Feminist Designer

Feminist Designer
Author: Alison Place
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2023-09-05
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262375893

A bold and timely collection that brings feminist theory and critical thinking to life through vital, approachable design methods and practices. Feminist Designer brings together a constellation of voices and perspectives to examine the intersection of design and feminist theory. For decades, the feminist refrain within design has hinged on the representation and inclusion of women in the field. This collection, edited by Alison Place, however, is a call to move beyond this narrow application. Feminist design is not just about who does design—it is about how we do design and why. Feminist frameworks for design activism are now more relevant than ever, as they emphasize collaborative processes that aim to disrupt and dismantle power hierarchies while centering feminist ways of knowing and doing. The first book in nearly three decades to address such practices in design, Feminist Designer contains essays, case studies, and dialogues by 43 contributors from 16 different countries. It engages a wide variety of design disciplines, from graphic design to disability design to algorithmic design, and explores key feminist themes, such as power, knowledge, care, plurality, liberation, and community. Through diverse, sometimes conflicting, intersectional perspectives, this book contributes new design methods informed by a multiplicity of feminisms that confront design’s patriarchal origins while ushering in new pathways for making critical and meaningful change. Contributors Jennifer Armbrust, Dina Benbrahim, Madeline Avram Blount, Elizabeth Byrd, Benedetta Crippa, Alexandra Crosby, Laura Devendorf, Rachael Dietkus, Ashley K. Eberhart, Griselda Flesler, Aimi Hamraie, Gaby Hernández, Alexis Hope, Jeff Kasper, Ellen Kellogg, Aasawari Kulkarni, Eden Laurin, Una Lee, Andrew Mallinson, Claudia Marina, Victor G. Martinez, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Margaret Middleton, Maryam Mustafa, Becky Nasadowski, Maya Ober, Nina Paim, Elizabeth Pérez, Heather Snyder Quinn, Cami Rincón, Jenn Roberts, Velvet A. Johnson Ross, In-ah Shin, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, Ayako Takase, Attia Taylor, Rebecca Tegtmeyer, Aggie Toppins, Ilaria Vanni, Joana Varon, Manon Vergerio, Mandy Harris Williams, Sarah Williams

Extra Bold

Extra Bold
Author: Ellen Lupton
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2021-06-25
Genre: Design
ISBN: 1648960227

Extra Bold is the inclusive, practical, and informative (design) career guide for everyone! Part textbook and part comic book, zine, manifesto, survival guide, and self-help manual, Extra Bold is filled with stories and ideas that don't show up in other career books or design overviews. • Both pragmatic and inquisitive, the book explores power structures in the workplace and how to navigate them. • Interviews showcase people at different stages of their careers. • Biographical sketches explore individuals marginalized by sexism, racism, and ableism. • Practical guides cover everything from starting out, to wage gaps, coming out at work, cover letters, mentoring, and more. A new take on the design canon. • Opens with critical essays that rethink design principles and practices through theories of feminism, anti-racism, inclusion, and nonbinary thinking. • Features interviews, essays, typefaces, and projects from dozens of contributors with a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, abilities, gender identities, and positions of economic and social privilege. • Adds new voices to the dominant design canon. Written collaboratively by a diverse team of authors, with original, handcrafted illustrations by Jennifer Tobias that bring warmth, happiness, humor, and narrative depth to the book. Extra Bold is written by Ellen Lupton (Thinking with Type), Farah Kafei, Jennifer Tobias, Josh A. Halstead, Kaleena Sales, Leslie Xia, and Valentina Vergara.

Data Feminism

Data Feminism
Author: Catherine D'Ignazio
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2020-03-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0262358530

A new way of thinking about data science and data ethics that is informed by the ideas of intersectional feminism. Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? The narratives around big data and data science are overwhelmingly white, male, and techno-heroic. In Data Feminism, Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics—one that is informed by intersectional feminist thought. Illustrating data feminism in action, D'Ignazio and Klein show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems. They explain how, for example, an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization, and how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems. And they show why the data never, ever “speak for themselves.” Data Feminism offers strategies for data scientists seeking to learn how feminism can help them work toward justice, and for feminists who want to focus their efforts on the growing field of data science. But Data Feminism is about much more than gender. It is about power, about who has it and who doesn't, and about how those differentials of power can be challenged and changed.

Paradise Rot

Paradise Rot
Author: Jenny Hval
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 119
Release: 2018-10-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 178663385X

Jo is in a strange new country for university and having a more peculiar time than most. In a house with no walls, shared with a woman who has no boundaries, she finds her strange home coming to life in unimaginable ways. Jo's sensitivity and all her senses become increasingly heightened and fraught, as the lines between bodies and plants, dreaming and wakefulness, blur and mesh. This debut novel from critically acclaimed artist and musician Jenny Hval presents a heady and hyper-sensual portrayal of sexual awakening and queer desire.

Design Justice

Design Justice
Author: Sasha Costanza-Chock
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2020-03-03
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262043459

An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival. What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? “Design justice” is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims expilcitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world. This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)—and invites readers to “build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.” Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival.

Design Discourse

Design Discourse
Author: Victor Margolin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 1989-09-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0226505146

The editor has gathered together a body of writing in the emerging field of design studies. The contributors argue in different ways for a rethinking of design in the light of its cultural significance and its powerful position in today's society. The collection begins with a discussion of the various expressions of opposition to the modernists' purist approach toward design. Drawing on postmodernist theory and other critical strategies, the writers examine the relations among design, technology, and social organization to show how design has become a complex and multidisciplinary activity. The second section provides examples of new methods of interpreting and analysing design, ranging from rhetoric and semiotics to phenomenology, demonstrating how meaning is created visually. A final section related to design history shifts its emphasis to ideological frameworks such as capitalism and patriarchy that establish boundaries for the production and use of design.

Designing Gender

Designing Gender
Author: Sarah Elsie Baker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2023-12-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1350273775

This book offers an ideal first step for designers looking to disrupt contemporary design practice by challenging gender inequality. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, it outlines key concepts and applies them to a broad spectrum of design activity. By developing feminist design approaches and methods, it provides a practical resource for designers wanting to make a change. Designing Gender covers essential topics including definitions of sex, gender and sexuality, histories of women in design, parity in professional design practice, diversity of users, non-binary design approaches, and sustainable and equitable futures. Filled with examples from around the world, the book recognises the culturally specific nature of gendered experience. Interviews with designers working in a diverse range of fields including user experience design, visual communication, interaction design and critical design, highlight the challenges and opportunities involved in designing a more equitable society. Each chapter showcases key methods and tools and culminates in hands-on activities.

Designing Knowledge

Designing Knowledge
Author: Bonne Zabolotney
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2024-01-11
Genre: Design
ISBN: 1350319791

By positioning designers and their practices at the center of design studies, Designing Knowledge merges theory and practice to highlight how knowledge creation can contribute to an expanded and more inclusive design practice. Bringing together a rich variety of perspectives, methods and approaches, and by exploring and critiquing current issues in design studies, this book encourages designers to reflect on their work in a new light. Design studies practice is a material and tangible focus on knowledge production and mobilization in the field of design. Throughout 15 chapters featuring a wide range of case studies, design practitioners and theorists address how they produce and mobilize knowledge about design through their practice. Chapters explore how to dismantle the colonial structures of modernist design and depart from the privileged spaces of art historical concepts in design history. They address tensions between traditional Indigenous design and contemporary design practice, discuss how to authentically integrate personhood into practice and explore topics such as designing wellbeing, developing communities of care, informed accountability and principles of the ecocene. They also analyse languages and typographic representations and investigate the nature of the graphic and typographic translation of literary texts, focusing on the writing of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges as a case study. This book elevates the voices of designers and their work and offers insights to professional designers as well as students on how to use these contributions when working on future projects. By highlighting the awareness of designers throughout their practice, this book will inspire others to reflect on their work and share their own knowledge for the benefit of the field of design.

Design and Feminism

Design and Feminism
Author: Joan Rothschild
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 1999
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780813526676

The distinction between the spaces considered public and private or work and home is becoming more blurred. Our streets, parks, dwellings and tools are designed to a "one-size-fits-all" standard, and the responses of the design community to meet diverse needs have been mixed at best. Design and Feminism offers feminist critiques of these inadequate design standards, and suggest ideas, projects, and programs for change.

Critical Digital Pedagogy

Critical Digital Pedagogy
Author: Jesse Stommel
Publisher:
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2020-07-17
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780578725918

The work of teachers is not just to teach. We are also responsible for the basic needs of students. Helping students eat and live, and also helping them find the tools they need to reflect on the present moment. This is exactly in keeping with Paulo Freire's insistence that critical pedagogy be focused on helping students read their world; but more and more, we must together reckon with that world. Teaching must be an act of imagination, hope, and possibility. Education must be a practice done with hearts as much as heads, with hands as much as books. Care has to be at the center of this work.For the past ten years, Hybrid Pedagogy has worked to help craft a theory of teaching and learning in and around digital spaces, not by imagining what that work might look like, but by doing, asking after, changing, and doing again. Since 2011, Hybrid Pedagogy has published over 400 articles from more than 200 authors focused in and around the emerging field of critical digital pedagogy. A selection of those articles are gathered here. This is the first peer-reviewed publication centered on the theory and practice of critical digital pedagogy. The collection represents a wide cross-section of both academic and non-academic culture and features articles by women, Black people, indigenous people, Chicanx and Latinx writers, disabled people, queer people, and other underrepresented populations. The goal is to provide evidence for the extraordinary work being done by teachers, librarians, instructional designers, graduate students, technologists, and more - work which advances the study and the praxis of critical digital pedagogy.