In April, Jacinda Walker stood in front of a group of 28 fifth-grade students in Columbus, Ohio. Walker, who founded the education and advocacy program DesignExplorr, was there to lead a two-day workshop to introduce the students to the design profession. On the first day, she set up demo Adobe Express accounts so the kids would have access and exposure to professional design software. She then asked the students to turn a blueberry cheesecake graphic into a strawberry cheesecake—a task that helps them practice their technical skills with the tool and explore design principles.

Organizations are working to ensure the next generation of designers is more diverse than the last.

On the second day, Walker shifted focus to introduce students to what she believes is the most important skill for diverse youth to master: “T-shape” person skills. Coined in the 2000s by former Ideo CEO Tim Brown, T-shape skills describe a person’s ability to have depth in a vertical expertise and breadth across disciplinary boundaries. To Walker, T-shape skills are imperative to navigating the increasingly complex world of design. Her poster design activity required the youth to practice their writing, design, and critical thinking skills all at once.

She instructed the students to tell her something meaningful. “When you pick your three things that are meaningful, I want you to write a sentence about one of them, and that’s going to be our headline,” she explained. “And then, you’re going to tell me what kind of visuals and colors and things you need to support this in your poster.’ I have a pile of PDFs of project ideas that they wrote and they began to design themselves.”

Walker founded DesignExplorr in 2017 to teach these skills and directly address the “pipeline problem” that design and technology companies have created through their decades of neglect of diverse communities. It’s one of a handful of organizations that have developed programs to help the design field better reflect the demographics of the eligible United States workforce in the past two decades.

SLOW PROGRESS

The efforts to diversify design have had varying impacts on design’s different fields. Certification requirements in architecture or access to specialized equipment in industrial design, for example, have kept diversity numbers consistently low in those professions. Meanwhile, graphic design, which has one of the lowest barriers of entry into design, has shown progress in its diversification over the last 30 years.

In 1991, American Institute of Graphic Arts conducted a survey that found that the graphic design field was 93% white. As of 2021, the graphic design field was by race 77.3% white (out of 77% of the general labor force), 4.9% Black (out of 13%), 9% Asian (out of 7%), 5.3% two or more races (out of 2%), 0.3% American Indian or Alaska Native (out of 1%), 0.06% Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander (out of 0.5%), and 11% Hispanic/Latinx (out of 18%), according to the 2021 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics collated by Datausa.io.

For nearly 25 years, several organizations have been developing programs to build a diverse youth pipeline in design, with youth defined by the United Nations as being between the ages of 15 and 24. Chicago-based Project Osmosis, led by Vernon Lockhart, is the oldest at 24 years. Its impact on more than 200 youth participating in its Design Youth Forum was palpable to me when I volunteered as one of two Black design faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2006 to 2009.

Based in the Bay Area, the Inneract Project, founded and led by Maurice Wood, has been operating for 20 years. E4 Youth in Austin has been active for 15 years. DesignExplorr; Innovators for Purpose, which is closely aligned with MIT; Creative Reaction Lab by Antoinette Carroll, originating from the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri; Indigenous STEAM by Megan Bang (Ojibwe/Italian) now based in Chicago; and Michael Ford’s Hip Hop Architecture Camp are all reaching their 8- to 10-year mark. One of the newest organizations, Diversity in Design Collaborative, formed in 2021 as part of the industry response to the murder of George Floyd.

SUCCESS IN ACCESS AND EXPOSURE

These organizations tackle what Walker described in her 2016 MFA thesis as the barriers to “access, exposure, opportunity, and value” in design for diverse youth. Their goal is to increase access and exposure, though they face limitations in expanding opportunity and value because it requires their interface with the wider design industry. To flourish in opportunity and value, design companies need to invest in these programs as a key part of their pipeline outreach, and then hire more of the youth who graduate from these pipeline diversity programs.

Collectively, across several of these organizations who keep metrics, more than 32,000 diverse youth have gained access and exposure to design in the past 24 years. Project Osmosis and Inneract Project are responsible for more than 20,000 youths’ access to design through their workshops and design contests. Nearly 8,000 participants have attended DesignExplorr’s workshops over the past seven years. The racial demographics of the 835 youth who participated in DesignExplorr’s 61 workshops in 2023 reflect these organizations’ effectiveness in providing diverse access to design: 61% Black/African American, 16% white/Caucasian, 10% Biracial/Multiracial, 6% Hispanic/Latinx, 3% Asian, and 0.4% Native/Indigenous.

Early access to design has direct career-enhancing outcomes. William Davis III, a Black front-end developer from Cleveland who has mentored youth on behalf DesignExplorr, describes the differences he observed between his own career start in the 2010s and that of his peers.

“Upon mingling at conferences, one of the things that I’ve noticed is a lot of designers of other ethnicities and genders had access to design a lot earlier than I did,” he says. “They were working in design in middle school. I would always wonder to myself, Where was I in middle school? I don’t remember seeing any classes. The pathway that they took tends to be a lot smoother.”

Davis recalls the moment he met Walker. “I literally brought the full pieces of my portfolio in a garbage type of bag. Later, I learned that that’s not how you do it at all,” he says. “She [Walker] looked at everything and said: ‘I can see that you’re talented.’ She asked about how much experience I had with layout. I really hadn’t had any, because my design experience came from doing flyers and things of that nature. That’s when I started using Photoshop.”

Exposure to design through these pipeline programs has led to greater interest in design by diverse youth. DesignExplorr’s 2023 impact survey data shows that “84% of participants were more interested in design after their workshop” and that “49% of participants were interested in learning more about design after [high school].” E4 Youth’s 2017 impact data showed that “90% of students who completed the summer shadowing program enrolled in college and 50% went into a tech or creative field.”

MISSION AND VISION

The seeds for DesignExplorr were planted in 2011 when Walker’s niece announced that she wanted to become a designer. Walker had experienced the microaggressions and challenges of being a Black woman designer firsthand during her 13 years as a graphic designer at the Cleveland Municipal School District and later at the City of Cleveland’s Division of Water. She worried about her niece entering a hostile environment—one that ultimately drove many designers of color out of the field. She had mentored youth throughout those 13 years, and saw the barriers they faced in breaking into the design world. But she also knew that to truly convince the field to change, she would need data.

Walker undertook a master’s thesis, “Design Journeys: Strategies for Increasing Diversity in Design Disciplines,” which she finished in 2016. Shortly after that, she started DesignExplorr.

Walker’s research showed that there were four passages in a designer’s journey: foundations, proficiency, workforce, and influence. And that African American and Latinx youth experienced specific “leaks” out of the design journey at each stage of those passages. In the foundations stage, diverse youth in K through 12 who lack early career exposure in design might never cultivate the interest. In the proficiency stage, diverse youth from ages 18 to 24 who lack mentorship miss out on career advancing opportunities. In the workforce phase, young designers who lack the knowledge on how to navigate the workforce might leave the field. And in the influence stage, designers who lack support or have difficulty adjusting to their responsibilities risk leaving the field. Walker offered 15 strategic ideas on how to keep diverse youth on their design career journey through each phase.

Walker uses DesignExplorr as a vehicle to implement these 15 strategies. To support access at the foundations stage, DesignExplorr offers a range of workshops for youths in grades 2 through 12 to establish the early design foundations and build interest in design. DesignExplorr and other organizational programs have had success in providing access and exposure because their founders have full control over their set-up. They decide how long a workshop should be, which influences the labor and community resources required (everything from donating the space like a school gym to supplies or a carload of snacks).

Increasing access and exposure means introducing youth to the wide range of diverse practitioners and histories of design, professionalism in portfolio and interviewing, and even technologies that youth may not have encountered. At the foundation stage, this is done through workshops. At the proficiency stage, DesignExplorr offers portfolio reviews and career counseling to young design professionals.

“It was a whole world of Black and brown designers,” Kimberly Thomas, a Black VP of brand and design strategy at a startup called Link, says of her mentorship experience with DesignExplorr. “It just exposed me to a whole segment that I’d been missing. I’d been looking at what the industry has told me to look at, and if I step back, what I was looking at was an overwhelmingly white field.”

BUILDING A BIGGER BRIDGE

Programs like DesignExplorr often extend beyond the participants, and for good reason. Parents and educators also require access and exposure to design. Parents of diverse youth or educators, for example, may discourage their youth’s love of drawing in fear that it leads to them becoming a starving artist in the future. “One of the things that we have on our DesignExplorr blog is offering parents some ideas on how to identify and nurture that they have a creative child” Walker says. Parents and educators can purchase Think Like a Designer and other kits with information and materials to support youth’s creativity on the DesignExplorr website. DesignExplorr also offers training workshops to educators and businesses to help them prepare for a more diverse pipeline of designers.

Francisco De Jesús, who has been part of DesignExlporr’s mentoring and internship program since 2021, says exposure to design has changed the way he thinks about his career opportunities. “It is just as easy as getting a blue-collar job as it is to get design jobs,” he says. “DesignExplorr helped me personally to think if I take this small amount of time out of my day, I can become a designer, rather than a construction worker.”

De Jesús received a 2023 summer internship at the Black Professional Association Charitable Foundation, and credits DesignExplorr and Walker with helping him get headshots for his LinkedIn profile, write and receive diverse professional feedback on his résumé, develop confidence in speaking at networking events, and “breaking me out of my bubble to really show my face.”

His mother, Elaine De Jesús, a professional graphic designer and parent volunteer at DesignExplorr, praises Walker for what she has done for her son. “She’s opened doors that I don’t know he would’ve gotten somewhere else. It was all her and I’m truly grateful to her,” she says.

GOING BEYOND A WORKSHOP

Several design pipeline organizations have developed career counseling, mentorship, and professionalization programs to move diverse creatives into professional job opportunities. With annual cohorts of 6 to 20 participants, these high-touch career advancement programs such as DesignExplorr’s mentoring, Inneract Project’s Uplift Program, and E4’s Creative Leadership Academy recruit fewer participants in order to maintain their effectiveness. For example, 85% of participants in Inneract Project’s Uplift Program reported “feeling better prepared” for design and tech jobs. And 80% of its participants got to the final interview stage for positions.

Yet looking at the lowest-barrier field, graphic design, the needle has not moved for nearly all categories of racial diversity from 2018 to 2021, which is the latest year for which U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers are available. There was a 3% increase among individuals selecting two or more races as their ethnicity, which balanced the 3% decrease in percentage of individuals selecting white. One might point to COVID-19 as the cause of this stagnation, but rates of hiring in digital design were high during the pandemic (which is being corrected in the last two years of layoffs). Notably, many companies made commitments to diverse hiring during the “Racial Reckoning” of 2020.

This lack of movement has a lesser impact on the Asian and two or more races communities, who are overrepresented in graphic design when compared to their percentage of the general labor force. But zero progress for Black, brown, and Indigenous communities pushes them even further away from reaching labor force parity. When opportunities do appear, these communities have to put greater pressure on the few individuals and organizations who have the industry experience and knowledge.

“As Black and brown cultures, we don’t talk about design in general or how to navigate a corporate world, how to get ahead, how to have money conversations that aren’t just simple budgeting, how to navigate a space where you might be the only one with confidence,” Thomas says. “My goal as a mentor is to shape a very powerful group of young brown and Black designers who are just as informed, and even more informed, than their counterparts.”

Both the design industry and wider society can do more to expand opportunity and value for diverse youth in design. The organizations doing the work of building the diverse youth pipeline for the design industry believe that the industry ought to be sponsoring their expansion of design camps and programs for diverse youth and amplifying the presence of diverse designers. “Design can take cues for success from sports and music, where early, accessible training and visible role models inspire youth,” says Maurice Woods of Project Inneract.

Walker blames the socioeconomic disparities in the education system due to racism, which lead Black, brown, and Indigenous communities to rely on programs like DesignExplorr to make up for the absence of guidance counselors, career counselors, and other career services catering to diverse youth. She notes the recent rise of discriminatory practices and predatory job preparation agencies, from which she has to protect diverse youth. But she is only one person and vulnerable to burnout.

To stabilize her impact, Walker opened an 1,800-square-foot Experiential Learning Center, which has been the catalyst for her to develop the systems needed to expand the number of staff contributing to DesignExplorr besides herself.

While the organizations building the diverse pipeline in design have to rely on the design industry to provide more job opportunities to scale their impact, they are confident in their own capacities to culturally empower diverse youth to value themselves in design.

In response to the pushback on DEI and its potential effect on the design industry, Thomas comes full circle to tell the DesignExplorr youth who she mentors what Walker has shown her: “Don’t let yourself be silenced. Stay informed as well on what’s happening, and think about how you can be creative. I feel like, as a people, we’ve always had to find ways to be creative around the issues, around the red tape, around the fences, and around the walls.”