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is paper draws on a collaborative project called the Africatown Activation to examine the role design practices play in contributing to (or conspiring against) the ourishing of the Black community in Sea le, Washington. Speci cally, we describe the e orts of a community group called Africatown to design and build an installation that counters decades of disinvestment and ongoing displacement in the historically Black Central Area neighborhood. Our analysis suggests that despite e orts to include community, conventional design practices may perpetuate forms of institutional racism: enabling activities of community engagement that may further legitimate racialized forms of displacement. We discuss how focusing on amplifying the legacies of imagination already at work may help us move beyond a simple reading of design as the solution to systemic forms of oppression.

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Figure 1. Sketched digital circuits (top), and fabricated circuits (bottom) created through various craft mediums: a) copper tape painting on paper, b) sewn conductive thread on fabric, c) painted graphite ink as interactive illustration, and d) decorative silver ink to ornament physical objects.

Figure 1: a) LightWire, an illuminated, spinning optic fiber that forms light bodies from social data, b) GorgeBox, an object that inflates based on the accumulation of data, c) LiveFans, two IoT controllable objects that actuate relational data.