I am shifting uncomfortably in a broken deck chair-turned-desk chair and trying not to distract everyone else on screen. There are already enough obstacles in the way of what we’re trying to do. The threat of a possible pandemic is looming and our city has taken precautions by going into full lockdown. As a result, our team finds ourselves meeting remotely from makeshift home offices instead of working side by side in a shared space. The frustrations over our patchy internet connections are growing more audible each time one of us drops out of the call. Someone with a choppy, robotic voice is already ‘over it’. 

Fortunately, we already have the data we need after wrapping up the latest and largest of our co-design events for this project. Your insights have already been condensed, quantified, and digitised for the latest progress report. And while the representative from the funding body is not present at this particular meeting, their expectations remain a close presence while we decide how to proceed. We need to move ahead at pace. The final phase of the project is up next and we are scheduled to use your ideas to generate a series of speculative design scenarios for the final report. Luckily for us (given the current uncertainty) we can do this part without you. 

Someone keeps us all on track for this transition by listing off a few example scenarios, just ‘like we talked about’ before, in the original proposal we generated over a year ago. I am suddenly reaching for the button to unmute: ‘Could I help with that?’ 

I don’t know exactly what I am planning to offer. But I am thinking about you and I sense a small opening. With the project coming to a close, this moment feels urgent, like a last chance.

***

Later, the meeting is over but I am shifting quietly in the same lopsided chair while preparing some ‘helpful’ materials for an internal workshop/design sprint I ended up suggesting to the team. This extra step will just be to support an efficient transition between the data analysis and final design outcomes. We will use this sprint to incorporate your insights into the final ‘co-designed’ speculative scenarios of existing city sites. Unlike the hand-made prototypes you created during the workshops, these scenarios will be professionally rendered to help reimagine certain target sites in ways that would make them safer spaces for women and girls. 

This extra workshop I have volunteered to run with the team is not part of the project timeline, so it needs to come together quickly if it’s going to happen. Instead of starting from scratch, I look for inspiration from existing speculative scenario-building activities and methods, and settle on: 'The Thing from the Future' (Candy, 2018). I download the open-source template, which includes a deck of cards with four categories. These are the ingredients the team can combine to rapidly envision speculative scenarios: ‘Arc’, ‘Terrain’, ‘Object’, ‘Mood.’ I just need a smaller, more bespoke and targeted deck to use this game for our sprint.

I feel confident in this choice as I start to curate from the provided list of Objects. Even as I am quickly pasting the words into my own version of the template, each one brings a little glimmer of a possibility to my mind. I can imagine certain people on our team sprinting off with their own inspiration, sparked by words like ‘box’ or ‘poster’ or 'clothing' or ‘wall’. For now, I resist following my own ideas beyond a fuzzy impression, but I cannot wait to see details; how the team will transform these everyday objects into concrete signifiers of wider social change. This is fun. 

I pause to consider how the cards should look. 

Again, I don’t need to start from scratch. There is already a gorgeous, striking brand identity for this project. The branding had felt important at the beginning. We wanted every bit of excitement we could muster around this feminist issue to help the conversation spread more widely. Maybe the branding could still end up being helpful, if the communication embargo on this contract research is ever lifted. As the months have gone by, this has seemed less and less likely. At this point, it will probably depend on what they think of the final report. 

I play around with these graphic elements and make intricate patterns reminiscent of a deck of playing cards. This is probably not essential. But I want the cards to look good and I want our team to want to use them. This has been a recurring concern across the workshops with the participants and stakeholders as well. Maybe, by compensating with beautiful workshop materials, I can help make it more possible to have hard conversations about ugly topics.

I shift my attention to the Moods category and scan across the original cards template, curating a relevant selection for the future scenarios for our project: 

Happiness – yes, obviously.

Excitement – of course.

Sorrow – Interesting. I think of recent news stories and faces of family members with loved ones who did not make it home one night. I wonder what our speculative scenarios would look like if the sites were redesigned to hold some of that sorrow? Though there are several recent stories that share this kind of grief, I am really thinking about one woman’s family in particular – a father and sister – who I know are aware of this project despite the communication embargo. I have heard about their hopes for what this project could achieve in her memory. As part of this research, I have gone to where it happened. I have gone to see if there are ways that we could somehow prevent it happening there, and in places like it, again. I went there to see if there was something we could learn about how to design our public spaces differently to be more safe ... Alongside these thoughts, I accidentally think, just for a second, about some of the situations I have been in myself as a user of designed public spaces, but quickly move on.

Outrage – Yes, that belongs.

Disgust – I bristle, reminded of how many hours we have spent considering how to make this project palatable, how many times we have been explicitly reminded that this project ‘will need to be palatable’. I copy and paste this word into my own curated version of the deck. Disgust is a part of this, but I do not expect this card to be used. 

I finish off the shortlist of Moods and move on to Terrain. This is one of the more significant adaptations I need to make to the template. Instead of using the provided Terrain cards, I will replace all these cards with your themes and ideas that came from earlier phases of the project. It is an easy swap. This data has already either been neatly arranged in bullet points or relegated to footnotes in the progress report. I feel the same sense of urgency I felt during the earlier meeting return as I picture all your ideas back on the table again. I imagine us picking them up, holding them in our hands, and considering them at least one more time before we make our final decisions. 

I start to realise that the point of the game – and perhaps why I have settled on this particular method – is that we will have to use the ideas you gave us. By putting your contributions to this project back on the table, we will have to acknowledge them, even the ideas that contradict what we had expected to find.

Copying and pasting the data from our progress report feels redundant, but there is something so important about bringing your thoughts back into use, back into reach. There is something so important about seeing the choices on which of your ideas we decide to leave behind solidified into material form. Material surrogates. Material objects. You. Useful. But without the Human Ethics Committee approval to engage with you directly again, this will have to do. Maybe changing the form of your ideas can change their function.

After all of your insights have been entered into the bespoke deck, I return to the original template from ‘The Thing from the Future’. The final suit in the deck is a list of four possible Arcs that guide how the future might evolve and take shape from now. I linger on the one labelled ‘Discipline’. This Arc describes a future where ‘order is imposed’. Reading this description, I can hear the last year of working on this project echoed in a single word. 

I’m sitting in the same broken chair, but now I know exactly why I unmuted during the meeting earlier. I felt that tension rise up in my chest because those off-hand example scenarios ‘like we talked about’ in the proposal had not shifted. Our ‘expert’ opinion had not shifted even after everything you shared and co-created with us. And though it was a casual remark, more to remind us where we were in the project timeline than to confirm the final outcomes, it signalled something other than project logistics. Those speculative scenarios were what we came in looking for, well-aligned with what the funding body was expecting. They were well-aligned with the usual interventions that get funded to mitigate gender-based violence and harassment. They did not deviate from expectations about the role of security and surveillance to help solve this issue. 

And yet you had raised concerns about these usual solutions. You had raised concerns about the disproportionate risk we could create for some of you. We had designed your participation so we could hold space for your concerns. We had designed the opportunity for us both to collectively imagine possibilities beyond these potential unintentional consequences. We had used these spaces to rehearse alternative ways of being, doing, and relating together. I thought we had deviated from the usual solutions. I left those workshops with shifts in my perspective. I left with a quiet confidence in the shifts I had witnessed in you too. Now, I am worried about settling back into place. 

But as only one of several possible arcs, ‘Discipline’ looks small. As part of a selection, it’s easier to see that it is just one version of how things could unfold. In fact, all four original Arcs seem to be relevant for this project, so I just adapt the descriptions slightly. I call them Change cards to directly speak to the active role of making changes to existing city spaces.

‘Growth – a future in which “progress” has continued’ (Candy, 2015).

becomes Improve/amplify – a future in which something is added to improve the space or something that is already good/unique about this space is amplified 

‘Collapse – a future in which society as we know it has come apart’ (Candy, 2015).

becomes Remove/make way – a future in which something in/about this space has been removed to make room for something else

and De-centre/include – a future that de-centres users who reflect a dominant status quo; universal access design principles of inclusion* are applied; the space actively encourages and supports the public lives of diverse women and girls 

Note: inclusion is not assimilation.

‘Discipline – a future in which order is deliberately coordinated or imposed’ (Candy, 2015).

becomes Enforce/require – a future in which order is deliberately coordinated or imposed (e.g. perpetrators are held accountable; gender-based violence is taken seriously/not tolerated by authorities and communities)

‘Transformation – a future in which a profound historical evolution has occurred’ (Candy, 2015).

becomes Transform/resist – a future that encourages a shift in relations and norms about gender and/or conventional gender roles; resists rigid conceptions of gender

I look at these Change card translations I have made by adapting the Arc cards and they are not perfect. Nor are they comprehensive. They reflect conflicting and inconsistent feminist ideologies. Apparently, my feminism in practice does not look exactly like my feminism in theory. I am thinking back over this project, comparing it to what Light and Akama (2012) describe as the ‘holy grail’ of participatory design: endogenous and community-led actions to develop solutions…

This work is distinctly not like that. It feels rushed, like I have to make do more than make change. As the only participatory design practitioner and the least senior member of the team, I hope these cards will help justify your inclusion and your efforts to have an affect on the outcomes of this project. I wonder how much these cards may have become material surrogates not just for you, but for tensions I had sensed but I could not voice. Surrogates for tensions I had been muting. I wonder how self-righteous I am to suggest this method and about my sense that there is something big at risk in this project. I wonder why I think I can make shifts, why I think I am entitled to do so. In any case, these cards are not neutral tools for ideating. 

Willfulness is striking; it is in the way of what is on the way (Ahmed, 2014, p. 76).

I think again about the close management from the funding body representative and the constraints that were placed on our process. She knows what is on the way. She knows how the institution works. In this case, her feminism is not about a moral high ground, but a calculated negotiation. She knows what we are up against. 

Deviation is hard. Deviation is made hard (Ahmed, 2020, p. 42).

The funding body representative knows that the ‘use’ of participation might be something other than participation. When the word ‘co-design’ gets used so often, it becomes useful in other ways too. I imagine that, unlike me, she sees resistance to the status quo through participation as the non-performative (Ahmed, 2018) and a more palatable and predictable participation as what ultimately enables real outcomes to incrementally make their way into existence. To make feminist futures actually possible, she needs to make sure that your ideas have a fighting chance of consideration. Even though I’m the one speculating the future scenarios, I realise she is operating on a longer practical time scale. She is working beyond the obstacles she knows are on the way, towards a vision of what could happen next if the project gets through those immediate barriers. Maybe she can see this vision because she is able to pass through where others cannot. This is the first time I’ve wondered if she might be thinking about you too. 

It is strange to see her this way. We have different orientations to this work, but I now notice a shared privilege to decide just how much our own participation will disrupt the status quo. We can design the affects of our participation and decide just how much, and in what way, the participation we designed for you affects change. I feel confronted by this sudden alignment. In our work, we are not the ultimate decision-makers, but the structures we are both working within already extend our shape (Ahmed, 2012), so coming up against or trying to shift these structures is our choice. How we make shifts, despite what we come up against, is our practice (Ahmed, 2017).

It is late now and the only light in the room is coming from my monitor. I have lost momentum and I am staring past the screen. I’m thinking about Audre Lorde (1984) addressing white feminists, famously pointing out that we will never dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools. My eyes gaze blankly into the darkness, where they can see a toolbox, larger than the room I am in. It is heavy, creaking, already overflowing with methods and materials from other design sprints and social innovation projects. Is my makeshift ‘feminist’ card game in there? 

This project has been about making shifts, about carefully questioning dominant norms and assumptions. And I am left wondering: at what point do these playful materials I’m designing become a shifty move, rather than a move that helps shift power? Maybe while sitting here, I am just shifting in this broken chair: putting myself in a more comfortable position, but not shifting the situation:

To live a feminist life is to make everything into something that is questionable. The question of how to live a feminist life is alive with question as well as being a life question (Ahmed 2017, p. 2).

I export my cards template and send it off with the instructions. I hope I can get the approval to use it. I head to bed wanting to know more about how others navigate this practice, how others adapt and make changes to get around all the large and small obstacles they come up against. I want to know how they might have done it differently. Feminist frameworks for design and feminist theories have been helpful for orienting me in this work, but less helpful in moments when following this orientation creates clashes with forces from opposing directions. Knowing about feminism does not seem to make it easier to decide when and where to make-do to make change possible. Or whether I need to make/do something differently to make change possible. I have learned so much from co-design methods and activities shared by other practitioners. But I wonder about the personal experiences and forces that shaped how these methods came to be. What are all the tiny ways we’re trying to make shifts and make change possible? What are others coming up against?

And when deviation is so hard, what about everything we come to understand through not making change possible? What about these moments when you and I come up against something that will not shift? What does it mean for you if it turns out that part of what will not shift is me?