Racial Equity in Design

It’s about time we design an equitable future. The Racial Equity in Design initiative is committed to instilling racial equity at our company and our industry through our interactions, investments, and actions. It was created to spark often uncomfortable but ever-necessary dialog on racial and social inequity and to accelerate change.

Our workstream under the Racial Equity in Design project designed a community-crafted set of action statements. They are the foundation of the work with practical steps towards a culture of equity entitled “Our call to action.” We hope this creates meaningful discussion and catalyzes action and change, now.

User need

This project was born out of racial and social injustices that occurred over centuries, specifically catalyzed by the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, as well as Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Atatiana Jefferson, Philando Castile, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake, Daniel Prude, and the many killed, harassed, victimized that we cannot name because there were no cameras or witnesses. IBM Designers came together to hold a discussion for expressing otherwise muted frustration. From that important and engaging discussion, the Racial Equity in Design initiative came to be.

Systemic racism reaches deep into all aspects of our society, and impacts all of our futures. We recognized that now is the time to come together and effect change, and this is an issue that still needs to be solved. We cannot pretend that within our company and within our industry, diversity is an issue that does not exist. We created this work to confront continued social justice issues and to make space to:

• show up authentically
• express how we feel
• make new connections
• share lived experiences

Our goal

Our goal is to make IBM Design as systemically antiracist as possible.

Beyond that, we intend this work to create conversations and effect real action and change towards antiracist and equitable futures both within IBM and in the design and technology industries. We strive toward creating a design industry where people of all races, ethnicities, gender identities, religions, ages, abilities, orientations, social classes, and cultures are met with equity.

The team

The first release of the project was built over roughly over a 6-month period, lead by a diverse team of business leaders, designers, and colleagues dedicated to making IBM a more equitable place. Several work streams emerged to build the components; Our call to action, Field guide, and the It’s about time podcast.

A full list of our team contributors are listed at the bottom of this page.

Contribution

As a front-end developer, I contributed in building the actual website. I worked with a content designer, visual designer, and other front-end developers to bring all aspects of the site to life.

This site is built using Carbon's Gatsby Theme. A theme built on GatsbyJS with a trove of pre-built, ready to use React components. I used this opportunity to add new features to Carbon's Gatsby Theme by adding dark, gray, and white theming along with some updates to the header-nav navigation style that the Racial Equity in Design site uses. This afforded us the ability to modify a few lines in our gatsby-config file to give us the dark theme along with site navigation that sits in the header as opposed to the defaults inherent in the Gatsby Theme for Carbon. For hosting, I chose to make a script in TravisCI that automatically pushed the app to IBM Cloud when a contributor merged to the main branch, this simplified deploying greatly and made it easier for anyone to make changes to the site.

Impact

This work was released in late January of 2021. The creation of the project already has built momentum in terms of meaningful and empathy-focused conversations. This effort was created so that long-term, real and impactful lasting change to thwart systemic racism will occur.

We would like to showcase top commitment statements for how designers and design leaders will take action towards an equitable future [or already are], and have set up a form to collect them in efforts to inspire others.

If you’re in the design or tech industry, please feel free to submit your commitment statement today: http://ibm.biz/RED-commit-to-action