Our Mission
&Design’s mission is to cultivate and activate Black, Latinx, and Indigenous Designers by providing tools, resources and training to support them on their creative career journey.
Our Theory of Change
We believe by developing a collective acumen of traditional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, in addition to using our creative craft to meet the needs of specific identities, we can address social ills and systems of oppression through Designing Diversity and Social Justice.
Our goals
To provide Black, Latinx and Indigenous emerging Designers access to people, content, and resources necessary to start, build and advance their careers.
To be key partners in supporting organizations looking to create more racially and ethnically inclusive cultures—highlighting identities’ intersectionalities.
To build a co-creative community, collectively focused on driving systemic, equitable change.
To amplify Black, Latinx and Indigenous voices through our digital platform and compensate them for their effort.
Co-Founders
Antionette Carroll is the Founder, President and CEO of Creative Reaction Lab, a nonprofit educating and deploying youth to challenge racial and health inequities impacting Black and Latinx populations. Within this role, Antionette has pioneered an award-winning form of creative problem solving called Equity-Centered Community Design (named a Fast Company World Changing Idea Finalist). Through this capacity, Antionette has received several recognitions and awards including being named an ADL and Aspen Institute Civil Society Fellow, Roddenberry Fellow, Echoing Green Global Fellow, TED Fellow, ADCOLOR Innovator, SXSW Community Service Honoree, Camelback Ventures Fellow, 4.0 Schools Tiny Fellow, St. Louis Visionary Award Honoree for Community Impact, and Essence Magazine Woke 100.
Within her almost 10 years of volunteer leadership, Antionette was named the Founding Chair of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force of AIGA: The Professional Association of Design. She’s a former AIGA National Board Director and Chair Emerita of the Task Force. During her tenure, she founded and launched several initiatives, including the Design Census Program with Google, Racial Justice by Design Initiative, Diversity and Inclusion Residency, and national Design for Inclusivity Summit with Microsoft. Additionally, she’s the co-founder of the Design + Diversity Conference and Fellowship and an active member of Adobe's Design Circle.
Antionette also is an international speaker and facilitator, previously speaking at Google, TED, Capital One, Harvard, Stanford University, Microsoft, NASA, TEDxHerndon and TEDxGatewayArch, AIGA National Conference, The Ohio State University, and more.
Timothy Bardlavens is Product Design Leader, a Cultural Strategist, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) specialist, a Fellowship Co-Founder, and International Speaker & Facilitator.
Currently, a Product Design Manager at Facebook, Timothy supports Community Experiences within the Facebook App, leading teams focused on new Member Experiences and Ecosystem Growth. Previously, he has led teams for Zillow’s newest venture, Zillow Offers—building the team and product vision of an end-to-end experience for buying, selling, financing and managing a home, all within the Zillow ecosystem. In addition to Microsoft, where his leadership focused on core UX and Intelligent (AI/ML) experiences in Outlook across all endpoints, platform experiences that span the O365 Suite and core browsing experiences in Edge.
As a Cultural Strategist, Timothy specializes in Organizational Culture through the lens of Human-Centered Design. His work shifts the focus of DEI from a Human Resources to a User Experience challenge, helping organizational leaders understand teams, organizations and companies are designed entities that need unique approaches to cultivate and thrive in an increasingly diverse space. Most importantly, Timothy works with these leaders to develop people-centric strategies with clear, actionable steps to increase diversity, create more inclusive spaces and design more equitable systems.
Timothy is the co-founder of the Design + Diversity Fellowship program, and an active member of Adobe’s Design Circle. Additionally, As an international speaker and facilitator, Timothy speaks on topics of Organizational Culture, DEI, Design Diversity, Racial Justice Product Design/Development, Inclusive Design and more.