Summary
Amahra Spence will speak on the themes of the conference, reflect back key insights that emerged over the course of the three days, and leave us with critical questions we can carry forward as a community, and individuals after the conference is over.
Key Insights
-
•
Liberation surpasses equality and equity by addressing past injustices and enabling future progress simultaneously.
-
•
Amara's work is deeply informed by Black imagination, diaspora experiences, and cultural forms like hip hop and grime music.
-
•
Scientific fiction is a metaphor for organizing: imagining futures that don’t yet exist to practice new realities.
-
•
The concept of 'designing from imagination' challenges us to reject inherited limiting worldviews in civic design.
-
•
'Yard,' a community space inspired by Amara’s grandfather’s Caribbean home, serves as a prototype for radical hospitality and mutual aid.
-
•
Organizational governance benefits from models beyond flat or hierarchical, such as a solar system metaphor centered on mission interdependence.
-
•
Marginalized groups, including youth and elders, hold crucial embodied wisdom that must be recognized and invested in.
-
•
Culture and the arts are critical to liberation work by fostering new narratives and experimenting with systems change.
-
•
Mutual aid should be the default community practice, emphasizing generosity beyond transactional interactions.
-
•
Designing for generative endings is necessary to avoid clinging to outdated power structures and enable regenerative transformation.
Notable Quotes
"Liberation not only repairs past injustice, makes fair in the present, but removes barriers to progress and influences future outcomes."
"All organizing is science fiction; it’s about the imaginations we choose to design from."
"I often feel trapped inside someone else’s imagination and I must engage my own imagination to break free."
"The Caribbean front room of my granddad’s home was both affirming and radicalizing, a site of education and politics."
"Hip hop is a social critique born from necessity, and what if its musicality could inform the built environment’s future?"
"We don’t want a flat or hierarchical organization; we designed a solar system where the mission is the sun."
"We have to design for better endings, the most regenerative possible, instead of hoarding power or clinging to long-term roles."
"The small things are how we do the big things; there’s no shortcut to real change."
"Our future is made up of today’s decisions, relationships, practices, and commitments—what do we need to practice now?"
"To the brave people here: support other organizers, be them if you can’t support, and protect them with everything you can."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"If users have to look things up, they often won’t, so policies must be easy and fast to respond to."
Heidi TrostTo Protect People, You Have to Protect Information: A Human-Centered Design Approach to Cybersecurity
January 23, 2025
"By myopically focusing on a single part, people are unable to see the elephant in the room."
Sheryl CababaExpanding Your Design Lens with Systems Thinking
February 23, 2023
"Interactions are exposed as events on components, so you can define that on clicking a button, a dialog opens."
Jack BeharHow to Build Prototypes that Behave like an End-Product
December 6, 2022
"Sketch made it possible to build a scalable library that millions of customers rely on with just a couple clicks."
Mitchell BernsteinOrganizing Chaos: How IBM is Defining Design Systems with Sketch for an Ever-Changing AI Landscape
September 29, 2021
"Sometimes the internal team looks at us like, oh my God, not again—external agency—it’s this perpetual doom cycle."
Séamus ByrneAligning Teams with Choreography
January 8, 2024
"The introvert’s edge is that they research, plan, and have a strategy for meaningful conversations."
Dave Hoffer Joanne WeaverUX Job Search AMA #2 with Joanne Weaver and Dave Hoffer
May 21, 2025
"Start with the biggest pain points your team is experiencing and find the biggest potential impact."
Gabrielle VerderberDocumentation Your Team Will Actually Use
October 3, 2023
"Testing with people who have low vision shows that even passing contrast ratios can still result in unreadable text if font weights are too thin."
Kate KalcevichIntegrating Accessibility in DesignOps
September 23, 2024
"In the application process for merchant services, underwriting’s risk-first mindset conflicted with customer needs, causing friction."
Robin BeersResearch as a Catalyst for Organizational Transformation
March 12, 2021
