Speaking engagements
It brings me deep joy to receive and share learnings about design justice, collaborative design, youth organizing, healing justice, socially engaged art, and methods for building and sharing power. Find upcoming engagements and offerings below.
Episode #1 Equitable Community Engagement
🗓️ August 2024
🎧 The Civic Design Room, Podcast
A podcast by Mariama N’Diaye featuring leaders from across the globe sharing their stories about using design in government. This first episode features Danita Reese and Andrea Ngan, who spent four years co-creating a living, breathing equitable community engagement resource and program.
Building Trust & Collaborating with Communities in the City of Philadelphia
🗓️ November 2023
📍Georgetown University Beeck Center Social Impact + Innovation Digital Service Network, Virtual Presentation
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.
Healing-Centered Art and Design: A Practice for Personal and Collective Transformation
🗓️ June 9, 2023
📍HASTAC Critical Making & Social Justice at Pratt Insitute School of Design, Brooklyn, NY
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.
Visual Practices and Experimental Geographies
🗓️ March 31, 2023
📍University of Kentucky Cooperative for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Virtual Panel
A panel moderated by Forest Kelley, Assistant Professor, University of Kentucky and James A. Enos seeking 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.
The City of Philadelphia’s Equitable Community Engagement Toolkit: Towards a Shared Vision and Practice
🗓️ October 2022
📍Design Philadelphia, Virtual Presentation (Zoom with ASL)
A collaborative session to invite designers and community members into the co-creative process of building the Equitable Community Engagement Toolkit.
LabStorm #173 - City of Philadelphia's Service Design Studio
🗓️ October 2022
📍Feedback Labs, Virtual Presentation
The Equitable Community Engagement Toolkit (i.e., the Toolkit) intends to create the conditions so equitable forms of engagement can occur between the City and the communities it serves. The PHL Service Design Studio (SDS) and the Mayor’s Office of Civic Engagement and Volunteer Service (MOCEVS) are partnering together to build the Toolkit. As the project team prepares to test the Toolkit with City agencies, they’re currently thinking about accountability and what mechanisms and examples exist that encourage lasting culture change in large and siloed organizations.
Lunch & Learn: Designing Equitable Programs
🗓️ Friday, May 20, 2022 at 12:00 PM
📍The Nonprofit Center at LaSalle University, Virtual Presentation
Join The Nonprofit Center at LaSalle University for a lunch and learn about designing equitable programs. Learn how to invite community lived experience to inform programming and how to build shared understanding and decision-making power to inform program goals and plans.
No Such Thing as Normal Panel
🗓️ January 26, 2023
📍DesignTo Symposium, Virtual Panel Discussion
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.
Introduction to Design Justice: Community-Led Reflections from the Philly Node
🗓️ Mar 2, 2022📍ONR Colloquium, Virtual Panel Discussion
Design Justice Network Philadelphia Node members Maggie Delano,Sara Montijo, Ila Krishna Kumar, and Andrea Ngan share reflections on their respective community-led design efforts. This session was moderated by Marion Leary, Director of Innovation, University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.
Dome: Making a Seat at the Table
🗓️ January 2022
📍AIGA NY, Virtual Panel Discussion
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.
They will share their personal and professional experience on:
- Running a creative business
- Diversity, equity, inclusion
- Creative problem solving (medium agnostic)
Building a Practice of Equity-Centered Design with the City of Philadelphia’s Service Design Studio
🗓️ June 2021
📍Code for America, Virtual Presentation
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. See recording at 31:25.
Building New Futures at the Intersection of Design & Social Justice
🗓️ April 2021
📍Maryland Institue College of Art (MICA), Virtual Panel Discussion
Denise Shanté hosts a public panel as part of MICA’s Mixed Media Speakers series with 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.
On Staying Together: A Collective Art and Design Practice in Pursuit of Healing Justice
🗓️ Thursday, November 12, 2020 7pm to 8pm
📍University of Georgia Athens and Virtual Presentation
A presentation that explores emergent strategies and case studies devised and 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.
Service Design in Government: For the people, by the people with the City of Philadelphia's Service Design Studio
🗓️ October 2022
📍Design Philadelphia, Virtual Presentation
The PHL Service Design Studio’s founding team shares how we leverage participatory design methods to center equity in our work at the City fo Philadelphia.
Creative Resilient Speculative Design Presentation and Workshop
🗓️ November 2019
📍Synapsis at Columbia University, NYC
A presentation and workshop organized and co-faciliated by Bennett Kuhn for Synapsis - A Health Humanities Journal.
Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal, develops conversations among diverse people thinking about medical and humanistic ways of knowing, and we see ourselves as a “Department Without Walls” that connects scholars and thinkers from different spheres.
Report from the Field: Practices in Collective Care
🗓️ April 25, 2019 📍Common Field Convening at Friends Center, Philadelphia PA
A panel discussion facilitated and curated by Theo Loftis featuring Andrea Ngan, Li Sumpter, and LaTreice Branson. This session seeks to reflect upon the current state of care in Philadelphia, as it relates to local efforts to build more equitable and inclusive future care models through various forms of creative praxis. In researching the history, contemporary urgencies, and barriers to accessing mental health care, Creative Resilience Collective (CRC) finds itself continuously exploring models of arts organizing and art-making that can offer alternatives and collective visions for community care. This Report from the Field considers care from a collective perspective through the practices of CRC and friends LaTreice Branson and Li Sumpter. Leveraging CRC’s multidisciplinary makeup to trace relationships between local initiatives in the fields of community organizing, design, cultural production, and social work, we will take stock of what we mean by care and its relevance to arts organizing in Philadelphia.
Spatial Literacy as Conscientious Visuality: Reflections on Teaching in Design Foundations
🗓️ Thursday, April 4 at 11:00am – 12:30pm📍 FATE (Foundations Art) Conference, Chicago, IL
Curated by James Enos and Jeremy Culler, four panelists were brought together under the Spatial Literacy and Sustainable Social Practices in Foundations sessions. Panelists included:
- Spatial Literacy as Conscientious Visuality: Reflections on Teaching in Design Foundations by Charles Miller
- The Creative Coast: Experience and Engagement by Michael Boonstra
- How a Generation of Map App-ers Prompted a Fresh Reading of the Dérive by Victoria Wagner
- Creative Resilience—A Collective Approach to Co-Learning and Social Practice by Andrea Ngan