This issue of FRAME highlights the designers who use their craft to make powerful statements against systemic inequality, as our editor in chief Floor Kuitert explains.

Design can be a force for systemic change, a form of protest against outdated regulations that impede progress. If you ask the designers and architects who share their visions in this edition of FRAME, there are many systems in desperate need of an overhaul. Education, for one. Architect-activist Zarith Pineda of Territorial Empathy, whose words will stay with you, proactively challenges systems – both societal and within the fields of architecture, design and urbanism – that reinforce entrenched prejudices and stifle the ambitions of emerging design talent. ‘I studied architecture hoping to build beauty and sanctuary,’ she says. ‘But what I found was an industry plagued by God complexes, elitism and a severe lack of intersectionality. The curriculum romanticizes form over function, theory over equity. It trains architects to ignore the systems they’re embedded in: redlining, settler colonialism and environmental racism.’

This issue of FRAME highlights the designers who use their craft to make powerful statements against systemic inequality, as our editor in chief Floor Kuitert explains.

Design can be a force for systemic change, a form of protest against outdated regulations that impede progress. If you ask the designers and architects who share their visions in this edition of FRAME, there are many systems in desperate need of an overhaul. Education, for one. Architect-activist Zarith Pineda of Territorial Empathy, whose words will stay with you, proactively challenges systems – both societal and within the fields of architecture, design and urbanism – that reinforce entrenched prejudices and stifle the ambitions of emerging design talent. ‘I studied architecture hoping to build beauty and sanctuary,’ she says. ‘But what I found was an industry plagued by God complexes, elitism and a severe lack of intersectionality. The curriculum romanticizes form over function, theory over equity. It trains architects to ignore the systems they’re embedded in: redlining, settler colonialism and environmental racism.’