I started working on 'even by design' to heal creatively. Design, today, is predominantly an instrument to enact white modernist ideals. I have had to shed my heritage for the privilege of being called a designer. This is a brief story of how I came to question this privilege.
I didn't go to design school because I didn't know that designers existed. That is not to say that image-making, fabrication, or invention didn't exist where I was from.
There were just named differently. And the people who did them were called artisans or artists.
So I stumbled upon design quite accidentally. A colleague who had gone to design school told me that the way I crafted curriculum and the way I taught my statistics class reminded him of design thinking. So I looked it up.