Hasta La Ideas

The 2024 Core77 Design Awards Design for Social Impact Category, led by Sabiha Basrai, Co-Owner Design Action Collective, features projects designed to directly benefit social, humanitarian, community or environments. Examples of social impact work include community or environmental impact initiatives, products for underrepresented communities, distribution systems, disaster relief, responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, the fight for racial justice, humanitarian efforts related to war and refugees, and others.

Sabiha Basrai, Co-Owner, Design Action Collective

Sabiha Basrai’s cemented her deep commitment to social impact through design early in her career. Sabiha was in the midst of her undergraduate graphic design studies when the attacks of September 11, 2001 happened, followed by what she calls a “heightened culture of fear and racism that I had to contend with as a young Muslim woman.”

Sabiha found her voice in the anti-war movement and began using her design skills to serve grassroots and social justice efforts. More than two decades later, Sabiha remains “motivated by the relentless activism of BIPOC communities and grateful that I can be part of an ecosystem of culture workers using art and design to advance movements for liberation.”

In her role as Co-Owner of Design Action Collective, a worker-owned, anti-capitalist design firm dedicated to serving social justice movements with art, graphic design, and web development, Sabiha continues working toward those goals. She also serves as co-coordinator of the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action, as an affiliate trainer with Race Forward, a faculty member of the University of San Francisco’s Department of Art and Architecture, and a member of the Center for Political Education’s advisory board.

Website design for Media Justice, by Design Action Collective

As someone who has dedicated her career to social justice, Sabiha is glad to see a growing number of designers getting involved in progressive movements and using their platforms as media makers to respond to issues like the rise of white supremacist violence, fascist ideologies, and the climate crisis. However, she advises that in the effort to contribute to solutions, designers make every effort to “ask the right questions and seek out enough feedback to ensure that we are following the leadership of those most impacted people and centering the knowledge of those communities.” Sabiha believes that finding ways to give and receive that feedback is a critical step in ensuring that designers are accountable to the communities they are serving.

Her other advice to designers operating in this space? “Make sure you have always done a power analysis and can name the impacts of structural oppression. When we fail to do so, we run the risk of offering individual or interpersonal solutions to systemic problems.” She believes that this approach can cause more harm – and undermine good intentions in the process.

2023 Design for Social Impact winner Ci3 at the University of Chicago for Hello Greenlight by Ci3

The winner in the 2023 Core77 Design Awards Design for Social Impact category was The Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3) at the University of Chicago for their development of contraceptive counseling resources for adolescents that present information about a range of birth control methods in a clear, step-by-step manner, in the context of whole and varied bodies and in the context of use.

Is your work making a positive difference in society? You might be this year’s Design for Social Impact winner. Enter your most impactful project today!