Changing Design from Margins to Centre : Developing Feminist Tactics for a more just Design Discipline

A new generation of feminist activists such as Amanda Gorman, educators like Lesley-Ann Noel and design researchers like Ece Canli are continuing to struggle facing resistance to change, due to patriarchal power dynamics and white supremacist attitudes. In the past years I have developed an understanding for feminist perspectives in design and am now wondering how to take this understanding with me into the professional design industry and design research, and how I can connect to people who are already there doing similar work. My entry point into this project is from a queer feminist point of view, for others it might be from a sustainability perspective. And even though we all come from different angles, we still all deal with questions of how discrimination in design can be dissolved. This project searches ways where to position oneself in the system as feminist designers, and where within design we can have an impact and how to expand this impact from an individual level to a systemic level. This project offers an exploration of how we can bring norm-critical conversations and anti-oppressive approaches to practise in the design industry. Through a decolonial queer feminist lens (Canli, 2017 and Vergès 2022) it is investigating issues of design‘s entanglement with systemic inequalities and values that are rooted in dominant cultural/societal perspectives and systems. All these oppressive systems are interconnected and intersectional (Crenshaw). They have in common that they privilege one group and make life harder for another group, based on specific characteristics. And then connect this to your perspective: With a feminist activist toolkit this project suggests one way of “staying with the trouble” and how to challenge binary regimes from within the design discipline. The activist toolkit is suggesting a form of practice to create connections which increase critical thinking on a reflective empowering journey to equity. It is one idea of how we can change design from margins to centre and develop feminist tactics for a more just design discipline. Furthermore, it assists dialogues to unfold concepts of how design embodies binaries in visuals, spatial, and other material practices and proposes a strengthening of allyship, to step by step bridging the gap between academia and industry, and between circular and linear thinkers.