Lee is an architect who was formerly the Place + Civic Design Director for the Arts Council of New Orleans as well as the founding organizer of the Design Justice Platform and the Design As Protest National Day of Action.
Mobley was formerly the Strategy and Communications Lead for the Organizing and Facilitation Committee of the Music and Culture Coalition New Orleans, as well as the Executive Director of Sweet Home New Orleans and the Community Coordinator for the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity.
The two came together to establish Colloqate after collaborating on other projects through a variety of venues.
Colloqate’s work looks to inspire conversation about how systems of racial, ethnic and gendered discrimination become embodied in the built environment. Designers, therefore, are at the very least complicit in creating systems of oppression if they remain unaware of how their work serves to perpetuate these systems, or deconstruct them.
Notable projects include the Design Justice Platform – an online, open source program to instigate a conversation on topics like immigration, education and racial injustice. Colloqate hopes to crowdsource a “hippocratic oath” for designers which can fold into architects’ pre-existing commitment to health, safety and public welfare.
