Black Stories/18: Audrey Bennett

Audrey Bennett:

I too am fascinated by the idea that Swiss design could have African roots. And if so, then what does that mean? This idea that we have not been included in graphic design history, or we didn’t realize that we have been included in graphic design history, how does that now change our history?

Justin James Lopez:

Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Amazon’s Black Stories, where we highlight the stories of Black designers, researchers, and creative minds from all around the world. I’m your host, Justin James Lopez, and today I’m joined by graphic design scholar Audrey Bennett, as we discuss the importance of representation, re-presentation, and how we shift the cultural narrative. Now, let’s hear her story.

Audrey, thank you again for joining me on this episode. I am really excited to jump into this conversation, but before we do that, I just wanted to pause and take a second to let you introduce yourself to the listeners here.

Audrey Bennett:

Thank you for having me. My name is Audrey Bennett, and I’m a graphic design scholar. I am a university diversity and social transformation professor at the University of Michigan within the Penny W Stamps School of Art and Design.

Justin James Lopez:

Aside from being a design scholar, you’re also the founding director of the Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability Lab over at University of Michigan too. Right? Can you talk to me a little bit more about what exactly the lab does?

Audrey Bennett:

So the DESIS Lab is a part of a larger network of DESIS Labs all around the world. It was founded by Ezio Manzini in Italy, and his vision was to start smaller labs around the country of varies art and design schools. I thought of the idea of starting this lab because I am interested not only in environmental sustainability, but also social sustainability and social innovation and addressing diversity issues related to some of the work that I’ve been doing in education more recently, museum studies, etcetera. But the labs can basically do the kinds of activities that they want to do. It requires a lot of community engagement, etcetera. But we’re only required to have one particular event each year. And I usually have a guest speaker come in and speak on a topic related to social innovation and social sustainability and environmental sustainability. This year we had Eric Benson speak to the Stamps community.

Justin James Lopez:

So as the founder, you’re the one that established it at the University of Michigan then because it is a part of a larger conglomerate.

Audrey Bennett:

I did, yes. And I did it right before the COVID pandemic. So in order to start a lab, you actually have to attend the DESIS lab events somewhere in the world. And so I went down to New York City, and I think I was at the new school when I participated in one of their events, and Ezio was there. So I had the opportunity to introduce myself, and I told them of my interest in starting a DESIS Lab.

Justin James Lopez:

Yeah. Do want to backtrack for a second because I didn’t say this, and I wanted to remember to say this is one, congratulations for winning the Steven Heller Award and-

Audrey Bennett:

Oh, Thank you.

Justin James Lopez:

This past AIGA, right?

Audrey Bennett:

Yeah.

Justin James Lopez:

Yeah. So well, congratulations for that because I feel like that’s a theme of a lot of what we’re talking about, including what you just mentioned. There’s just commitment to creating this sustainability for the environment and for the culture. And I want to jump into that for a second because I did see an interview that you did a while back, and you mentioned one of your key missions is taking culture, math, and computing and shifting the conversation for it to be a bridge instead of a barrier for communities that have been historically marginalized or felt marginalized or excluded. And we’ll jump into a lot more of how those different pieces come, but I wanted to ask, why did you decide, this is the thing that I want to do. This is the thing that’s important for my work.

Audrey Bennett:

This line of inquiry, diversifying design, STEM, etcetera, started from the time I was a graduate student at Yale School of Art, and I was doing my thesis around my background, etcetera. I’ve always been interested in writing, and I was taking courses in writing while taking my graphic design courses within the MFA in graphic design at Yale. And I wanted to somehow bring in my culture into the creative work that I was doing. I was always wondering how to do that.

So at that time, I had asked Saki Mafandeekwa to be my thesis advisor, and I’m pretty sure he’s the one that introduced me to a book on African art. And what stood out to me as I was going through this book was the Lu Caza, which is a sculptural piece that has embedded in it teachings, you could say, from one generation to another. And it’s coded in the beads and the organization of these beads on this artwork. And I found that to be enormously just interesting. I was interested in memory, and I’ve always been interested in how information can be encoded in visual language and can only be read by those who understand that language.

After I graduated, I went on to a tenure track position at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and three years in, I bumped into Ron Eglash in the hallway. And after introducing myself to him, he was interested in my hearing about the work that he was doing, and we talked about our work. I told him about the work I was doing when I was a graduate student, and he had a lot to say about the Lu Caza and how there is computational thinking that is embedded in it. I’ve always wanted to give back to my community through the work that I’m doing, and I found his perspective on African fractals, etcetera, to be very, very interesting. And it was through working with him that I believe I developed this passion to continue this trajectory with my research always giving back. And I figured out that I could do that theoretically.

There was a time when I thought that I would be able to do that better by going into industry, and I said to Ron, “I am going to leave my tenure track position and go and start a studio.” And so that’s when I got a really amazing lecture on the power of theory and how racism is grounded in theory. And he used pasteurized milk as an example of how theory can impact life. That was so powerful to me. I decided not to quit my tenure track job and go into industry and to stay and to pursue theory and theoretical research.

Justin James Lopez:

So it was the milk that did it.

Audrey Bennett:

The pasteurized milk, that did it.

Justin James Lopez:

No, no, no. So that’s really, in all seriousness, I think that that’s really interesting because that is really almost the origin story of the work that you’ve done and the work that came after. Because I’d be remiss to not call out that at one point your life could have been completely different. You weren’t going to be a designer. You wanted to be a lawyer, I think.

Audrey Bennett:

Yes. How did you find out about that? I was pre-law.

Justin James Lopez:

Yeah, so we wouldn’t have had any of these conversations potentially, right? Well, maybe you had been making changes differently. So talk to me a little bit about that. How do we go from pre-law to moving into being a design scholar? What happened there?

Audrey Bennett:

Well, I was valedictorian when I was in high school in East Orange, New Jersey. And my parents, of course, my mom wanted me to be a doctor or lawyer. We were poor, and so it made sense. This is where the money is. So she was not happy when I ended up at Dartmouth majoring in art. I took a drawing class and absolutely loved it. It was with Professor Ben Moss.

And I tell my students about this all at the time, how he had a standing for four hours drawing, and it just changed my life. I had no idea that art could be elevated to this intellectual experience. And it changed me. And I was like, “I am majoring in art, and I will do whatever I have to do to make it as an artist and pay my bills.” Because I was just, my family was not very happy to hear that I was moving away from law and medicine to art. Even my professors at Dartmouth said, “You really should not go on to graduate school for art.” So I said, “Okay, I will do graphic design then because I will be able to get a job in graphic design.”

But I was committed in doing whatever it is that I had to do to succeed financially within art and design. I put my mind to it, and I did not look back. I wanted to have a life where I enjoyed what I was doing. Is that too much to ask?

I was actually interning at a law firm in New York City. I was on the track to becoming a lawyer, and I did not like the experience. A funny thing about it is that I said, “Oh, it’s just way too political. I should go into academia.” But I didn’t understand the level of politics in academia, so I didn’t get away from the politics. But when things get really political and toxic, I fall back on what I love to do, and it’s this theoretical research that I absolutely love to do, and I love to write, and it makes me very happy.

So I think you’re right. If I had gone on to be a doctor or a lawyer, I might be focusing on reparations right now, which I’m so excited about it. I’m glad to see lawyers doing that kind of work, but I’m very content with the decisions that I’ve made and where I’ve arrived right now, very excited.

Justin James Lopez:

I think there’s an entire cohort of humans that are content with the decision you made and where you’ve arrived. You’ve influenced so many people. I think that there’s influences though, in all of that. I think that you, and this is just my perspective, but you shifted your career, but not the way that you think because you’re implementing those same theories. When I think about litigation or being able to take an argument and use it to affect change. There’s a couple of things there that you just mentioned. One is this industry versus staying in academia, which we’ll come back to. But on the topic of the work is I read the article that was submitted for the book that came out, was it last year, “The Black Experience in Design Identity, Expression, and Reflection.” But your article was specifically around the Golden Ratio. Was it an excerpt from a larger article that was written?

Audrey Bennett:

Well, the piece that’s in the Black Experience book is a journal article that I wrote years ago that’s been sitting in a journal until now. And so it basically is something that was written prior to. I also wrote a piece, an op-ed, that was in the conversation that got picked up by a couple of different venues on the African roots of Swiss Design. And that op-ed is based on that chapter that has been published. And that chapter is a reprint of a journal article that I wrote several years ago.

Justin James Lopez:

One thing that I thought was really powerful, because I loved learning more about your journey and just the work that you have done. Because most of the time what I find is when you look at a person’s journey, it tends to be linear in a certain way in the concept of it’s moving in one direction, and yeah, there’s different points that intersect and shift and go up and down with the ebb and flows of life, but it tends to be in one direction. Your journey seems to be very cyclical as a lot of the things that you do connect from points in time. And I’ll explain what I mean by that is everything that you just mentioned, and the work that you do in the mission that I mentioned earlier, and I was reading the journal article, the component that was in the book, and I thought it was really interesting. There’s a few things that I wanted to ask you about.

But the one, when I think about the mission that you mentioned of creating a bridge, and you also mentioned the whole idea of the issues with the industry, and diversity, and lack of representation. And at the very end there’s this part where you connect it all together. You’re listening and you’re looking at the history, and for the listeners, sorry if I’m losing you here, but if you haven’t read it, if you haven’t listened to it, definitely check it out. But the part that I’m talking about is where you basically say one of the biggest issues that we face today, especially as marginalized communities, jumping into these spaces when it comes to math, computing, design in general, is that we don’t see ourselves represented well in these spaces. And feel free to correct me if I’m getting this wrong, but what you connected at the end really actually made me feel really good about the work that you’re doing and just in general. And the direction that we’re moving with some of the research that you’re conducting is really going back to the beginning and saying this is all influenced by our culture.

Audrey Bennett:

That is right.

Justin James Lopez:

You think that you’re not represented, but you’re actually represented-

Audrey Bennett:

Yes.

Justin James Lopez:

... very well in these spaces.

Audrey Bennett:

Yes.

Justin James Lopez:

That’s the theoretical bridge that I saw in my brain, literally connecting as I was reading it. You took a very complicated and complex series of events over hundreds of years that have happened, and you put it into 30 pages that was super easy to digest, which it’s a skill. You just mentioned a bit of that conversation in the origin point that you had when you were thinking about jumping back and forth. Where does the work go from here?

Audrey Bennett:

I think that is a wonderful, wonderful question, certainly something that I am grappling with now. When I started working with Ron Eglash, we were developing a website, and I was doing interaction design, interface design. I didn’t really think that my work in graphic design, my scholarly work in graphic design and graphic art, would intersect the way that it did. I was having a conversation with Ron around the content of the website and this idea of computational thinking being embedded in African art and cultural practices when he mentioned the Fibonacci Series and the Golden Rectangle. And I said, “Wait a minute. We use these things.” This is what I learned in typography.

And that’s when I made that connection and I said, “Could it really be that Swiss design is really based on African heritage and African culture?” And so when I wrote that article, I didn’t necessarily think that I was completely right with this. I just thought, this is an observation. I think it’s interesting. Let me write about it and get the idea out there. And it sat for many years. I did so many other types of work. It certainly has emerged as quite relevant. There’s been a lot of pushback from various cultural groups who want to take credit for the Fibonacci Series and this knowledge.

Justin James Lopez:

Well, it is exciting when you think about our culture and the misrepresentation of that culture as we’ve been talking about. And looking at something like this where you find out that there’s something that has been so impactful throughout the course of history of our human history, and finding that those roots are rooted in African culture, something that you can identify to something that is really living and breathing and a part of you, that’s something that’s really exciting. Even as a prospect, that’s really powerful to think about.

Audrey Bennett:

I too am fascinated by the idea that Swiss design could have African roots. And if so, then what does that mean? This idea that we have not been included in graphic design history, or we didn’t realize that we have been included in graphic design history. How does that now change our history and what has been created with the Swiss design and that grid? Yeah. So that’s something I am exploring right now. I do want to publish more on this. I do want to put together a book, and I am working on that, exploring this further. Because if that is true, then I’d like to explore what has been created since the introduction of the Swiss grid, you could say to graphic design.

Justin James Lopez:

So from an academic perspective, how does that impact the work that you’re doing with your students? What is their response to you bringing in this new information, this information about representation and where they fit into the greater scheme of graphic design from an historical perspective?

Audrey Bennett:

What’s interesting is that they’re not all Black students. I have only one Black student, one was Indian, and I want them to realize that Black people are deeply rooted and embedded in the history of graphic design, and even the Swiss grid that we definitely have contributed something to its history. So it’s been interesting trying to weave that new knowledge into my graphic design classes. And I think it went pretty well. The African American student in my class, she was just so excited to know, to have this knowledge that she is represented in the history of graphic design, and in this important part or component of our history, the canon of design, that there we are. We’ve been a part of it all this time and didn’t really know, but now we do. So what do we do with this new knowledge?

Justin James Lopez:

And that’s the question, what do we do with this new knowledge? And I think that it leads me to another question. You call this out in your journal article as well, which I thought was really interesting, the idea of representing the culture appropriately. A lot of your work is really doing that, of saying, “Hey, if this is true, if all of these things were influenced from African culture, then what does that mean for us now? What does that mean for how we interpret the information? And you talk about the idea of representation, but also re-presentation of the culture, and how that’s being done in media, and now in different spaces where you think of Spike Lee as one of the big ones, as well as, I think you call out Tyler Perry as well. But looking at how we’re specifically, and they’re doing it in a different way, but they’re specifically calling out certain stereotypes in order to then establish re-presentation of what representation should be.

Naturally, my brain goes to a place of what is the practical application of new information, like this, this information coming in? And how do we tactfully inject this information in so that it doesn’t completely disrupt our coding, which can almost cause a fail safe response in the brain for people? So you go, “Hey, here’s new information,” and information changes situations. So how does this situation change based on the work that you’re currently doing with interweaving this new information into your students? What are some recommendations that you have for the greater community to do that both inside and outside of academia?

Audrey Bennett:

I think that we have to look at the canon, decolonize that canon and rewrite those history books. Absolutely important that that gets done. That’s the only way that future generations will be aware of it. So we need to just throw out the old history books or update them. They really need to be updated.

Justin James Lopez:

From an industry perspective. I know one of the biggest issues, and we’ve been talking around it, but just the lack of representation in the industry and a lot of... I think that this helps, the idea of seeing yourself. And I mean, honestly, that’s one of the big positioning point for this podcast, this series, is you can’t be what you can’t see. But then are we then restructuring what being able to see yourself in these fields means and how that shows up when you think of, “Well, we’ve actually been here the entire time.”

Audrey Bennett:

The entire time, and it’s something that we can embrace and take ownership of. I certainly would like to see us take ownership of this new knowledge and put it in action within design. We have to take ownership of it. So you have the scholars who are decolonizing the cannon of graphic design and writing the correct history, and then you have the practitioners in industry who are embracing it and moving it to the next level aesthetically. I would like to see that. I think that’s what’s really needed.

Justin James Lopez:

Yeah, it creates that flywheel that makes the change. Yeah, I agree with that. You also mentioned that as designers in general, we have a obligation to look at the world’s problems and solve them.

Audrey Bennett:

Yes. Try to solve them.

Justin James Lopez:

Try to solve them.

Audrey Bennett:

I have a new book that’s coming out that talks about the wicked solution, that all wicked problems have an equally complex wicked solution, and that as a graphic designer, we have to take responsibility for the impact that our work is having in the world, the impact. We have to do that. And we also want to bring our voices into the conversations around these wicked problems.

Justin James Lopez:

What’s the name of the book?

Audrey Bennett:

“Food Insecurity.” And I did a comprehensive literature review of existing design outcomes that addressed food insecurity. I’ve been working with Jennifer Vokoun, at Walsh University on this, and we’ve compiled all of them. We’re mapping them. And the next step is to go into communities, and try to either have some of these design outcomes that are working in other environments, have them implemented locally in our own communities that are underserved, or do asset mapping with these communities to find examples of designs that are not peer-reviewed scholarly articles and books. Design outcomes that are designed by community members without formal training in design that are working to alleviate some aspect of the larger wicked problem.

But yes, as designers, we need to take responsibility and inject our voices into larger conversations, interdisciplinary conversations around some of these wicked problems towards alleviating them. The more of us doing that, I think we’ll see some relief from some of these problems that we have in society. But to say that the artist or designer has no voice in these conversations is problematic.

Justin James Lopez:

This actually reminds me of a moment when I was younger. I remember interacting with my mother. I was pretty frustrated about something, and I can’t remember what it was, but I remember this moment very vividly. I was frustrated, which most kids are. But what ended up happening was I went to, my mother, told her about it, and what she said to me, I’ll always remember. She said, “Don’t raise your voice. Improve your argument.” And it wasn’t, yeah, I know for her it wasn’t... It’s not like I yelled a lot, but for her it was like, “Stop allowing everything to bother you. Instead, try to use the skills you have to change the things that are around you.” And that’s what I naturally think about with what you just said, but it also just fits well with what you have done in your career. And I wanted to thank you for that.

Audrey Bennett:

Thank you for saying that.

Justin James Lopez:

Yeah, it’s been amazing to see everything that you’ve done and on the back end, just looking it all up, and then seeing how it all connects, like I said, in this circle as it moves forward. And it’s just amazing to sit here, hear from you, interact with you, and learn from you. So thank you.

Audrey Bennett:

Thank you so much for saying that. It makes me feel really good. I’ve worked really hard and endured so much to arrive at where I am now. And I think I’ve always wanted to design something that does make an impact in a broad kind of way. So I think this is what it is, and I’m very excited about that. So thank you for saying that.

Justin James Lopez:

Thank you. And thank you for joining us on this episode, for sure.

Audrey Bennett:

Absolutely.