During MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) this past January, third year HASTS student Odinaka Kingsley Eze offered a workshop series entitled “Design through Pan-Africanism and Afrofuturism.” A collaboration with Eze’s colleague Sheila Bombaar (University of Texas, Austin), the hybrid activity exposed MIT undergraduates to how Pan-Africanism and Afrofuturism can serve as design frameworks for creativity and speculative imagination in the 21st century. MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society sponsored the initiative.
From January 14th to 16th, Eze and Bombaar guided students through a series of exercises that allowed them to develop conceptual projects, prototypes, and visual ideas that fused historical imagination with future-oriented design. In doing so, the instructors encouraged participants to incorporate principles of pan-African solidarity and Afro-futuristic systems of knowledge— such as oral traditions, folklore, poetry, and African cosmologies— into their work. The result was a series of projects that proposed to re-invigorate creative industries spanning from game design to fashion by suffusing them with these frameworks.