Decolonizing Design | Dr. Dori Tunstall in conversation with George McCalman

Join us for a conversation with Dori Tunstall about her groundbreaking book Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook. Tunstall will be in conversation with author and designer George McCalman.

Tunstall's work serves as an inspiration for MoAD's current exhibition, Liberatory Living: Protective Interiors & Radical Black Joy, curated by Key Jo Lee. Decolonizing Design is a guidebook to the institutional transformation of design theory and practice by restoring the long-excluded cultures of Indigenous, Black, and People of Color communities. Tunstall and McCalman will muse on the theories and practices centered in the book, and examine how Tunstall's work inhabits the exhibition at MoAD.

About the Book

From the excesses of world expositions to myths of better living through technology, modernist design, in its European-based guises, has excluded and oppressed the very people whose lands and lives it reshaped. Decolonizing Design first asks how modernist design has encompassed and advanced the harmful project of colonization—then shows how design might address these harms by recentering its theory and practice in global Indigenous cultures and histories.

A leading figure in the movement to decolonize design, Dori Tunstall uses hard-hitting real-life examples and case studies drawn from over fifteen years of working to transform institutions to better reflect the lived experiences of Indigenous, Black, and People of Color communities. Her book is at once enlightening, inspiring, and practical, interweaving her lived experiences with extensive research to show what decolonizing design means, how it heals, and how to practice it in our institutions today.

For leaders and practitioners in design institutions and communities, Tunstall's work demonstrates how we can transform the way we imagine and remake the world, replacing pain and repression with equity, inclusion, and diversity—in short, she shows us how to realize the infinite possibilities that decolonized design represents.

About the Speakers

Dr. Elizabeth "Dori" Tunstall (@dori_tunstall) is a distinguished design anthropologist, celebrated author, visionary organizational leader, consultant, and coach. As the renowned author of Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook, she is a path-breaker of liberatory approaches that challenge conventional design paradigms that exclude and harm Indigenous, Black, and other cultural communities.

With a global career encompassing an Associate Professor of Design Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Swinburne University in Australia, respectively, Dori made history as the first black and black female Dean of a Design Faculty anywhere at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. Her accomplishments have been recognized with numerous prestigious awards, notably the 2022 Sir Misha Black Award for Distinguished Service to Design Education, the inaugural BADG of Honour for Design Education from the Black Artists and Designers Guild, and the 2023 SEGDExcellence in Design Education Award.

Ever expanding the contexts for libratory joy, Dori has established Dori Tunstall, Inc., a firm dedicated to decolonizing and diversifying institutional processes for companies and organizations through strategic consulting, care-shops, corporate education, and leadership coaching.

‍George McCalman is an artist and creative director based in San Francisco and Grenada. His design studio McCalman Co collaborates with a wide range of cultural clients. McCalman’s background in the editorial world has been a foundation of his storytelling, and his decision to cultivate his fine art practice alongside brand work reframed his perspective and synthesized the importance of design. His first book Illustrated Black History: Honoring the Iconic and Unseen was published in Sept 2022 to profound accolades by The New Yorker’s Hilton Als, NPR, The New York Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle. His book won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author in Feb 2023.

This program is presented in conjunction with the current exhibition Liberatory Living: Protective Interiors & Radical Black Joy on view through March 2, 2025.