Lecture recording is now available for members of the CCA community for education purposes.  

The Design Division at CCA welcomes August de los Reyes as our first speaker in the 2020 Fall Design Lecture Series. These lectures bring leading designers, strategists, curators and educators to speak with our community. The Fall 2020 series speaks to design as a tool for empowerment. 

De los Reyes is currently the President of AIGA San Francisco, holds an MDes from Harvard, and is a Fellow for Royal Society of Arts. He begins by sharing the early years of his career and carries us through the tenets of inclusive design, all the way to his vision for a new American Dream and a proposal for good design in the 21st Century. 

In a life changing moment, de los Reyes flopped down on his bed but missed. He fractured his spine, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down. But this is a talk about vision, not a tale of woe. He returned to work just in time for the release of his Xbox project at Microsoft. Everything looked different and his focus shifted to access in design, and specifically to achieving that through inclusive design. 

In 2011 the World Health Organization defined disability as a mismatch between an individual’s abilities and the environment in which they interact. De los Reyes reckons that this “brings us to the damning conclusion that disability is in fact designed.” Inclusive design, which focuses on an individual’s exclusion as the origin of any solution, offers a compelling lens. De los Reyes cites a series of examples from remote controls to closed captions and audiobooks. These were originally designed to address access for individuals, but grew to serve more broadly; including an anecdote about an Italian aristocrat and his blind mistress and a charming story about a father whose daughter couldn’t reach the top of her milkshake straw. “Whenever I see a bendable straw, I see a love story,” De los Reyes shares. He urges us to seek exclusion and solve for the personal; it just may scale to the universal. 

De los Reyes’ fingerprint is clear on the website of Varo Bank, where he is the Chief Design Officer. Each feature is pitched as an individual’s need, adding up to being “a bank for everyone,” where “net worth does not equal self worth.” Reflecting on this work, de los Reyes muses that the American Dream as we know it is actually a nefarious idea, that the sense of inadequacy that the dream inspires might actually be a mismatch between the players and the environment. Could we design a new, more humane American Dream, focused less on the material what, and more on the immaterial how? With “temerity and tenacity” de los Reyes offers us an update to Dieter Rams’ 10 principles of good design. Good design de los Reyes posits, is inclusive, playful, and enduring; it preserves dignity, and is serene. 

De los Reyes’ principles challenge both what we teach and how we design education, especially during this pioneering time. Through these tenets, and with a focus that centers an individual’s experience but scales to serve many, we can aim for a truly inclusive pedagogy.

Authored by Saraleah Fordyce