Associate Professor Mari Hulick is the Director of the School of Design at SF State. Prior to this position she was faculty and in administration at The Cleveland Institute of Art, Parsons School of Design and UCLA. Her practice is rooted in publication and information design, and has expanded into the multidisciplinary field of social justice design. Comfortable in a variety of media: print, interactive, web, app and environmental graphics, her award-winning practice is rooted in a strategic, user-focus approach. After living in Paris, New York, and Cleveland, Mari is thrilled to be living in California again, especially here in the Bay Area.

Mari has worked with community leaders and small businesses in Chicago, East Cleveland, and North Philadelphia to realize community-based solutions to the problems facing our “underserved” populations. Employing the tools of UX methodology, she’s worked with neighborhood and city-wide groups grappling with problems as diverse as gentrification, police brutality and small businesses threatened by multi-national conglomerates. “Social Justice Design” as a practice has emerged from a group of interdisciplinary designers (architects, visual communication designers, city planners and computer scientists) creating significant work in our fields.

Led by activist designers such as the New Orleans firm, Colloquate, Turner Duckworth (offices in London and San Francisco), and Mass Design Group, this movement is bringing significant change and insight through great design. Mari’s talk, “A Design Justice Education” is about integrating these challenging ideas into our classes. Our students are facing some of the gravest wicked problems of all time: climate change, income inequality, and mass incarceration just to name a few of the issues that weigh so heavily on us all. Social Justice Design uses the tools we have as problem-solvers and communicators to bring about the significant changes we are all searching for.

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