Design is a self-organizing, cultural system mediated by power, involving people with practices situated in places that generate products—tangible and intangible outcomes—that have the potential to fulfill purposes in analog and digital places. People set design in motion through gathering and deploying intellectual, technological, environmental, and financial resources for the overarching purposes of capitalism, socio-ecology, and self- or collective expression. The basic unit of design is a project that, when replicated in self-similar ways at ever increasing scales, can lead to transformational change for the betterment of humanity and our environment.

Audrey G. Bennett is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work centers on design studies for social justice at the intersection of theoretical research and the critical and creative practices of thinking, making, and writing. She is the director of Baohouse, a virtual design studio she founded circa 2005 as an immaterial and motile research space for collaboration between experts from professional and lay communities. She is an inaugural University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor at the University of Michigan (2019), an Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Scholar of the University of Pretoria, South Africa (2015), and a College Art Association Professional Development Fellow (1996). She was awarded the AIGA Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary in 2022, one of the highest honors in the discipline of graphic design. She has an M.F.A. in graphic design from the Yale School of Art.