The Design for Inclusivity Industry Summit convened key industry leaders, equity advocates, activists and AIGA’s Diversity & Inclusion task force for a working session to share what’s working and address what’s missing to develop a roadmap for diversity, inclusion and equity in the design industry. This Summit was developed by AIGA in partnership with Microsoft and Creative Reaction Lab.

Role:  Taking the lead in the AIGA National team, responsibilities included project management, event planning and logistics, communications and outreach, designing and developing program and workshop materials on-site facilitation and creating branded documents/tools for participants. This also meant serving as a liaison for keynote speakers and facilitators and working with them to create supplemental materials for the sessions they led.

Fun Fact! This summit was very anticipated! It was initially planned to happen along the 2017 AIGA Design Conference, but was then shifted to open for the 2018 Design + Diversity Conference.

Project executed as Strategic initiatives program assistant at AIGA the professional association for design.

A ROADMAP To INCLUSION

This Summit developed in partnership with Microsoft and Creative Reaction Lab was an invitation-only working session to explore the future of diversity, inclusion and equity in the design industry. It was hosted in conjunction with the Design + Diversity Conference to spark critical discussions and ignite a long-term movement to support the collective mission.

The program was developed as an opportunity for key industry leaders to share the lessons they’ve learned and reveal the strengths in the programs, models and initiatives that have been implemented successfully. These keynote presentations followed by workshops were divided into three tracks: gender, ability and race. Industry leaders presenting included IBM, HP, Microsoft, Creative Reaction Lab, and University scholars. These workshops were designed in collaboration with the AIGA national leadership team.

The afternoon was set aside for a hands on working session in which participants were asked to synthesize the information they had been exposed, provide feasible micro and macro long-term action steps to and map their proposed ideas according to timeframe and scale. In this section of the day, participants were asked to break into groups according to their expertise. These groups were education, career pathways, leadership and community. Groups were asked to share among each other and then to the whole group, revealing a lot of overarching themes and common goals.

The contact information of the 60 attendees was shared among participants and a slack channel was created to keep the conversation moving and encourage participants to continue collaborating and looking to each other to gain insights.

You can view the program for the event here.