Bringing It All Back Home

From the start of the Black in Design (BID) 2023 conference, it was clear that Harvard GSD’s African American Student Union had put a great amount of care into the planning of the weekend. The attention to detail extended to the brand-new bottles of Nivea lotion in the bathrooms—a must on these dry and cold New England days.

After a reception on Friday evening, things got going the following morning with a keynote panel moderated by Harvard professor Toni L. Griffin. Architects, designers, and writers unpacked the complexities of the Black home—the theme of this year’s proceedings—furnishing material that would be explored in greater detail throughout the weekend. Black domesticity was re-framed through the lenses of feminism, queerness, care, land use, even sustainability. (There was a workshop for imagining “sustainable soul spaces.”)

Unlike typical academic conferences, BID ’23 aimed to be approachable. In a gesture welcomed by presenters on stage, elderly community members interjected and rebutted from the stands, offering their own accounts of historical events and movements of Black representation and political thought. This dynamic produced rich conversations and helped to bridge some of the more abstract moments in the programming—perhaps best summed up by the title of the Sunday workshop, “Remembering Home_Critical Fabulation and Imaginations of __.” Designer/educator Nekita Thomas asked those in attendance to reconsider Afrofuturism as a more immediate process. She identified ways designers can imagine better futures—inside the domus and beyond—on a much shorter timeline.

In between presentations, attendees engaged in intense talk and excited laughter, reminding many of us of the importance of in-person gathering and, naturally, of home.