OUR DESIGN & CREATIVE PRINCIPLES

• Ask What If? as the easiest way to imagine the world anew. Subvert the status quo and re-arrange the paradigms that no longer serve you.

• Ancient Futures. We learn from the past to shape the future. We look back to our ancestors to help us know what to create in the present to shape a beautiful future for our descendants.

• Cultivate Black Euphoria (collective Black joy) as a powerful force for transforming the world.

• Win the Imagination Battle - We are building the power of collective imagination necessary to shape a world in which all Black people are thriving, joyful, sovereign and free.

• Declutter, make space - We believe that we are at our most creative when there is spaciousness and we are able to have clear vision for what we want to accomplish. This involves clearing our minds as well as our physical surroundings.

• Build Black Utopias - We are world building an archipelago (interconnected network) of stories and spaces where we can practice self governance, regenerative economics, and Black love at scale.

• When Reality Gets Absurd, It’s Time to Get Surreal

• Craft Narratives and Design Aesthetics - We use narrative to both understand what the problem or issue is that we want to address as well as to convey our solution in powerful, accessible ways. We use aesthetics to embody our narrative, ensuring that the ideas, products, and experiences we create are visually appealing and make social change attractive and desirable.

• Create a Culture of Black Liberation - Our design purpose is inextricably linked to the birth of a culture of Black liberation. We explore and integrate cultural experiences and expressions within Black communities that are prefigurative and that posit the assumption that black people exist in the future and we are free there.

• Design FROM the margins - We are tricksters. We didn’t go to school for design. We’re harnessing, remixing, and hacking popular design tools and making them our own so that those at the margins and intersections can define and solve their own problems using the incredible assets we know we have.

• Embrace a Third Culture Perspective - The margins are really the intersections or borders. They are complex places and the people who inhabit them are quite often best positioned to think about complex issues in creative ways. We’re straddling borders and adapting to new realities all the time. This makes us innovative, creative, and adaptable. Skills that are really important for design.

• More Love, Amplified - When we come together with love, to create, what we are capable of doing is immeasurable.

• You gotta be willing to drill the hole - Take the necessary risks in order to achieve your goals.

• Put the (proverbial) weed in the bag - Take care of the foundation so you can get to the top.

• Trickster shapes the world -