How Do You Combine Law, Race, and Design?

A conversation with graphic designer Penina Acayo Laker

For those of you who missed my last post, I’ve been away on vacation for the past few weeks. Today, Some Assembly Required returns with an interview with my friend and colleague, Penina Acayo Laker. Penina is an assistant professor of communication design in the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University.

Penina and I co-teach a first-year undergraduate class called Law, Race, and Design: Examining the St. Louis Story. As we note in the course description:

From Dred Scott to Ferguson, St. Louis has served as a focal point for some of the most important issues in our country’s long and still unfinished work toward racial equality. The law has played an important role in these developments—judicial opinions, city ordinances, and commission reports have shaped how we understand questions of race and equality. But the law is not simply the written word—it involves people, practices, and places, and the stories we tell about them. How we communicate our stories ultimately affects how we understand those stories, and how we understand ourselves.

This course situates law within stories and equips students to communicate those stories in ways that draw from a range of methodological tools. Using human-centered design, it challenges students to connect the words of legal documents with the experiences of those whose lives are situated by them.

I recently sat down with Professor Laker to talk about her research and our teaching.

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John Inazu: Tell me a bit about your research and what motivates you as a scholar and teacher.

Penina Laker: I describe myself as a design researcher—a practicing graphic designer and educator. Much of my current research explores how design can facilitate mutually beneficial partnerships—or you could say equitable engagement—between community members and stakeholders. I have found that at least in the design research space, even though there's always been a genuine desire to do good, there have also been so many unintended consequences of doing this work in a way strips levels of dignity from the people that are being served in more vulnerable and underserved communities. As designers, we tend to approach our work from a top-down level, and oftentimes the people being served end up without a very active voice or participation in the solutions that are created for them.

JI: How does mutual participation help? Can you give me an example?

PL: Right now, I’m working on collaborative research project called, Say No to Stigma: Making Mental Health Visible Among School Going Children in Rural Ugandan Primary Schools with a colleague at the Brown School of Social Work. Our goal is to co-design, with students, visuals with messages that promote healthy mental health behavior and reduce stigma among primary school children in Masaka, Uganda.

Our interdisciplinary process involves learning the “baseline level” of the students’ understanding of mental health through traditional social science approaches: focus groups, interviews, open conversations. And then, guided by this knowledge, I apply co-creation methods to involve students in the image-making process. Instead of designing images on my own, I can sit down with the students and work with them to create images on their own. I can ask them, “How would you depict someone with a mental health challenge? What kinds of expressions does this person have? I teach them how to draw and create images, and then my job is to take what they’ve created and make it clearer. And then when we put these images up in their school, they can look at them and say, “Oh, we came up with these ideas together.”

JI: Let’s talk a bit about our class. What did you know about the law before we started working together?

PL: Growing up in Uganda, there are three jobs that your parents want you to have if you are bright: a doctor, an engineer, or a lawyer. But I didn’t really know what lawyers do besides advocate for people in courtrooms. And I’ve never encountered a situation where I had to be close to the law in that way. Which meant I thought of law as mostly lots of paperwork.

JI: Before teaching with you, I had not appreciated the extent to which rules govern art. And I think, conversely, maybe you had not seen the extent to which creative interpretation governs law. And I think we both learned a great deal by watching each other model to students the core of our disciplines. I mean the first time you brought out the magic markers and the butcher paper, I wasn't sure what we were doing. But after that class, I began to see the thinking and the rules that underlie that kind of exercise.

PL: I learned from you that in law, there is a difference between the facts of the case and what the case is about. I think that’s where some of the creative interpretation comes into play, when you’re thinking about the larger narratives and trying to make sense of stories. And in the design field, we think about specific principles that, if followed, can achieve certain outcomes. Principles like contrast, value, and clarity. The ways we think about color and proximity. We always tell our students that in order to break the rules, you first have to understand them.

JI: The law also has a tendency to depersonalize by reducing every recorded interaction to the words of trained professionals. In fact, that’s one reason we have lawyers—to represent clients who might otherwise not be able to contain their emotions. Part of what you bring with the design element is to remind us not to forget the human dimension. For example, we spend time looking at photographs that depict the emotion behind otherwise depersonalized systems we’re describing with text.

PL: Thinking of larger social challenges from a human centered perspective reminds you of the people that are at the core of these issues. It’s extremely hard to empathize with people who are living in a completely different context from you. We can work at this by visiting sites and places, by viewing photographs and videos, through reading first person accounts, and through interacting with the participants in these stories.

JI: You recently reminded me of my own experience navigating a local court after a traffic ticket. None of this was rocket science, but it was just not knowing that made it impenetrable. And lots of people are incentivized not to translate effectively because it keeps them important and relevant. If people didn’t always have to ask you how to make something clearer or more accessible, you might actually be working yourself out of a job.

PL: But that should be the point for all of us, right? Are we willing to relinquish power to help others?

JI: How do you think that our focus on race-based cases complemented or confused our class?

PL: One of the reasons I work in a very interdisciplinary way is knowing that these issues are going to take multiple perspectives and no single discipline or person can solve them. Because at the core of these issues are people and people are complex human beings. That was part of the challenge of our coming together to try and make sense of the St. Louis story through key cases and decisions. What creative problem-solving approaches can we highlight? How can we understand what was really going on? What are some of those other experiences?

JI: How do we think about different systems working together?

PL: It’s sort of like the iceberg model. There are the things that we see above the water which are usually symptoms or signs of underlying issues. For example, if we’re looking at housing inequality, we might just see vacancy issues on the surface. And then there are things we don’t see that are under the water like laws and policies. This class gave me a much better understanding of restrictive covenants, the role of private real estate companies, and the effects of discriminatory banking and lending that hindered the ability to own property. All those things that you don’t see above the surface. From a design perspective, we often find ourselves tackling the symptoms—the things that we see at the surface. We create plans for things like new housing. But the things at the surface are usually not the root causes. To design for root causes, we need to first visualize to understand visualize the structures below the surface and then, create and support the development of the conditions needed to address those issues.

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Penina is a co-editor of the recent volume, “The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression & Reflection.” The anthology seeks to address the exclusion of black designers from traditional design history and educational canons and includes “a range of perspectives, spotlights teaching practices, research, stories, and conversations from a Black/African diasporic lens.”