Associate Program Director and Associate Professor of Product Design, Drexel University
Raja Schaar, IDSA (she/her) is an Afrofuturist mother, designer, activist, and educator. Since 2016 she has taught at Drexel University’s Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design where she is an Associate Professor and former Director of the Product Design Program. She served as the inaugural chair of IDSA’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council, was the Education Director on IDSA's Board of Directors 2018-2019, and continues to actively serve on the DEIC and as a member of the Disabilities Section. Before joining Drexel, Raja taught at the Georgia Tech School of Industrial Design and the Department of Biomedical Engineering and has spent a long career as a museum exhibition designer.
Raja is passionate about ways Design can be more inclusive, and ethical, and positively impact social inequities at the intersections of health equity, environmental justice, and STEAM education through community-based participatory design and speculative design.
Raja graduated from Georgia Tech with a BSID in 2001 and completed her MAAE at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003.
Raja’s innovative approach to design education empowers students to tackle critical issues like sustainability, ethics, and social impact through design. As the inaugural Chair of IDSA’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council, she has led transformative efforts to reshape how design serves underrepresented communities. Raja’s groundbreaking work, including co-founding Black Girls STEAMing through Dance, connects design with technology and culture in meaningful ways. A student shared, “Raja helped us bring our own cultural diversity to the forefront of design thinking and also ensured that we all felt heard, recognized and propelled towards the parts of design we sought to immerse ourselves in.”
Designing Space for Black Girls: Embodied Learning in a Transdisciplinary Community
Black women make up less than 0.5% of the field of industrial design and 3% of the tech industry. The purpose of Black Girls STEAMing through Dance is to leverage transdisciplinary research collaboration to develop methods and frameworks for Black girls to develop STEAM literacies, STEAM identities, and positive self-concept through their participation in dance, coding, and design-based educational experiences. For 7 years, BGSD is testing the hypothesis that early culturally sustaining interdisciplinary STEAM experiences will improve self-efficacy for Black women around STEM and STEAM and lead to greater diversity in the design, tech, and computing workforces.
BGSD employs Critical Dance Pedagogy, Critically Conscience Computing, and participatory Community Action frameworks to encourage Black Girls to embrace technical and hands-on learning. BGSD participants learn through movement and activities that teach e-textiles, block coding, AR/VR, and augmented reality.
The Audience Will Learn:
In this interactive BGSD workshop, presenters will share the conceptual framework behind BGSD as well as the program’s history and structure and model hands-on lessons that engage creativity, making, block-coding, and movement through the creation and programming of an e-textile cuff.
Cli-fi Futures
Co-presented with Chris Baeza
How might we use apocalyptic science fiction or Climate Fiction (Cli-fi) to forecast the consequences of design decisions and to inspire a futures-focused approach to design? Participants will play a speculative world-building game designed by the author, and based on themes of climate-fiction, Afrofuturism. The authors were inspired by Afro-rithms from the Future to create this Miro-based ideation and analysis exercise. The goal is to use this as a jumping off point inspire designers to consider how speculative environmental end societal tensions can inspire new ideas and bring new implications to life. Since its creation and initial testing in a Drexel university classroom, the authors have played the Cli-Fi Futures game with design groups, conferences, and universities all over the country. They are happy to bring Clifi Futures to the IDSA Education Symposium and IDC attendees to hear from the Industrial Design community how they see the same being up in classroom and studios in the future. Attendee with leave with access to a Miro Template they may adapt for their own use.
Raja Schaar, IDSA is Co-Chair of IDSA’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council (DEIC) and this year also served on the IDSA Awards Committee and as an advisor for the Diversify by Design (DxD) coalition, Where Are the Black Designers? and Black Designers Ignite. This is all in addition to her work as an Assistant Professor at Drexel University’s Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design, where recently she was promoted to Program Director of Product Design.
Raja has held her program together during a pandemic by transitioning to online ID learning, successfully launching the Drexel PROD Senior show, and organizing community events, all while teaching and generating new courses on Design and Sustainability. She has advised student groups committed to social justice and equity, Black Westphal and Drexel IDSA Student Chapter, and continued her work with the interdisciplinary Black Girls STEAMing through Dance team. Throughout 2020, she has spoken and written about Design and Equity, bio-inspired design, and speculative design with local, national, and international communities, including during IDSA’s International Design Conference and Sustainability Deep Dive.
Says Raja: “2020 has shed a light on the persistent inequities and injustices that plague our planet. But it has also revealed a will to dismantle systems of oppression. More than anything, I’m relieved that design has entered this conversation and is willing to reckon with its role in upholding oppressive and outdated systems. I finally feel like my fascination with dystopia, gender, race, the environment, and equity make sense (and also worried we’re in the prologue of a dystopian novel).”
Raja has been motivated by the energy and commitment of her students in dismantling oppressive systems, and inspired by the ongoing successes of her current and former students and mentees, including Krystal Persaud (Grouphug), Christina Harrington, PhD (DePaul University), and Jasmine K Burton (Wish for Wash and Period Futures), as they change the world through their social impact and sustainability work. “I’m always ready to fight for, listen to, and contribute to the voices of womxn and womxn of color, especially black womxn, in pushing us towards a more just and equitable future through design,” Raja says.
In addition to her 2020 writing, speaking, and volunteer experiences, Raja is very proud of her fitness, hiking, and baking accomplishments during quarantine: “While other designers were perfecting their sourdough bread, I was killing the doughnut game with perfected raised yeast, sour cream cake, old fashioned buttermilk, and vanilla cake doughnuts,” she says. “Oh, and I started to dabble in the protest pie biz.”
What’s next for Raja? “More futurism work, examining ethics and equity in the environment, society, health, and education,” she says. “Looking forward, working more with IDSA DEIC, and devising sustainable programs and policies that lead to increased accessibility, empathy, and accountability for the industrial design community and the community at large.” And: “Be on the look-out for apple cider doughnuts and more biscuit variations.”
Using Design Fiction to Teach Ethics in Design
How do we teach Design in the face of an ethical awakening when issues of climate change are complicated by political turmoil, social injustice, and food insecurity; where advances in technology come laden with concerns over surveillance, data privacy, equity, and dependence? What if designers were less concerned with driving the economy, but instead designing a better planet? What if design education pushed students to identify problems that don’t exist yet by connecting their understanding of history, society, technology, and design to provoke, interrogate, and shape the future by grounding themselves in the study of ethics and design futures? How can the context and concepts of design fictions allow students space to conceptualize, explore, and critique design ideas through an ethical lens?
It is an honor to be nominated for Education Director on IDSA’s Board of Directors. I consider myself a life-long educator and life-long learner. I believe my experience and ideas will resonate with educators and students at all stages of their ID careers.
I have taught at the high school level, developed ID summer camps, taught at an elite governor’s school, community workshops and museums. I have had the privilege of teaching ID at the university level since 2004 as a part-time and full-time lecturer, machine shop manager and now tenure-track assistant professor. As a university educator I have taught at all levels—from foundation programs to PhD advising—developing and coordinating undergraduate and graduate curriculum for future industrial designers, architects and biomedical engineers at Georgia Tech and Drexel University. I have a strong commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration and I firmly believe that design is at the center of innovation.
IDSA has a strong reputation as an organization with a tangible commitment to education through student chapters, local chapter outreach, District Design Conferences and Student Merit Awards. I am excited for the opportunity to be a part of that mission at an influential level. While issues related to curriculum development, student/industry engagement, professional preparation and networking must continue to be a part of the larger conversation, we also need to be inclusive of our evolving field and community. As education director, I want to make sure that we have targeted discussions that address the following four areas:
