Andrea Ngan

About

Welcome! I’m grateful you’re here. My name is Andrea Ngan. I care deeply about building and nurturing collective power and collaborative processes, particularly for young people.

As a lifelong student of liberation, I study and research ways to imagine, build, and embody worlds where all living beings are free from cultures of domination.

My practices take many forms, but I frequently return to design, strategy, education, collective organizing, and media art as my primary outlets for experimentation and meaning-making. These practices represent my commitment to building imaginative and pluriversal worlds of possibility. Possibilities that continually challenge the oppressive and inequitable defaults that I and so many of us have inherited in this world.

Like me, this website is in perpetual progress.

Selected work

At the heart of my work is a sincere hope that a soft, devoted, and disciplined love for all living beings might prevail against the very certain uncertainties we face on this ever-warming planet. Because the future is scary in its unknowability, my practices are an embodiment of my hope and love for a life worth living.

Education
I’ve channeled much hope and love into youth futures. For over 14 years, I’ve collaborated with brilliant young people who have taught me great lessons about the joys of living an unapologetic life. More importantly, they’ve shown me when to take a leap of faith, how to guide, and when to get out of the way. Learn more ⬇️






Facilitation
Few experiences have humbled and grown me more than initiating a health justice collective. To know me is to know that I remain indebted to my Creative Resilience Collective co-organizers and collaborators. A debt of gratitude for embarking on a seven-year journey of continual personal and collective death and rebirth. We stumbled through the dark more times than I can count. I wish I’d known what I know now, but our work together grew me and I am wiser for it. Wise enough to know when I don’t know. Wise enough not to bite off more than I can chew. Wise enough to accept a helping hand. Wise enough to move away from traditional forms of leadership that reproduce leaders and followers. I am forever changed by our youthful ambitions to “shape the evolution of care towards liberation and joy.” A forthcoming digital archive will be available in 2025. To learn more about our past efforts see our Instagram page linked below ⬇️.




Designer
Currently, I find myself in the company of brilliant colleagues at the PHL Service Design Studio. Since February 2020, our small corner of the world has remained steadfast in our practice to center trauma-responsive, accessible, decolonial, and queer design methods to ensure that the people impacted by government decisions are involved in matters that impact their lives and well-being. Since 2020 I’ve co-led efforts to create standards of practice that push the City of Philadelphia to collaboratively design services, programs, and policies with excluded and systemically oppressed residents. Prior to my work in service design, I designed interactive exhibits for museums and public spaces at Local Projects. Learn more ⬇️









Affiliations




Speaking
Andrea regularly facilitates workshops about design justice, co-design, youth leadership, collectivism, community engagement, mental health, health justice, public art, and ways to build and share power. 

For Fall & Winter 2024 speaking and workshop inquiries, please send an email with your request. 


🗓️

November 16, 2023


Georgetown University Beeck Center Social Impact + Innovation Digital Service Network

Location:
Virtual event
Link to recording The City of Philadelphia recently launched the Equitable Community Engagement Toolkit. Led by the PHL Service Design Studio, the toolkit was created by City of Philadelphia engagement practitioners and community members and serves as a compass for equitable community engagement within City government.Danita Reese, Deputy Director of Strategic Design, and Andrea Ngan, Community Co-Design Practice Lead, joined the Digital Service Network's (DSN) UX Subnetwork to share more about their experiences in developing the toolkit. You'll learn more about the journey to create the toolkit and lessons they learned along the way. 




🗓️

June 9, 2023


HASTAC Critical Making & Social Justice

Venue:
Pratt Insitute School of Design
212 Steuben St
Brooklyn, NY 11205
Steuben 408 (Design Center)


Sign up 
 Making contact with personal and collective intergenerational trauma is inevitable for students and facilitators of social change. Trauma, as Prentis Hemphill writes, is a “relational injury. Which explains why, after, we might try to make home in isolation… [and] protect ourselves from knowing each other and being known. Intimacy is connection at the point of vulnerability.”

What opportunities for intimacy with oneself and others does collective art and design initiatives centering healing offer? Can connection at the point of vulnerability be the antidote to the loneliness of trauma? This presentation seeks to reflect on these very questions through the founding of a mental health and healing justice organization I initiated in 2017.

Drawing inspiration from Shawn Ginwright, this presentation embraces a healing-centered over a trauma-informed approach. Through this lens, trauma is seen as a collective experience that requires holistic methods involving culture, spirituality, civic action, and healing for oneself and others. This distinction aims to acknowledge that trauma-informed approaches often focus more on one’s injury, leading to clinical and individualized forms of symptom management. By embracing a healing-centered approach to collective art and design, this presentation calls for strength-based methods that foster:

  • Connection: A practice of creating spaces for interdependent ways of making and being vulnerable with oneself and others. Through connection, we enact mutual forms of witnessing, listening, and affirming each other's growth as we learn and unlearn together.
  • Care: A practice of providing political, social, material, and/or emotional support in service of ensuring another living being can thrive and be well. Through care, we better understand how to show up for our needs and others.
  • Courage: A practice of challenging norms, sharing personal truths, and manifesting audacious acts of liberation despite doubt and fear. Through courage, we can better work with uncertainty over comfort and the status quo.
  • Collaboration: A practice of uplifting the unique wisdom and gifts inherent in every living being by sharing decision-making power. Through collaboration, we make space for multiple perspectives, experiences, and truths to better be in relationships with ourselves and others.





🗓️

March 3, 2023


Hmnty Cntrd
Critical UX: Challenging the Dogma of UX

Venue:
Virtual panel 
Whether it’s designing for delight or usability, designers are primed to address the pain points of their users. But when we only focus on individual-level problems, we can fail to account for the complex and even contradictory needs of the communities, governments, and ecosystems we’re embedded in. A panel moderated by Alba Villamil, featuring Cyd Harrell, Dr. Madhuri Karak, and Andrea Ngan.




🗓️

March 31, 2023


University of Kentucky
Visual Practices & Experimental Geographies

Venue:
Virtual panel 
A panel discussion that seeks to establish generative points of contact that consider a growing interest in visual epistemologies, visual methods, and more-than-representational theories of knowledge by geographers and, on the other hand, growing interest in spatial thinking, mapping, and geographic concepts by visual artists. [We seek] to explore these intersecting research interests and develop collaborations that inform future work in both departments.

A panel moderated by Forest Kelley, Assistant Professor, University of Kentucky and James A. Enos.



🗓️

March 3, 2023


Design Philadelphia
The City of Philadelphia’s Equitable Community Engagement Toolkit: Towards a Shared Vision and Practice.

Venue:
Virtual presentation 
In this session, the Toolkit team will share a presentation about how they’ve approached collaboratively designing and implementing equitable practices across City agencies and community members. The team will then invite participants into a discussion centering on accountability in equitable community engagement.



🗓️

January 26, 2023


DesignTO Symposium:
No Such Thing as Normal

Venue:
Virtual Panel

Sign up  What can designers learn from collective practices rooted in care and reciprocity? How can equity-centered design move beyond binary thinking as a means for personal, community, and systemic transformation? This presentation will seek to answer these questions through lessons learned from organizing, teaching, and designing on Lenni Lenape land (commonly known as Philadelphia). Through three case examples, this talk will reflect on embracing uncertainty and care through community organizing, fostering young leaders, and building a citywide equitable community engagement toolkit.



🗓️

January 20 2022


AIGA New York: 
Dome Making a Seat at the Table

Venue:
Virtual Panel
Join Katie Lee and Lynn Kiang, co-founders of Dome as they share the process of making Seat at the Table, a public exhibition that highlights the current state of gender inequity in America and a reminder of the ongoing struggle by women since gaining the right to vote over 100 years ago. This event will be moderated by Andrea Ngan.



🗓️

June 14, 2021


Code for America Summit:
Building a Practice of Equity-Centered Design: 

Venue:
Team presentation

See recording (31:25) A session offering perspectives around how three teams are approaching and working towards more equitable practices in government. From Philadelphia, The PHL Service Design Studio will share how they’re collaborating with City employees, community-based organizations, and residents to co-design a Toolkit to strengthen equitable community engagement across Philadelphia.



🗓️

April 1, 2021


MICA: Mixed Media: Building New Futures at the Intersection of Design & Social Justice 

Venue:
Virtual Panel

Sign up  Last Fall, the Center for Social Design at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) invited Denise Shanté Brown of Black Womxn Flourish to design and facilitate a two-part guided module, Design as a Pathway to Justice. Bringing together students and community members, they explored existing design justice movements practicing and embodying design to create the worlds we need. To continue this conversation on design justice, Denise Shanté is hosting a public panel as part of MICA’s Mixed Media Speakers series that will gather Wesley Taylor from Design Justice Network, Andrea Ngan from Creative Resilience Collective, and N'Deye Diakhate from Black Womxn Flourish. From rethinking design processes so that they center people marginalized by design, improving access to self-determined mental health care, and Black womxn redefining and designing what it means to be well — they’ll discuss how each movement is propelling us into a more just, compelling future and what design justice could look like during these precarious times.



🗓️

November 12, 2020


University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art Studio Core Conversation 

On Staying Together: A Collective Art and Design Practice in Pursuit of Healing Justice 

Venue:
Virtual Panel

Sign up   This presentation explores emergent strategies and case studies devised or experienced by the Creative Resilience Collective (CRC), a community group based in Philadelphia founded on design and disability justice principles working at the intersection of art, design, education, mental health care, research, and technology.



🗓️

October, 2020


The Design Philadelphia festival by the Center for Architecture and Design 

Venue:
Virtual Panel
The PHL Service Design Studio founding team shared how we leverage participatory design methods to center equity in our work at the City fo Philadelphia.



© Ngan 2024