Azra Sungu: Becoming Accountable to Our Visions

Azra Sungu (PhD 2024) spoke at this year’s End of Year Celebration on May 16, 2025. Following is the transcript and video of her speech.

Being a PhD student, I’ve celebrated the graduation of multiple generations of students before me. After all these years of sharing the joy of other classes, it feels nice to have my graduation.

It’s a profound blessing to have shared this journey with so many amazing souls who have shaped both my research and my understanding of what design can truly be.

Almost six years ago, I toured this building for the first time with Carlos Teixeira as my guide.

I was over the clouds, and instantly felt welcome. As we came to the end of our tour, he asked me what I’d like to do after the PhD—my vision.

I told him that I wanted to do social impact oriented design work, be somewhat of a design nomad, to live in different countries in the pursuit of change for good. With the most sincere glimmer of hope, he said he hoped that I would have the same excitement at the end of my journey here.

Well… I don’t.

The excitement with which I stepped through the doors of ID was the one of a 26-year-old.

An excitement that hadn’t been tested with the weight of the world yet. It hadn’t been broken and stitched back together. It was unbound by the constraints of bills to pay, bureaucracies to tackle, debts to settle. It hadn’t witnessed the administrative changes, been through the pandemic, and other atrocities happening day after day, to our planet and its people.

And more importantly, it was fueled by my ego—by the idea that I, as the playful creator and willful entrepreneur, would bring change to the world.

I no longer have that excitement.

I now know that the resistance to change is not only a matter of complexity, but concerns deeper mindsets that shape how we co-exist. I know now that masses aren’t coming to build the better futures we portray in our posters.

The values of sustainability, equity, justice, and care that guide the worlds we imagine are hardly universal. Unfortunately, in the real world, they are weighed against different values. The values that we hardly mention in those same posters—efficiency, profit, convenience, tradition.

So I feel this barrier between the worlds in our posters and the worlds we live in. I’m not just talking about the difficulty of materializing what we imagine, but more so the mental barrier that those worlds belong in the posters, while we get on with our lives in the real world.

We cultivate this amazing space of possibility with our precious “how-might-we’s,” and inspiring “what-if’s.”

And if you are feeling crazy enough to do a PhD, something along the lines of “how can design…?”—insert world-changing idea.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good question, and it’s my job to ask good questions. But who’s going to make it? Who is going to answer these calls? I feel that today, our world needs more than possibilities.

We can keep suggesting change, like tossing coins in a wishing well, and hoping someone will make it reality. Or, we can go beyond suggesting what could be done, and start giving the answers. And if a decade of design school taught me anything, it’s that the best way to show an idea is to make it.

A better world isn’t going to sprout in slide decks and proposals. Its blueprint won’t be drawn in boardrooms. But it is being made, day after day: in our communities, our streets, and neighborhoods. It’s made by the elder women who run our community free store, by the advocates who take justice to courtrooms, by the artists who keep the city’s soul alive in its murals, and by the farmers who care for the life-giving soil. The people I’ve been honored to have been inspired and guided by.

These worlds need designers too, perhaps even more than the tech incubators and corporate innovation labs do.

That’s the beauty of design, it’s not confined to 9-5 shifts or job descriptions. If you ever woke up in the middle of the night, scribbling down an idea, hoping to God that it will still make sense in the morning. If you’ve been the designated heating system technician for your parents—as I define myself—or found yourself redesigning everyday objects to be just a little better, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

So I’m asking us all: How can we, as designers, be in the service of those worlds? How can our practice enhance their collective creativity, wisdom and joy? How can we be accountable to the worlds we dream of and preach in our posters?

I know it’s hard. The world pulls us in many directions. The weight of student loans, the need to find a job and survive, the pressure to prove our worth through conventional metrics—these forces are real.

The excitement I had six years ago couldn’t withstand these forces. So I’m glad I have a different one now. One that’s grounded in radical love and honesty.

Not the naive (and selfish) excitement of believing I can change the world—driven by ego. But the mature excitement of knowing that together, in small ways and large, through persistence and community, change happens.

So when Carlos asked me about my vision six years ago, I wasn’t wrong about wanting to create social impact. I just didn’t understand the path. It’s not about being a design nomad who swoops in to solve problems. It’s about being an ally who commits to the messy, ongoing work of building better worlds wherever we find ourselves.

As we embark on this new chapter, I hope we can carry this understanding with us. And I hope we can continue finding the wisdom and inspiration in one another, when the world tests our excitement. I can’t wait to see the worlds we’ll bring to life.

Thank you to the faculty who guided us, the staff who supported us, our families who believed in us, and to each other for sharing this journey. The real design work begins now.