CN04 - Design and sexism: assembling a community of care

Conveners: Tanveer Ahmed, Sarah Pennington, Mathilda Tham, Juliette Kristensen, & Harriet Harriss

Despite an ever-growing body of feminist design practitioners, researchers, educators and digital platforms, gender inequalities persist in design education and the design industries. This conversation takes as its starting point the need to further interrogate and expose practical manifestations of sexism, and the epistemological biases and structural hierarchies that interplay in perpetuating gender inequality. Our motivating research questions for the DRS Conversation are: how does ‘everyday sexism’ manifest in design in the University? What are the situations, products, processes, resources, procedures, practices, languages that we can point to as examples of these deeply rooted gender scripts that can serve to
highlight sexism in design? And then, how can we use design criticality, creativity and care to make change? What are the sensitivities required for treating an ‘issue of concern’ like sexism as a 'matter of care’? Through assembling this conversation on the topic of sexism, we hope to gather a ‘community of care’ around this contentious issue of concern.

Click here for full Conversation details.