Cabalfin, associate dean for equity, diversity and inclusion for the Tulane School of Architecture and director of the Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship (SISE) program, I taught my first course in Spring 2022. ‘Design Justice in the Swamp’ was an upper-level SISE course, available to students who had taken the introductory SISE 2010. All six of the students who enrolled were graduating seniors, giving the class a senior-seminar feel. Students were challenged by the curriculum, but did the readings and came prepared to discuss heavy subjects like the genocide of Indigenous people, settler colonialism, enslavement, segregation and the effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. The class’ focus on strategies of resistance and activism applied through design allowed students to see themselves as actors within the field of design justice, and their amazing final projects presented a wide range of approaches to the prompt, “There is a future where Black people are free and Indigenous people steward the land… What does this place look like? How does it function? How did we get here? What was my role in helping to get here?” 

 

January 2022 saw the debut of ASCENT: Elevating Southern Perspectives on Design Justice. This exhibition and program series, which I co-organized with Prof. Kiwana McClung of the University of Louisiana-Lafayette’s School of Architecture and Design, was a partnership between our respective institutions and the National Organization of Minority Architects Louisiana Chapter (NOMA Louisiana). The physical ASCENT exhibit hosted visits by students from New Harmony High School, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, the Tulane School of Architecture; and professionals from several architecture and design practices, including Trapolin Peer, Trahan and EskewDumezRipple. Virtual programs reached many more across Louisiana and the world.  

 

UL-Lafayette students and Prof. Atianna Cordova visit ASCENT exhibit at the Taylor Warehouse, February 10, 2022. Photo: Omana Douce-McDermott
 

During the spring of 2022, what was to be my second and final semester at the Taylor Center, an opportunity arose for me to continue my work for an unexpected second year. I am deeply grateful for this opportunity, as it allowed me to continue projects I had begun; meet and collaborate with wonderful new members of the team; and lay groundwork for future projects which will continue my efforts in education for design justice.  
 

Connecting and Collaborating in Year 2  

My second year at the Taylor Center has been defined most significantly by the opportunity I have had to collaborate with Prof. Marguerite ‘Maggie’ Sheffer, who was hired in the spring of 2022 as Professor of Practice and Associate Director of Design Thinking. Maggie has been a truly awesome colleague from whom I have learned so much in just a year, and who has through her catalytic capacity brought people together to make far more great things happen than even she knows. Her efforts convening Social Entrepreneurship (SE) professors have created a new sense of community from an existing Center program, one which has been especially important to me in 2022-23 as the bridge that connected me with two of the amazing professors who currently hold those roles. 

Dr. Jelagat Cheruiyot and I first met back in 2019, when she was part of a multi-institutional collaboration hosted at Tulane called the Anthropocene River Campus, for which I was employed as a photographer. Her own boundless care for the experiences of others was evident to me even then, and in working with her as an SE Professor, I am continually impressed both by the depth of her knowledge and her consistent thoughtfulness. Our collaboration during my time at the Taylor Center has focused on her work organizing community gardens with deeply rooted neighborhood organizations around New Orleans. Throughout this process, I’ve learned that ‘community’ is the operative word in that phrase; without human relationships of care able to withstand the challenges of life in a disinvested 21st-century city, garden beds planted with even the best intentions will wither.  

 

It’s appropriate that I first met Dr. Melissa Fuster at a spring 2022 Design Thinking Breakfast hosted by Dr. Cheruiyot, because their work springs from the same roots: deep care for people pushed to the margins of our cities, especially Black and brown people who are systematically denied access to the resources we must have in order to lead healthy lives. From her position as faculty in the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, Dr. Fuster leads Voices at the Table, a project partially supported by her SE Professorship which investigates how Black and Latino-owned restaurants can be venues for promoting positive health outcomes, focusing on the role of policy in constraining or elevating these restaurants and their strategies for promoting health. I have had the privilege of working on Voices at the Table with Dr. Fuster, Prof. Sheffer and their wonderful team of graduate assistants, contributing my own expertise in New Orleans’ cultural geography and relationships in communities on which the project is focused.  

Over the weekend of October 14-15, 2022, the Association for Community Design (ACD) held its first in-person annual convening since 2019 in New Orleans, at Tulane’s Tidewater Building on Canal Street. Professionals and students working in community design and design justice from around the US traveled to meet, attend sessions and tours, and socialize together in the beautiful fall weather. Thanks to the support of the Taylor Center, ACD was able to access this space at a discounted rate, and I was able to devote a portion of my time during the summer and fall of 2022 to planning and hosting the convening. I am grateful for the Taylor Center’s catalytic investment in this event, which exposed the Center to a nationwide audience of changemakers, and gave Tulane changemakers an opportunity to meet people doing similar work in other cities.  

 

 

My teaching responsibilities in the 2022-23 academic year included completing VISIONS’ Train the Trainer (TTT) curriculum through collaborative facilitation of VISIONS curriculum in SISE 2010 courses, and a set of guest lectures I gave in the SISE 2010 courses instructed by Prof. Maille Faughnan and Prof. Anna Monhartova, as well as Prof. Sheffer’s SISE 3010 elective. These guest lectures focused on the themes of design justice and speculative design, as well as on providing context for service learning in the Broad Street neighborhoods around the Lafitte Greenway; the New Orleans East neighborhoods around Joe Brown Park; and New Orleans City Park. I incorporated interactive activities building upon students’ experience in VISIONS to challenge their racialized assumptions about these neighborhoods and the people with whom they work, in support of their professors’ ongoing engagement with critical service learning.  

 

In April and May 2023, toward the end of my final semester as Visiting Assistant Professor at the Taylor Center, I was able to bring two special projects long in development to fruition.  

The first, a speculative design workshop for the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans (TWC), constituted a Taylor sponsorship of that organization initiated in the fall of 2022. Entitled ‘Systems Change and Afrofuturism: What will water justice look like?’, this interactive session was part of the Water Collaborative’s Water Justice Fund series, intended to build support for new funding sources to support climate change adaptation to infrastructure in New Orleans. Co-facilitators Prof. Annicia Streete (LSU School of Architecture) and Prof. Bryan Bradshaw (Tulane School of Architecture) and I facilitated this workshop for over three dozen nonprofit and community leaders in New Orleans.  

 
 

The second, a collaboration with New Harmony High School (NHHS) in New Orleans and NOMA Louisiana’s Project Pipeline high school youth architecture+design justice mentoring program, was a series of field trips through which NHHS’ entire 10th grade class visited three professional architecture and design offices in New Orleans’ CBD; the historic Piazza d’Italia; and the Tate, Etienne, Prevost (TEP) Center, a historic civil rights site and example of sustainable adaptive reuse redevelopment in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward. Students participated in interactive design activities with professionals at Trapolin Peer Architects, envisioning the adaptive reuse of a vacant building near their school in Mid-City, New Orleans.  

 

 

Scholarship 

Scholarly research and writing is an important component of academic work. During my time at the Taylor Center, I collaborated with Detroit-based landscape architect Ujijji Davis Williams on a book chapter, ‘On the Water Front: Battles for Black New Orleans’ Future’, to be included in a forthcoming Routledge edited volume, New Approaches to Coastal Adaptation in Landscape Architecture. A paper I wrote in 2020, ‘Freedom and the politics of space: organizing and convening for self-determination in the contemporary American citymaking professions’, was published in ENQ: The ARCC Journal for Architectural Research, vol. 19, issue 1 in 2022.  

I also produced more public-facing writing, including ‘Reconstructing the Syllabus: A speculation from New Orleans’ for a publication of the Scottish design festival Architecture Fringe, and ‘In New Orleans, Designs for a More Just Future’, a feature for ARCHITECT magazine published in October 2021. During the spring of 2023 I have made progress on a paper, tentatively titled ‘Blues and Bourbon Architecture: racialized design education in Louisiana’, which I anticipate completing in the winter of 2023.  
 

Conclusion 

Throughout all these projects in curriculum, facilitation and beyond, I have consistently engaged issues of design justice, particularly racial justice, and the implications of spatial apartheid on our present efforts to make change for a more just and equitable world. A thread that has emerged throughout my work over the past couple of years, in response to disasters like Hurricane Ida and my own growing understanding of the Katrina disaster’s long-term effects on New Orleans and New Orleanians, is understanding the design and political challenges of just climate change adaptation. Key questions arise:  

• How might we prepare young people, raised under conditions of racial apartheid in US schools, to challenge the injustices built into the world around us by practitioners in architecture, design, planning, policy and other professional fields?  
• How might we educate both Tulane’s predominating student population, young and wealthy White people from generationally invested suburbs across the United States, to do this work while supporting their development into antiracist consciousness?  
• How might we educate the minority of Black students and students of color, and others minoritized within the dominant culture of Tulane and US higher education, to do this work while supporting them to survive and thrive within a hostile system?  
• How might we better support youth, specifically Black youth and youth of color from generationally disinvested cities like New Orleans, in the pipeline to higher education, and to opportunities in architecture, design, planning, policy and other professional fields?  

• How might we change these fields, from our privileged positions within them, to ensure these students can grow into leaders who can continue this important work?  

 

These are issues I have been working around for many years, but the Taylor Center has given me the invaluable tool of experience with the design thinking language in which I’ve framed them here. Working as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Taylor Center over the past two years has been an unparalleled opportunity for me to learn so many ways to do this work more effectively. Most importantly, the Taylor Center has been a place at which, and through which, I’ve met so many wonderful people who I now see as allies and collaborators in this work. I look forward to keeping in touch, and to continued collaboration in service of design justice education for many years to come.