Like so many of you, we’ve spent the past few weeks listening, reading, reflecting, and comprehending the systemic racism and discrimination against the Black community. As Design+Business thought about how best to support and drive change, we wanted to be intentional, action-focused, but most importantly, empathetic. As designers, our desire is to create a human-centric world and we hope to achieve that with our student body. We are heartbroken over the latest acts of violent police brutality against George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Rayshard Brooks, along with many others. D+B club stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and BBSA.

As student leaders of innovation, it is critical that we re-examine and re-design the world around us with a human-centric and equitable lens. It is also important to understand why we are in this place of reckoning - what policies, laws, business practices, and intentional acts that have led us here. As demonstrated in this powerful report by the Sentencing Project - the system isn’t broken, it's built to work this way. D+B believes we must be part of designing and implementing systems that are just.

here are our immediate action items:

1. Contribute a donation of $400 to Code Fever, an organization that brings resources, training, networks, funding, and inclusive policies to the Black community for innovation.

2. Host a series of facilitated design thinking sessions centered around diversity and inclusion during the summer and upcoming academic year with topics like:

• How might we redesign the MBA core curriculum to include a racial justice lens and promote Black business leaders and success stories?
• How might we design section and class-wide programming to further anti-racism amongst the Ross community?
• How might we empower employees to speak up about race and continue the conversation on a regular basis at the workplace?
• How might we design products more intentionally for a diverse world?

We, at D+B, are committed to taking the next steps in bridging design and ideation with business practices while also fostering efforts to host DEI workshops and promote Black individuals in tech, design, and entrepreneurship. We invite any suggestions to help us achieve this commitment.

Always Innovating,

Your 2020-2021 D+B Board

resources to learn more

• Training deck from our session on “Why anti-bias training does not work?”
• What Not To Say To Your Black Colleagues Right Now - Monica Torres, Huff Post
• Design Thinking Is Fundamentally Conservative and Preserves the Status Quo - Natasha Iskander, Harvard Business Review
• Of course technology perpetuates racism. It was designed that way. - Charlton McIlwain, MIT Technology Review
• What Does It Mean to Decolonize Design? - Anoushka Khandwala, AIGA’s Eye on Design
• Black Designers: Missing in Action - Cheryl D. Holmes-Miller, Print Mag