All Black Zine

The ABZ mission is to disrupt creative spaces by featuring primarily artists of colour and thereby draw more patrons of colour. By doing this we intended to address social issues, encourage progressive discussions, and hopefully bring about change in our community.

| www.allblackzine.com |

THE CHALLENGE

The patrons of art events in Duluth, MN did not reflect the diversity in the city at the time. There was a zine that had been circulated before, to entice POC but excitement had atrophied and there seemed to be an opportunity to rejuvenate the idea with a more robust offering and use it as a vehicle to galvanise people and bring forth positive change in the community.

THE approach

Our team conducted a working session with project stakeholders to ideate why so few people of colour were attending art events. We prioritised two hypotheses: 1) There was a lack of subject matter that was pertinent to POC experiences and this curtailed engagement 2) Attendance was time and/or cost prohibitive. We then followed up with an exercise of asking “ what would it take to achieve ______? This exercise helped us to formulate a set of actionable objectives.

THE PRoCESS

The Metrics and design strategy were formulated around the basis of raising consciousness, discussing volatile issues and not being intimidated by the breadth of the overall systematic issues we were trying solve. We wanted for patrons to feel empowered that they could help be a part of the solution by starting small.

The pre-work to get to this point included running focus groups  which were a go to from my advertising and marketing experience. However in hindsight these proved to be limiting with regards the accuracy of the conclusions we reached as we later discovered better ways of asking questions in order to really understand what was required.