Interview with Dori Tunstall

Dori Tunstall is dean of design at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD), and was the first black dean of a faculty of design. Earlier this year she was awarded the Sir Misha Black Medal for Distinguished Services to Design Education. Her book Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook is due to be published next year by MIT Press.

Where and when were you born?
Columbia, South Carolina, in 1972, but I was raised in a predominately black community in Indianapolis, in the US Midwest.

How has this shaped you?
I grew up steeped in the ideas that “black is beautiful” and I came from a rich African American cultural heritage. I directly experienced the negative effects of Reaganomics on the working-class communities in which I lived, which left me with a passion for how policy design affects the conditions of possibility for communities. I had access to a great public education system, and to the arts through great museums, with the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis one of my favourite places on earth.

Indiana seems fairly conservative.
It’s a surprising kind of place. Indianapolis is one of the places where the KKK started, and it’s also the place where Madam C. J. Walker, the first black millionaire, established herself. A lot of communities that live under conditions like discrimination and oppression are quite resilient – they work very hard to find community and joy. When I went into the fourth grade, Indianapolis was undergoing school desegregation – I and my friends had to get up very early to get on a bus to be driven from our community to the white suburban community. I think part of the reason I became an anthropologist is that I ended up becoming bicultural – I was in the advanced programme in many of my classes, the only black person in the classroom, so I had to learn about white culture, and then I would go home to a predominately black community and had to culturally adapt to being there.

Why did you move to Canada?
I came because OCAD wanted someone who could help address the racial gap. At Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, I spent almost seven years working closely with aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, bringing them into our design curriculum. When the call came out from OCAD, looking for a dean who could help with the process of decolonisation and Indigenous revitalisation, I knew I could help with that. That allowed us at OCAD to accelerate our processes, because anytime someone said: “We don’t know if that’s possible,” I said: “OK, this is what we did at Swinburne, and this is what the outcomes were, and this is how we do it.” And all of a sudden, things became possible.

What are the key outcomes?
When I started at OCAD in 2016, we had zero full-time black faculty and zero full-time Indigenous faculty. We began with a five-person Indigenous cluster hire, then a five-person black cluster hire. Counting other ethnicities among our 75-member faculty, we are now probably only one or two cycles of hiring to reaching half non-white. And because of the work that we’ve done, we’ve also seen an increase in black and Indigenous students. Right now we look like a United Colors of Benetton advert. Other institutions are asking me about it. When we announced our black cluster hire, people at the Rhode Island School of Design took it, went to their leadership and said: “We should be doing this.” Then they got the money to do so. I’ve sent people all the materials that we’ve developed to support that, including our equivalency chart; if you’re trying to hire people who have been structurally excluded by the post-secondary sector, it’s how to identify that they are excellent, measured in domains of work or community. York University, here in Toronto, took that to their leadership. I was in London recently receiving the Sir Misha Black Medal, and the Royal College of Art said they’ve taken the model to push for a diversity cluster hire.

What keeps you awake at night?
I have a hard time getting to sleep in moments where I am wondering how to best use my experiences, gifts and talents to bring true social, cultural and economic justice in the world. Especially now, when it seems we are in a major tipping point of the last gasp of a white, patriarchal, male, Christian dominancy and thus there is a rise in the push to hold on to those structures by those who have benefitted from them for such a long time.

You’re planning soon to leave OCAD?
Yes, I’m returning to Los Angeles, which is a place where I’ve lived off and on since probably the age of 18. It’s partly for personal reasons – I’m getting to the point of needing to care for elders in my family, and the border closure during the pandemic kept me away for years. But the other reason involves trying to figure out where my experiences and skills can be the most useful. I’m realising there’s a lot of people now who can do the kinds of work that I’ve been doing at OCAD, and there is not as many people who can go into a major company and show them how to decolonise their design process. I think of it as the continuation of my work, where I’ve created with faculty and staff this amazing environment for students who feel they can bring 100 per cent of who they are into the things that they make and the things that they do. Now when they go off to work in industry, I don’t want them to lose that because they haven’t found companies that are aligned with those values. What you learn in design is that it’s the everyday small decisions. If you only get to choose one photograph that a company has on its catalogue, that’s a very powerful decision if you're making it from the perspective of how can this choice fight discrimination, how can this choice bring about more sustainability, how can this choice bring about more social and economic justice.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com

CV

1990-94 BA in anthropology, Bryn Mawr College
1994-99 master’s degree and doctorate in anthropology, Stanford University
1999-2002 senior experience modeller, Sapient Corporation
2003-05 senior experience planner, Arc Worldwide
2005-09 associate professor of design anthropology and associate director of the City Design Center, University of Illinois at Chicago
2005-06 managing director of Design for Democracy, American Institute of Graphic Arts
2009-15 associate professor of design anthropology and associate dean of learning and teaching, Faculty of Design, Swinburne University of Technology
2016-present dean, Faculty of Design, Ontario College of Art and Design University
2022 Sir Misha Black Medal for Distinguished Services to Design Education

Appointments

Jennifer Rexford will be the next provost of Princeton University. Currently the chair of the department of computer science and Gordon Y. S. Wu professor in engineering, she will take up the post in March. She will succeed Deborah Prentice, who has been named vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge. Christopher Eisgruber, Princeton’s president, hailed Professor Rexford as “a proven administrator, a decorated researcher in computer science, an excellent teacher, and a wonderful university citizen”.

Mark Hallett has been appointed director of the Courtauld Institute of Art. Currently director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art at Yale University, he will take on the post next August, succeeding Deborah Swallow, who is stepping down after leading the Courtauld for 19 years. Having completed his own PhD at the Courtauld, Professor Hallett also served as head of the history of art department at the University of York. He said he was committed to “helping to make the Courtauld a uniquely dynamic, inclusive and intellectually stimulating place in which to encounter and study the art and architecture of all periods, from across the globe”.

Donatella Sciuto has been elected rector of the Politecnico di Milano and will take up the post next month, succeeding Ferruccio Resta. A professor of processing systems and currently vice-rector, she will be the institution’s first female leader in its 160-year history.

Davide Ravasi has been confirmed as director of the UCL School of Management. He has held the post on an interim basis since July 2021, when Bert de Reyck departed to lead the Lee Kong Chian School of Business at Singapore Management University.

Joan Rodon will be the next dean of Esade Business School in Barcelona. The associate professor in the department of operations, innovation and data sciences will succeed Josep Franch.