Preface by Marzia Aricò
I met Daisy by chance. Someone saw one of her presentations on Feminist Design. While they were speaking about it, I thought: I've got to connect with this woman. I did, and little did I know! Our conversation was inspiring, illuminating, and eye-opening. I immediately invited her to write a piece for Design Mavericks. She put together one of my favorite pieces on this blog.
Enjoy it. Before we start, please take a moment to subscribe to the blog if you haven't yet. Much appreciated.
My new year's resolution is to stay true to my feminist values in everything that I do.
My friend and feminist co-conspirator Renee was standing in my kitchen a few weeks ago watching me wrestle with a box of tea. I gave up on the ridiculous opening mechanism and passed it to her to try. After a few moments, she exclaimed “someone DESIGNED this! They actually sat down, and thought…oh, yes, now this is a good idea to put out into the world!”. Since it was only tea, we rolled our eyes at our fellow designers, laughed a little, and decided to just tear the box apart.
Throughout our PhDs in the healthcare domain, we have often turned to each other with some variation of “what the hell… someone designed this!”. Except inequitable, oppressive healthcare systems are not boxes of tea, and it hasn’t made us laugh.
Have you thought about whether the things you put out into the world reflect your personal values lately? Or stopped to consider the ripple effect of the things you’ve designed? If not, consider this your new year's call to action!
We must begin making our design decisions with care if we want to build equitable, nourishing and joyful futures!
Personally, I am particularly excited about the transformative power of feminist thought in design practices. It has completely changed the way I think about my role as a designer, and has allowed me to align my personal feminist values with the work I do day to day.
Curious about the value that feminist design approaches could bring to you, your design process, and the final designs you push out into the world?
Read on for some Feminism in Design 101!
Feminism: A framework for equity based on gender, gender expression, sex, and sexuality as understood through social theories and political activism, with the goal of achieving equity for women and marginalized communities.
My current flavour of feminism: Radical intersectional feminism - the idea that patriarchal systems are at the roots cause of inequity, and that we cannot understand gender based discrimination as separate from other forms of oppression, such racism, classism, ableism or homophobia because they intersect and reinforce one another.
Feminism in design: Ways of designing products, systems, services, and futures that question and challenge the dominant patriarchal culture or narrative and instead centers the experiences and knowledge of marginalized groups.
My Own Journey Towards Feminist Design Practices
First, I want to share my own journey towards feminist design practices, in the hopes that you might see your own experience in it.
I was working on a healthcare project for cardiac rehabilitation, exploring how digital tools might support the delivery of nutritional care. I did all the things that we've been taught to do as designers, and long story short, I created a food tracking chatbot that made it easier for patients to log what they ate and share it with a nutritionist.
In this project, two very important things happened for me.
First, I learned just how drastically women are disadvantaged at every step of the cardiac care pathway.
They are diagnosed and treated slower and less accurately1, they are referred less often to life-saving cardiac rehabilitation2 , and even if they are referred, they are less likely to enroll3 or complete the program4. Why? Well, women report that cardiac rehabilitation is not tailored to their lived experience5 or aligned with their values6. These disadvantages are also, of course, compounded across lines of marginalization -- if you are queer, if you are fat, if you are disabled, if you are Black, or Brown, or have a lower socio-economic status, if you have migrated, or if you don’t speak the primary language of the country where you live.
Second, I started to get very uncomfortable with the disconnect between my personal values, and the futures I was designing.
In my personal life, I was a raging feminist with a passion for body politics and liberation7 . At work, I was designing a food tracking chat bot. Presentations of the project would be met with “wow, what a great idea”, “the burden reduction!”, “the cost reduction!”. But on the way out, in discussion with mostly women, we would say, “but I wouldn't want to use it... Those apps always make me feel guilty, and ashamed,”, “those apps triggered my disordered eating”, or “those apps make me feel generally crap about myself”.
and I would say I'm sorry, I get it, me too.
This project came to an end, and I had some time to reflect, and realize that I don't want to be designing experiences that make women feel crap about themselves. How can we be designing for women’s “health” while ignoring these very real lived experiences of technology?
I went looking for design practices which closer aligned with my personal values, and which could give me some handholds of how to navigate challenging the status quo in design that frames women’s bodies as problems to be solved.
This is where I arrived at the wonderful world of feminist design methodologies, approaches, and practices.
Since then, I have been using them to critique food tracking applications for being rooted in anti-fat bias and neoliberalism (hopefully published soon!), and co-imagining what the future of feminist nutrition care might look like (if you would like to imagine together, let’s drink tea!).
Applying feminist design practices can take many forms and knowing where to start can feel overwhelming. While there are some great context specific methodologies8, I have found that the most practical step to start designing in a more feminist way is to consider feminist values and how they might translate into practice. We can embody them as designers, we can make them integral to our design processes, and they can come alive in our designs.
Four Feminist Design Practices
Below I share four feminist considerations and some trigger questions to get you started.
1. Power
The first practice integral to being a feminist designer is critically examining power. This requires us as designers to do deep self-work and reflection, and can also be a meaningful exercise to do as a team — not only on the power of personal identities, but also reflecting on the power that we have in the role of designer, and how we might re-distribute that power more equitably.
We can ask ourselves:
What privilege do I have?
What biases do I carry?
How does my own identity impact the work I do?
In our design practices, we can think about:
What are the power dynamics between stakeholders?
Who holds the most power? Who has the least?
Who gets to “give out” power? Who gets “given” the illusion of power?
2. Cultural and Historical Context
The second is the importance of understanding the cultural and historical context of the work we do. Designing is inherently political — services and systems do not exist in a vacuum, and inequity is a systemic issue which touches everything.
We can ask ourselves:
What is the cultural narrative around this design space?
How has gender discrimination / colonialism / racism / influenced this design space? How does it continue to?
Who has framed this design space? Who has not been involved?
In our design practices, we can think about:
Where do we get our data from this on?
How is the context we’re designing for unique?
Is this design space a site of resistance? Has it been in the past?
3. Knowledge
The third value essential to feminist design practice is knowledge. Feminist design values lived experiences as a valid source of knowledge. It emphasizes that personal experiences, especially those of marginalized groups, can provide unique insights and understandings that are often erased or marginalized in traditional academic and intellectual discourse.
We can ask ourselves:
Whose knowledge do we value? What type of knowledge do we value?
Whose expertise is considered legitimate?
Are we engaging with knowledge generated outside of academia and design?
In our design practices, we can think about:
Using non-extractionary co-design and participatory design practices
Getting rid of personas based on stereotypes
Actively seeking out rich stories from marginalized people using qualitative methods
Paying for the expertise of activists who are working for change in the area.
4. Complexity and Plurality
The final considerations I want to share are complexity and plurality. When practicing feminism through design, we must acknowledge that reality is messy and there is not a quick fix. Life is complex, and it is often in the spaces where we try to simplify it, that we cut out the experiences of marginalized groups. Feminist design acknowledges the plurality of experiences that exist in the world -- many worlds exist within our one world.
We can ask ourselves:
Which binaries do the services you design reinforce?
Do you have different perspectives in your design team?
What about when you are doing user research?
In our design practices, we can think about:
Making complexity visible and accessible for stakeholders to engage with.
Naming the dominant narratives present within the system you’re designing and highlighting the alternative ones, even when they add complexity.
Examining how your work reinforces norms about binary gender, ability, values, health, life trajectories, and desires.
Seeking out perspectives different than your own and making those experiences visible across maps and tools.
By now, you have probably realized that luckily, there is no one way to do feminist design. As Diana di Prima aptly said, no one way works… it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.
As we ring in a new era of design approaches, I look forward to seeing more feminist thought in the mix so we can all start pushing!
Garcia, M., Mulvagh, S. L., Bairey Merz, C. N., Buring, J. E., & Manson, J. E. (2016). Cardiovascular disease in women: clinical perspectives. Circulation research, 118(8), 1273-1293.
Colella, T. J., Gravely, S., Marzolini, S., Grace, S. L., Francis, J. A., Oh, P., & Scott, L. B. (2015). Sex bias in referral of women to outpatient cardiac rehabilitation? A meta-analysis. European journal of preventive cardiology, 22(4), 423-441.
Way, K. L., & Reed, J. L. (2019). Meeting the needs of women in cardiac rehabilitation: is highintensity interval training the answer?. Circulation, 139(10), 1247-1248.
Resurrección, D. M., Motrico, E., Rubio-Valera, M., Mora-Pardo, J. A., & Moreno-Peral, P. (2018). Reasons for dropout from cardiac rehabilitation programs in women: A qualitative study. PLoS One, 13(7), e0200636.
Supervía, M., Medina-Inojosa, J. R., Yeung, C., Lopez-Jimenez, F., Squires, R. W., Pérez-Terzic, C. M., ... & Thomas, R. J. (2017, April). Cardiac rehabilitation for women: a systematic review of barriers and solutions. In Mayo Clinic Proceedings (Vol. 92, No. 4, pp. 565- 577). Elsevier.
Sanderson, B. K., Shewchuk, R. M., & Bittner, V. (2010). Cardiac rehabilitation and women: what keeps them away?. Journal of Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation and Prevention, 30(1), 12- 21.
Body polictics are about the way that the body you have impacts how you get to engage with the world.
Black Feminist Technoscience: Sojourner Truth, Storytelling, and a Framework for Design.(Jihan Sherman. 2023).
Towards Response-able PD: Putting Feminist New Materialisms to Work in the Practices of Participatory Design (Suvi Pihkala and Helena Karasti. 2022).
Troubling Design: A Design Program for Designing with Women’s Health (Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, 2020).