Lilly Saniel-Banrey

Designer of many things. Sowing joy and wellbeing into the details of everyday life. Currently at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. See a full scope of work including architecture, graphics, objects, and documents. Or just see my current projects.

Columbus Conversations


Started 2020
Columbus, OH

In partnership with Stephen Clond + Edwin Beltran under NBBJ’s Anti-Racism Taskforce
 As part of NBBJ’s commitment to Anti-Racist measures as an integral practice of company culture and methodology, the Anti-Racism Taskforce was founded. The taskforce collates desired actions, provides educational opportunities from estabilished experts, and builds a large framework for the firm’s ongoing equitable retooling of the practice. Within the scope of the Anti-Racism Taskforce, Columbus Conversations was developed as a response to the need for candid conversation and continued education of an Anti-Racist Architecture at a studio level. The series engages the participants at an intimate scale through a multi-dimensional learning and discussion model. This model was developed around conducting conversations as a research tool and encouraging meaningful conversation directed towards building understanding and pressing towards design solutions. As the series unfolds, insights are documented, shared, and synthesized to become methodologies and artifacts of an Anti-Racist Architecture in practice.




Implementation of the process was broken into three steps: Group Formation, Series Cycles + Programming, and Dialogues. G roup formation centered around creating enough variants in topics while allowing for an interchange of information across groups. Each participant was sent a survey guiding them through their desired media choice, a “focus theme” through which they would analyze the media, and a “cultural lens” as prompts to their selected themes. Each end point in the survey corresponds to a group on the full resource matrix. Their focus themes and cultural lenses also determined which “cross cutting” sessions they would attend.


Series Cycles + Programming relied on a 4 week cycle of individual group meetings, two rounds of “cross-cutting” sessions where information is shared across themes and cultural lenses, and a final week of synthesis in the form of a panel, charette, or studio-wide dialogue.


Dialogues were to remain open-ended, but in addition a kit of tools was developed to encourage thorough analysis and invite productive conversation. Each tool highlights a specific mode of investigation into the resource. Groups were encouraged to meander through each tool.