Designers Are Taught to Think of Their Work as Neutral. It’s Not.
Feminist design can show up in anything from the apps we use to the healthcare we receive. The issue is prioritizing it.
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Women are routinely designed out of the world.
From cars, where women are 47% more likely to be seriously injured because crash test dummies are based on the so-called average male, to fashion, where women’s clothing is so often designed without the convenience of, say, pockets. The consequences of these design oversights range from deadly serious (cars) to mildly irritating (cue the hashtag #GiveMePocketsOrGiveMeDeath).
But that is just the beginning of the story.
In a new book, Alison Place, who heads up the graphic design program at the School of Art at the University of Arkansas, has gathered contributions from 43 people in 16 countries who are changing the status quo in design. It’s a popular subject: Place received 140 responses to an early open call for contributions. “It was astronomical—far more than I expected,” Place said.
The resulting collection of essays and interviews—gathered under the title, “Feminist Designer: On The Personal and Political in Design”—shows how design is contributing to cultural, political, and economic change for all. The subjects it covers are often overlooked, including “mother-centered design,” disability design, and health in marginalized communities.
This month, Place, along with co-creator, the designer and developer Megan Dieudonné, launched a related project, the Feminist Design Archive, an open source digital archive documenting the work of feminist designers.
In a conversation with The Persistent, Place discusses some of the subjects of the book, including why design isn't just personal—it's political. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
What do you mean when you say “feminist design?”
I get asked this a lot. The point of feminist design is not to create another set of instructions, or another set of ideals or a prescription for how you act or work in a certain way. That would be incongruent with feminism itself, because feminism is about questioning power. It is about questioning norms and collaborating with people to do those things. Feminist design is more of a mindset. It's more of a way of doing.
Your book focuses on the “personal and the political.” How does design relate to politics?
It’s a hard question, because designers are taught to be “neutral agents.” But that's the mindset my book aims to address—it’s about embracing design as a very political act and the job of a designer as a very political role.
As a designer, politics should shape all of the decisions that you make, the types of work that you do, the way that you work with people, the way that you work with clients. It connects to every single issue that's at stake [in politics] in some way, shape, or form. Designers don't often realize their participation in those issues or their obligation or responsibility to address them.
A 2020 tweet from the designer and social entrepreneur Antionette Carroll, which you feature in the book, caught my attention: "Systems of oppression, inequality, and inequity are by design. Therefore, they can be redesigned." What are some examples of everyday designs that we just accept as the way things are?
That tweet ages like a fine wine because it reveals more and more to us as we go through the world. It sounds like it's addressing these massive systems like voting systems or social systems, which is true. But there is so much replicated in day-to-day ways of interacting with the world. Something as simple as an app on your phone, or the way that workplace culture and systems in the workplace happen.
Often it is really invisible: It could be something huge like the maternal healthcare system. But it can be granular: The constraints placed on your communication with another person through digital tools, for example.
And the context is critical, the historical context, the political context, but just the context of the design process and the design background of how something comes to be. It's in everything.
I am becoming increasingly skeptical of design thinking, the concept that anyone interested in social change–not just trained designers–can contribute to product innovation by following a set of routines. Can you tell me a bit about why it doesn’t align with feminist values?
When it comes to thinking of design through a feminist lens, there are some really great examples in the book that talk about how power is distributed to people in the design process.
One of the people in the book who speaks really eloquently about this is Jenn Roberts [founder of the collective the Colored Girls Liberation Lab]. The role of a designer should be a facilitator: You're no longer focused on output of artifacts and systems—you're focused on building relationships in communities; you're focused on allocating and acquiring resources to empower people to fix their own problems. It's a complete reversal of what we've been taught through the design thinking lens.
Design thinking has become a bit of a strawman—it's just so easy to tear it down these days. But it is really important that we replace it with something that is specific to context and communities.
Talk to me about fighting the “typatriarchy”—the idea that even typefaces have patriarchal underpinnings?
One of my interviews is with Aasawari Kulkarni, whose work on typography and how it relates to the patriarchal nature of design is really important. She articulates in the book that for hundreds of years, all of the typefaces were designed by men. And today, still, most of the typefaces we use were designed by men.
There's a complete obfuscation of who's behind a typeface, of who actually created it. What was their intention? What’s their identity? Kulkarni says in her interview that it never occurred to her that the identity of the designer would make a difference. That was her lightbulb moment. It was like, ‘Oh wait. I'm a person who grew up in India. I am a woman of color in the United States. I am shaped by all these other aspects of my identity. How does that actually inform the design choices I'm making? How does that inform the typeface that I'm designing?’
Her typeface Nari is a really great example of how you do design in a feminist way and also end up with an artifact that is inherently feminist.
One of your interviews is with the founders of Nyssa, a company that makes products for menstruation, menopause, and for rehabilitation after birth. How is that sort of design changing the conversation about postpartum care?
I found Nyssa because I was one of those new moms on the internet being like, “Who do I talk to? How do I find out about this?” The year that I had my baby was the year that Nyssa launched its podcast, The Unmentionables.
Some of these [topics] seem more commonplace today, but five years ago not many podcasts were talking about pelvic floors, breastfeeding, or tearing during childbirth. I got an education and I also felt extremely empowered being part of a community of other mothers experiencing those things. I knew from listening to the way they spoke that they were trying to change the way we talk about women's health.
My conversation with Eden Laurin and Ellen Kellogg, Nyssa’s founders, got me thinking a lot about how mothers, in particular, pass along their way of navigating those early weeks and months of parenthood to their children. That was one of my favorite interviews—I cried in the middle of it several times, because if you've never felt that support before and you finally experience it, whether it's through a podcast or a person or a company that makes a product that helps you, it hits you straight in your heart. It's really meaningful.
Emma Haslett
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