Design Education Futures: Reflections on Feminist Modes and Politics

This is a pivotal time for design education, as widely discussed in the context of the “Beyond Change” conference. It is a time to consider possible and, even, preferred futures of our field. Our students and future generations of designers are demanding equality, sustainability, and other paradigms than those historically dominating the design profession and education. What do we want for the future, what do we want to be different, and how can we go about making that future happen?

Raising the question of difference, of different or preferred futures, is also a call for criticality. Through my years as a designer and then as a researcher, I have come to appreciate the role and power of critical theory and practice. One role of critical theory is to examine everyday life, to ask how particular norms, hegemonies, and in/exclusions are constructed and (re)produced. Practices of critical historiography ask such questions of the past, and critical futures studies interrogate the future. Further, feminist critical modalities explicitly explore how things could be otherwise. Taken into practice, theory is not neutral – in questioning, naming, and framing, it may destabilize how things were before and open new possibilities for thought and action.

Now is a time for such criticality in design education, for identifying what could and should be different, for aspiring and acting toward our preferred future. Here, I explore some of the everyday building blocks of design education, namely those of design canons and curricula, academic and research conventions. In order to explore these critically, and in relation to difference, I take a feminist perspective. By feminism here, I refer not only, or even primarily, to issues of gender and gender inequality. Feminist theory has become a powerful tool for interrogating the multiple, intersecting variables comprising the human condition, social relations, and societal hierarchies, which result in inequality as experienced by many people and cultures. In this respect, design has progressed. Increasingly, we have been making critical, feminist, and decolonial theories our own, adapting these to our practices as designers, educators, and researchers, and building, as architectural theorist Hélène Frichot puts it, “feminist design power tools.”

In this essay, I write in the first person, from my own experience and work, referencing many others by name. For me, this is a feminist approach to writing. Donna Haraway articulates all knowledge as, unavoidably, situated, embodied, and partial, an understanding that has been crucial not only for feminist theory but also for “research through practice” in design. Positioning myself and others is my refusal of the so-called “God trick” of supposed universality and neutrality. It’s also a way to express a personal stake in, among other things, (design education) futures.