Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall on designing for respect

As told to Alice Grandoit-Sutka
Art by Alexis Eke

I’m Elizabeth Tunstall, but everyone calls me by my nickname, Dori. I’m the Dean of the Faculty of Design at Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U) in Toronto, Canada. I’m the first Black (and Black female) dean of a design faculty anywhere in the world.

My design story starts as a kid; I was always interested in art, but I was also interested in context and culture. I had this amazing, multi-volume set of encyclopedias. Volume 11 was called “Make and Do.” Around the age of eight or nine, I went through every exercise in that book. So, before I ever knew the word “design,” I had a very designery mindset. But it wasn’t until after I finished graduate school and started my professional career working with titled designers that I realized, “Oh, this is what I’ve been doing all my life.”

I’ve always had a designerly approach, which is about the harmonious relationship between content and form. Yet I am interested in how that dynamic fits into a wider context. This is where my background in anthropology and the work of Black, Indigenous, and POC anthropologists in decolonizing anthropology comes to the fore. It informs my deep interest in and commitment to decolonizing design. When we first discussed “decolonizing” design at OCAD U, I talked a lot about Europeans, Eurocentrism, and the European bias in design. But in my faculty, I have a lot of staff who are from Europe. They’re German, Dutch, etc. They said,“the things that you’re talking about, we don’t even do that in Europe anymore. We don’t do the Bauhaus anymore. We moved beyond that.” This caused me to pause and think,

“What’s the right terminology to describe this?” We came up with the“modernist project” of design. At OCAD U, we are trying to focus on what it actually means to design. There are design traditions that go back 65,000 years. To me, what makes something design is that it is functional. It is meant to be used. It is meaningful in the sense that it evokes cosmologies. That’s what design is. We’ve been designing as human beings for a really, really long time. You can go to archeological sites and find 20,000 year-old sunglasses created by the Inuit people to block the glare of the sun coming off the ice and snow.

At first, I studied anthropology. My training was all about figuring out how to understand people deeply, how to understand the rules of their engagement with the world, how to understand the way in which they communicate with one another. Once you understand that, you can use design to figure out the points of leverage through which you can bring about change. This could be a change in thinking or a change in doing. I’ve always thought about design and anthropology together, even before I had the language to describe either. And that’s exactly what I do every single day as a dean. I look at the systems that are in place. I look at people’s interests within that system, the politics of that system, the positioning of that system. And then I use design to figure out how I can change someone’s ideas about something, or how I can express something that needs to be communicated, or how I can help create something that didn’t exist before.

I also co-developed a framework for Respectful Design, which came out of work I was doing with my colleagues at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. I was working with Dr. Norm Sheehan (who is an Aboriginal scholar, designer, and really cool human being), Dr. Deirdre Barron (who brought a labor and feminist perspective) and Frank Fisher, RIP (who came from a sustainability-seeking perspective). Through conversation, we determined that what brought all of our perspectives together was respect: respecting women, respecting the environment, respecting Indigenous, racial, and gendered ways of knowing. What does it mean to reorient design away from being an external thing that you do, and towards something that reflects your internal ethos of respect?

We had already thought a lot about that, and I’d written a paper on the topic for the World Design Summit. When I came to OCAD U, I knew I wanted Respectful Design to be the brand that we would carry forward. OCAD U is actually extraordinarily forward thinking; the school had already been promoting an ethos of Design for Humanity for about fifteen years. Bringing in the idea of Respectful Design was a way of saying, “Fifteen years ago you were the leaders of that idea, but now everyone does that.” From a branding perspective, we needed to occupy a unique space. The differentiating term became“respect” because, amid all the different notions of design, no one had claimed that yet. In one of my first staff meetings, we asked members of the faculty to define what Respectful Design meant for them, both in the context of each program and in the context of the whole school. A video iteration of this conversation, overseen by our marketing and communications teams, can be found on our website.

Respectful Design can be parsed in many different ways. In advertising, it’s about encouraging people to buy things they actually need. In graphic design, it’s about recognizing that we can do harm as well as we can do good. In environmental design, it’s about erasing the separation between humans and our environments. There are truly polyvariant meanings and that’s actually part of being respectful, because what you need to understand or share or communicate respect might be different from what I am imagining, based on my position, based on my discipline, based on how I want to enact respect in the world. The thing we can agree about is the need for respect.

Interestingly, all the tools and techniques that I use as a dean, to work with my faculty and students, are exactly the same ones I used when I worked as a high tech consultant. At any one time, I’m overseeing 70 to 80 full-time faculty and 200 to 250 sessional faculty. Physically, it’s very difficult for me to get everyone in one room, and as I’m a very bottom-up person in terms of getting different perspectives, I’ve had to use digital tools to do that. I’ve had to develop design tools to be able to effectively communicate and solicit participation in decisions and processes from my faculty. Again, these were all things I did when I was working in consulting.

“What does it mean to reorient design away from being an external thing that you do‚ towards something that reflects your internal ethos of respect?”

A great example of a digital tool is the use of personas in order to develop ways to better serve underrepresented populations. Recently, I gave a talk at Mozilla. I was explaining OCAD U’s Black cluster hiring initiative, for which I created two additional personas beyond the“traditional” academic that we typically hire for. One was a“praxis star” who, even if they weren’t engaged in the post-secondary sector, was still hitting it out of the park and doing amazing work in the context of their industry. I came to them and said,“You are Mozilla. You know how to use personas!” All I did was create more inclusive personas that took into account that, for many populations, there will be structural barriers that keep them outside of a traditional academic profile. I said to them,“You know how to do this. This is what you do.” They were like,“Oh, yeah!” It’s not an academic thing and it’s not an industry thing—these strategies apply across the board.

The Ontario Human Rights Code allows for what is called“positive discrimination” in scenarios where you can demonstrate underrepresentation. That means you can target a specific group in your hiring process—Black or Indigenous, for example—to the exclusion of other groups, if you can demonstrate that underrepresentation is a problem for the group you are targeting. Addressing underrepresentation requires setting up corrective structures; if you have a qualified racialized candidate and you have a qualified white candidate, the priority goes to the racialized candidate.

“Positive discrimination” also allows for closed searches, where, for example, the only people who can apply are Black or the only people who can apply are Indigenous. I’ve also learned, in all my writing of job descriptions, that the magic words are“lived experience.” That phrase completely changes the pool of people who apply. It changes the criteria of evaluation because if you’ve been doing this work“professionally” for years, but you’re not connected with or serving any real life community, you’re not going to rise to the evaluation. As an employer, you really need to get to know people as people, not just by their skills and accomplishments. In a context in which you cannot legally say,“only Black people can apply,” try tying what you’re looking for to a lived experience of a community. This will create the language by which those who apply will self-select.

The main shift we’re working towards is getting rid of the hierarchy. The problem is that design by European men is still seen as the paragon and the standard by which all other design is judged. Get rid of that hierarchy and guess what? Other people are going to be more confident. That’s decolonization, as well as giving back Indigenous land, because none of this work is a metaphor. What we should be doing in design is creating the conditions by which Indigenous sovereignty happens. The settler’s deepest fear is that Indigenous people are going to do the same terrible things to them that they did—that’s the fear of the Black body, the fear of revenge, the fear of guilt, the root of white fear. But designing decolonization together offers a chance to imagine the role that white people can play in sharing fairly. There’s no hierarchy anymore.