Would you call yourself a feminist?

Many of us who gravitate towards more socially and politically charged methods of collaborative design might say yes. Maybe this yes would come after a slight hesitation; we might know from experience how divisive the word ‘feminist’ can be. After all, even among self-proclaimed feminists, the definitions and implications of this term are endlessly – and often fiercely – contested. So, if you do find yourself aligned with something in this word (or maybe find this word helps align something within you), what does that mean in practice? How does feminism permeate the actions, choices, and things that you do in your life and when you are designing?

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This website serves as the accompanying exhibition for my PhD research ‘Feminist Tendencies, Tensions, and Co-Design Practice.’

In my practice, I have seen how easily well-intentioned research initiatives using participatory approaches and community consultations can be co-opted. Therefore, this study creates space to examine personal experiences of navigating complex co-design situations and to question how we might be ‘becoming feminist’ through our work. On paper, making the shift from being a feminist to becoming feminist requires just a few extra letters. And yet, it took me years to recognise that there could be tensions between these 2 distinctions. This realisation has since marked a monumental change in my orientation to this work. As you can read about in the PhD, rather than using feminist theory as a tool or lens that can be applied to co-design practice, I now consider how applied co-design practice, in turn, informs a designer’s personal understanding of feminism. 

Here, you can find documentation from the first 3 conversations in a series of small workshops with other co-design practitioners, as well as other resources produced by the study. This website holds space to reflect on our evolving practices and to collect more accounts of ‘becoming feminist through co-design’. This initiative also serves as the beginning of a new outward-facing dissemination and interrogation of the knowledge that has been produced by my research. In keeping with my research objective to ‘bracket’ the co-design project, this series of workshops will continue beyond this doctoral study. So, more than a conclusion, I consider it the first phase of following a new orientation.

Please have a look around and get in touch if you would like to join the conversation.