Design has a diversity problem

And ethnically diverse designers hold the key to fixing it

Courtney McLean

Lately, I’ve found myself reflecting on what it really means to be a Black designer. Not just in the portfolio sense, but as a lived identity that colours how you notice things, question things, and design things that others might overlook entirely. Being Black in this industry often feels like being bilingual: fluent in the official design language… while also holding a second, deeper language shaped by lived experience, cultural memory, and the subtle codes you inherit from your community.

This hit me sharply after reading the Anthropology of the Black Experience in Design. It’s one of those texts that doesn’t just inform you; it lingers. It asks you to sit with the uncomfortable truth that design—at least the version that dominates the “canon”—has been shaped disproportionately by a narrow slice of the world. European. White. Male. A greatest-hits playlist on repeat.

When that’s the default standard of “good design,” everything else gets measured against it. Including us. Including our communities. Including people whose lives and realities sit entirely outside those inherited assumptions.

And this is exactly why so many mainstream services fail—sometimes quietly, sometimes catastrophically—for users who don’t fit the mould they were designed around. These services weren’t created with us, or anywhere near us. You can tell. You can feel it. They’re efficient on paper and alienating in practice.

But here’s what the dominant canon never accounted for: the depth, richness, ingenuity, humour, cultural intelligence, and resilience that Black designers bring to this work. We aren’t simply “diversifying the field.” We are expanding its imagination.

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The SDinGov conference wake-up call

A recent moment really crystallised this for me.

I attended the SDinGov conference—a gathering of around 400 designers shaping public services across the country. These are the people designing tools, systems, and infrastructures that directly impact how people live, learn, heal, access support, and navigate government.

Out of roughly 400 people, only a small, countable handful were Black—including me and my team.

Four hundred designers building services for a nation that is deeply, visibly multicultural… and the room looked nothing like the people it was designing for.

It wasn’t simply a “diversity issue.” It was a design-quality issue. An equity issue. A systems-integrity issue. Because when the people shaping public systems lack the lived insight to understand the full spectrum of human experience, their work inevitably reflects those blind spots.

It’s not that these designers are incapable or ill-intentioned. It’s that no amount of desktop research can replace the cultural intelligence that comes from lived experience.

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Why black designers change the work itself

This is where the Black design lens becomes priceless.

Black designers, creators, system thinkers, problem solvers and cultural interpreters bring a way of seeing that can’t be learned solely through toolkits or training courses. We notice patterns others can’t. We understand gaps others skim over. We read the subtext of systems—because we have lived inside their impact.

In my work at Rooted, where equity-centred design is embedded into the foundation of every project, I’ve witnessed this in action. Rooted taught me that equity-centred practice isn’t a cute add-on. It’s a discipline of humility, healing, historical truth-telling, and community accountability. It requires sitting with uncomfortable realities and creating space for new ones.

It taught me that design done with communities—rather than for or about them—produces outcomes that are not only more effective, but more just, more humane, and more likely to endure.

Black designers don’t simply bring representation.
We bring reorientation.

A reframing of the work itself
A shift away from extraction and toward relationship
A lens rooted in cultural intelligence, community knowledge, and lived resilience

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We are not waiting to be included

The beauty is that more Black designers are stepping into this space with intention. The Black Designers Guild stands as one of the brightest examples of what happens when we stop waiting to be invited and instead create our own communities of practice, knowledge, and care.

We are no longer satisfied with being “the only ones in the room.”
We’re building new rooms.
New methods.
New discourses.
New design futures.

And this is where the industry must catch up.

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Some provocations to ponder...

What might our public services look like if Black designers were not merely present, but central in shaping them?
What new systems might emerge if we valued lived experience as much as we value academic expertise?
What becomes possible when we stop designing around Black communities and start designing with and through them?
How would our understanding of “good design” shift if the canon finally expanded beyond the usual suspects?

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Because here’s the truth:
The design world does not just benefit from Black designers—It needs us.

For relevance.
For integrity.
For equity.
For systemic imagination.

And most importantly, for futures that actually serve everyone.

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