COVID-19: We Can Build New Institutions or Make Structural Inequality Worse Than Ever

MIT associate professor Sasha Costanza-Chock’s new book ‘Design Justice’ explores ways in which design can help marginalised communities and promote equality. AOC believes that many intuitive creatives are sharing brainstorming space with global health gurus like Bill Gates in feeling that the coronavirus crisis is so devastating in scope that offers a “great possibility” for community-led change.

Note that billionaires like Gates and Mike Bloomberg are the source of the problem in Costanza-Chock’s mind. Reality is that they, too, are searching for solutions with full knowledge that the world is suddenly in a very different space. — one in which institutions are crumbling before our very eyes.

Sasha Costanza-Chock Twitter.

The pandemic creates "a moment where there could be great possibility but also the likely outcome that existing structural inequality gets deepened," Costanza-Chock told Dezeen.

“Designers need to think about how to seize the moment.”

Costanza-Chock teaches civic media at MIT, founded its Co-Design Studio and is on the steering committee of the Design Justice Network. The creative speaks with Rima Sabina Aouf about “the matrix of domination” and why designers must be aware of it.

The concept “matrix of domination” comes from black feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins and her now classic book ‘Black Feminist Thought’. Simplified, racism doesn’t operate independently of capitalism, patriarchy and other institutions of western civilization.