Interview by Isabel Bo-Linn
Design Educator Profiles
We are excited to share profile interviews highlighting members of the DEC Community, focusing on featuring the many roles we hold as educators in various institutional settings and job titles. In this edition, we share a profile of design educator Shannon Doronio Chavez.
How/why do you see graphic design as a relational act?
I think about the word relational very literally first, by its definition, something connecting or happening between at least two people. Graphic Design is relational, because it concerns a message sender and receiver. I also think about it as relative, design doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from a position, whether it’s content generated by a person or collaborative work between a designer and a message sender. It’s a response to a human experience in a very specific time and a very specific place with very specific perspectives. And so in that way, design is relational relative to the time and place that it comes from and the people that are creating it. I also think about the design practice as a relational act, because none of us are doing this by ourselves, right? Every single opportunity I have gotten to practice design, talk about design, or teach design was a gift or an opportunity extended to me by another person who was willing to not just share an opportunity, but also collaborate, share resources, guidance, and mentorship—in that way it’s also a relational act, a communal act. When thinking of Design as a relational act I consider how we got here, the topics that we’re engaging with, and then where the work goes afterward, it becomes a part of a larger context.
You posted a diagram to Instagram about “the art of culture making”. What is culture making and how does it play a role in your pedagogy?
The diagram is about how we make artifacts of culture, and the cultural conditions we perpetuate. I think the cultural behavior, has a tremendous effect on what gets made (and what doesn’t). Sometimes there’s a toxic recipe that happens in the classroom, where the educator believes their job is to prepare the student for professional practice, but it is often a mindset rooted in scarcity and competition that ends up fostering a toxic classroom environment—which then becomes the toxic workplace as that we are preparing students for. I often find myself asking, why are you doing it this way? The response is always, “I’m getting them ready for the real world.” To which I respond—”How do you think the “real world” is created??
It starts here, in the classroom. Graphic Design culture is seeded in our students, and we are germinating them, we’re tending them in a specific way. When we get into the workplace, we’re confronted with people who are competitive to a point of willing to harm other people, harm projects, we meet people who suffer from so much imposter syndrome that they’re willing to let projects be less of what they could be in order to protect themselves—all of it starts in a classroom—it’s an ecosystem.
A person that enters the ecosystem, when they have a professor that teaches them to behave in a certain way that is toxic, they then take that toxic behavior into the workplace—where it’s normalized. Later, when that person returns to the classroom as an educator, they believe they need to teach students the same toxic lessons. We have an opportunity to break that cycle in the classroom.
I’ve been thinking about culture making very intentionally, because we are living in this AI landscape where the companies selling this tech claim that it is creative, generative. I’m very explicit when describing culture making as a human act, and how the act of culture making is uniquely human. Sometimes I think students mistake AI for a creative tool, I see it more as a regurgitative tool. Humans make the culture, it gets fed into the AI products, and then the AI system reorganizes and regurgitates based on aggregated logic. It’s a reorganization of things that humans have already made. I want my students to really understand—what culture-making is—it is an act that is exclusive to humans.
How does your personal history and identity sit at the core of your practice and pedagogy?
I was a little spoiled as a kid, lots of aunts and uncles, first grand kid. I had a giant box of blonde-haired, blue-eyed Barbie dolls in my closet, but I remember my Nana buying me a Barbie doll with brown hair, brown eyes, tan skin…and it was a revelation. This doll looked like me, like us! This doll went everywhere with me, and I was just really connected to it. Later, as an adult, I learned that when children are given a toy that looks like them, it gives them a sense of agency and cultural belonging. I also learned that when a student has a teacher they can culturally connect with, especially early in their educational journey, it can have a tremendous positive impact. Whether it’s something like a shared interest or a similar cultural background, when there is some version of that child’s future self that they can see in their teacher —their likelihood of graduating from high school, and going to college skyrockets. I started to understand from my own experience, how important this exposure is. In addition to coming up against various systematic barriers, I was also noticing that so much of my own culture was missing or misrepresented in visual culture. All of these experiences combine informed what I chose to do as a designer, things like working with nonprofits predominantly serving Latinx people along with serving various other under-resourced communities. I worked with 826 National and had the privilege of designing publications written by young authors, I was using my skillset to platform these under-celebrated voices and felt like everybody should get access to this, because there’s just so much brilliance out there. In the classroom I foreground my my identities. On the first day of class, I share my positionality statement, I want them to know the places I come from, and how my cultural experiences have shaped me: I’m of mixed-race, a 90s kid who grew up on feminist punk rock and hip hop.
How do you encourage your students to maintain a strong sense of their own identity in their work and practice?
When I moved into design education, I wanted to teach students how to get clients and to get a job, but I also wanted to teach students to identify their own communities sand consider how they can tell their community stories in the ways that only they can. I want students to think—wow, I can even write my own stories! I want them to know they can author their own projects, perform autoethnographic research and make things around that they feel connected to.
When you’re doing this work, I am really careful, and mindful. You have to check in with yourself about who you are as their professor, and acknowledge the pressure they may feel to overshare things they aren’t ready to get into yet. This work has to be presented as an invitation to students, and from there they get to respond to that invite with their level of comfort, interest, and excitement.
As an advocate for equitable pathways, what are the biggest ‘invisible barriers’ you see preventing talented students from entering the design profession, and how are you working to dismantle them?
Wow, there’s so many. In my specific case, one hurdle was this huge generational and cultural gap between me and my immigrant parent. There was a lot of fear that choosing the arts was a terrible financial decision and I would be “poor.” Sometimes the biggest invisible barrier is a narrative specifically coming from a parent that just stops the student from even looking at design as a major. This narrative is complicated by the pressure to be the model minority, to choose medicine, business, or sciences over the arts, it’s typically summed up in the statement “We didn’t come here and do all of this just so that you could choose to be an artist and end up starving.”
I also think certain application processes are an unnecessary barrier—especially the programs that require a portfolio. So many students have limited access to computers on their high school campus or live in areas where even the community college doesn’t give them access to the tools that they would need to build a portfolio. Another is the exorbitant cost of going to a school, sometimes it’s so high that students don’t even apply because they don’t know how to work the financial aid system to reduce the cost. Personally I try to remove or lower these barriers for my students, I use my funds of knowledge to mentor them through that process as a fellow first-generation student. I’ve also participated in a series of workshops reimagining pedagogy like those hosted by Yasmin Khan and Jessica Wexler. They’ve created a space for educators to engage with the speculative future of design pedagogy specifically ones that are liberatory.
What is one skill you are teaching your students today that wasn’t on your radar five years ago?
OMG. How to be a human. Many of them are so terrified of being a real human in real time, they’re so afraid of making a mistake. Tyler the Creator’s last record, Don’t Tap the Glass, was a response to the same thing that I’m seeing in the classroom. He noticed how nobody’s dancing at shows anymore and after interviewing people, he realized it’s because people were afraid of going viral. In the classroom, I’ve discovered students are more willing to be beautiful weirdos when they’re not on Zoom, in front of a camera, when they know that nobody’s recording them everybody’s phones are in their bags. They’re free. I’ve been trying to get them comfortable with the thought of, ”so what if I dance weird and somebody puts it on the internet?” Own it!
In what ways does design education need to change or shift focus in order to prepare practitioners for the future?
I love futuring practices and I love sci-fi. One of my favorite books as a teen was Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End—when I think about the future, I can get very, very dystopic. I think what we are most at risk for right now is being so scared of being human that we lose our humanity—the one thing that makes us a real competitor against AI and big tech. I fear we’re going to become so dependent on AI as the source of everything—of knowledge, the keeping of history, of knowledge gathering, of research—that we’re just going to get caught in an endless loop of really bad iterations, like a xerox of a xerox of a xerox of a xerox of humanity. I push my students to back away from the internet of things when we are in research mode. Everything they’re referring to is something they found on the internet with little context,or critique. Whatever Google says is enough.
Design education should emphasize archiving, visiting physical archives, and getting off the internet. A few years ago, I diverted some of our supply funding to build a physical library of design books. I wanted to put analog media in front of the students, give them unprecedented access to these materials. That’s been a game changer for enhancing their work.
Shannon Doronio Chavez is a graphic designer, educator, artist, and storyteller based in the San Fernando Valley, California. She holds a BFA from Otis College of Art & Design and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is a tenured Professor and Co-Chair of the Graphic & Multimedia Design program at College of the Canyons in Valencia, CA.
In her teaching, she develops curriculum grounded in access, equity, and culturally responsive design pedagogy. A mixed-race Chicana feminist and first-generation college graduate, she is driven by a commitment to diversify the canon of visual communication and to create equitable pathways into the field for historically underrepresented students. Her classroom centers storytelling, lived experience, and collective imagination as essential tools for learning, authorship, and cultural participation. Her creative practice explores storytelling and sites of culture and positionality as places of research, working across writing, collage, typography, publication, cultural ritual, and visual narrative. Guided by the belief that graphic design can affirm life—not just sell things—she seeks to disentangle the discipline from purely capitalist definitions and reconnect it to its role as a relational act: a gesture of connection, memory-keeping, and truth-telling.
This interview was led by AIGA DEC Steering Committee member Isabel Bo-Linn, Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Portland State University.