DesignEd Uganda

DesignEd hosts community-oriented design workshops in Uganda. For 2018’s workshop series held at the Design Hub, a co-working and event space in Kampala, program founder Penina Acayo Laker along with designer Audrey Western established a new visual system using Aglet Slab and Aglet Sans. Penina writes:

After running these workshops over the past four years, we knew that it was time to start working towards creating a kind of visual vocabulary that would set the tone for future workshops. We set out to find a typeface that would capture the spirit of DesignEd—bold, yet inviting, with subtle quirks uncovered overtime—a typeface that exudes confidence and ease of reading across multiple weights and scale shifts. Aglet was a perfect choice; we couldn’t have been any more pleased with the versatility of its large family when set at various sizes. We barely touched the surface with this one and we look forward to discovering more fun ways to use it in the future.

More information on the mission of DesignEd:

DesignEd Uganda workshops is an initiative birthed out of a necessity to:
1) broaden the scope of design education in Uganda, and
2) develop and cultivate sustainable culturally-appropriate practices to Social Impact Design/humanitarian design and
3) act as a pipeline for design professionals and educators from more developed nations seeking partnerships with local individuals and organizations working to alleviate challenging societal concerns facing Ugandan communities.

These workshops are designed to educate and train young people to apply design research and methodology to creatively solve problems faced in their communities. Similarly, increasing access to design education in Uganda ensures a more diverse workforce that is better equipped to deal with matters of globalization, emerging technologies, and modes of communication as they pertain to both local and global context—a step toward promoting interchangeable cross-cultural collaborations between designers from the West and African creative practitioners. In the long run, this will also help increase the visibility of exemplary Social Impact Design (SID) projects coming out of Africa.

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