From the Margins to the Centre
May 14, 2026 9:54 pm
Dear friends,
I have just published a new article reflecting on Kaleena Sales, designer, educator, author of Centered: People and Ideas Diversifying Design, and Chair of the Department of Art and Design at Tennessee State University.
The article is titled From the Margins to the Centre: Kaleena Sales and the Rebuilding of Design Education.
In this piece, I look at what Sales’s work reveals about culture, identity, lived experience and the limits of the traditional design canon. Her conversation on The Art School Graduate Podcast raises one of the most urgent questions in design education today: who gets to decide what “good design” looks like?
For too long, design education has presented certain visual standards as universal, when in reality they often come from specific histories, cultures and institutions. Students are too often asked to become professional by removing the very things that make their perspective valuable: their culture, their community, their visual memory, their language, their neighbourhood, their lived experience.
From the New Art School perspective, this is not simply about adding more diverse names to the reading list. It is about rebuilding the foundations of design education itself.
A student’s culture is not a limitation.
It is a form of knowledge.
It is a source of visual intelligence.
It is a place from which design can begin.
Kaleena Sales reminds us that design education must move beyond narrow ideas of neutrality, professionalism and taste. We need classrooms where students are not trained to disappear, but encouraged to see from where they stand, speak from what they know, and design with courage, context and consequence.
You can read the full article here:
Thank you, as always, for reading and supporting this ongoing work.
Warm wishes,
Lefteris
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