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Dr. Audra Buck-Coleman

Designer, Educator, Author & Social Design Researcher

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Projects / Teaching

InDEFYnable

InDEFYnable: Stand Together, Struggle Together was an event to promote APA students’ coexisting cultural and individual identities.

Type of Project
  • Experiential Design
  • Research
  • Teaching
Subject Matter
  • Discrimination
  • Racism
  • Social Justice
  • Structural Violence
Students around the Indefynable exhibit

Summary

7 Research probes
4 Hour pop-up event
530 Visitor interactions

“Asian Pacific American” (APA) is a broad term that minimizes the numerous diverse groups collected under this one designation. “InDEFYnable: Stand Together, Struggle Together” explores the stereotypes of APAs including the “model minority” myth and aims to create awareness about the ways APAs can be considered with coexisting cultural and individual identities. Design students collaborated with APA students to create a campaign responding to these issues.

The main event was a pop-up exhibition on campus. The event, part of UMD APA Heritage Month activities, included information posters, giveaways, and participatory activities aimed at creating well-rounded identities for APA students and all campus members. Collectively these activities and information encouraged the UMD community to view one another as individuals, not just as stereotypical members of a culture or ethnicity.

Collaborators

UMD APA student group members, Jude Paul Dizon, UMD 2014 senior design cohort

Awards & Recognition

The project is a featured case study in Developing Citizen Designers, edited by Elizabeth Resnick.

Details

InDEFYnable: Stand Together, Struggle Together event was created by the 2014 UMD Design cohort in collaboration with Asian Pacific American (APA) student group members and campus leaders. The primary element was a 6-foot by 4-foot rotating pillar featuring the images of 6 UMD APA students. The pillar symbolized the ways the students are collectively part of the APA identity but also distinct from it as well.

The event included posters featuring information about the APA students on the pillar as well as research results.

InDefynable posters hanging between two trees
An Asian Pacific American student standing with the pillar from the exhibit. Her image is on the pillar.

Students could get a free t-shirt for Tweeting images of themselves with the pillar.

Other event activities included filling out coaster that described the author’s salient identity aspects and responding.

Students at a table covered in coasters.

Student-Produced Videos

More about the project is in the following videos, created by design students John Lee, Katherine Pepe and Annie Snedegar.

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Network of Mutality title card on the entry wall. Art can be see in the background.
Experiential Design:
Network of Mutuality
Network of Mutuality: 50 Years Post-Birmingham brought together works that address the injustices of 1963 and contrast today's contentious-yet-critical issues of race, representation, and otherness.
Students looking at blacklight responsive posters.
Teaching:
Nations of Resilience
University of Maryland students collaborated with Native students to create this exhibit, which spotlights the challenges and successes of U.S. Native American populations.
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