Each month, Dr. Dori Tunstall contributes a compact meditation for PRINT: 100 words and a single image that together open up larger conversations around design, culture, power, and possibility. A pioneering design anthropologist and the author of Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook, Dr. Dori approaches design not as styling, but as a lived social practice shaped by history, identity, and community. Her work challenges institutions to think beyond inclusion toward genuine cultural transformation—while still leaving room for curiosity, humanity, and joy.
Cut No. 4, is focused on Salvador Gutierrez, USC Roski MFA Design Class of 2026, and his thesis project, Unconventional.
Latino future design rock star (ask GDUSA), Salvador Gutierrez eschews the technological “hand-me-downs” to Latinx communities to make new technologies silently shout for “treating all people with dignity”. In his USC MFA Design thesis, Unconventional, Gutierrez’s soft-spoken passion for justice treats the message of “FUCK ICE” as mundane. He screen-prints it on shopping bags, molds it into “Americana” motel soaps, and embosses it on safety whistles dispensed via gumball machines for four quarters. Gutierrez rejects generative AI’s Latinx stereotypes by using AI and 3D-printing to immortalize ICE-detained kid, Liam Conejo Ramos; his five-years old self, and others harmed by ICE.
An award-winning design anthropologist and author of “Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook” (MIT Press, 2023), Dori Tunstall brings a practice rooted in cultural justice and liberatory joy. Through her coaching and consulting, she helps organizations build more equitable relationships with the communities they serve. Her writing has also appeared on Substack, “Fast Company,” and “The Architect’s Newspaper.“