Participatory design meets gender equality at European higher education institutions

Iivari, Netta; Tervo, Erkki; Käsmä, Marjukka; Heikkinen, Mervi

doi:10.1080/15710882.2023.2215742

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 67 publications

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“…For example, inclusive design was originally developed to address the needs of people with disabilities but now tries to address a wider range of factors that can lead to exclusion, such as gender and socio-economic status (Szlavi and Guedes, 2023). Participatory design involves users as co-designers and co-creators of design solutions, giving them a voice and a stake in the design process, and more recently began to tackle gender equality issues (Iivari et al, 2023). Design for social innovation (Manzini, 2015) and autonomous design (Escobar, 2018) are perhaps the most relevant frameworks, as they focus on empowering people at the local level through collaborative design activities.…”

Section: Meaning Of Empowerment For Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dis/re-orienting design through norm-critical gender lenses: an educational case in Turkey

Yetiş,

Bakırlıoğlu

2024

Front. Sociol.

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Design, as a practice of developing solutions beyond products, and increasingly services and policies, inevitably poses an impact on gender (in)equality which remains largely unrecognized by design practitioners. This paper advocates the urgent need for adopting gender lenses in design education for sustainable cultural transformation through proper recognition of the complexity of any societal and cultural issue, power relations and inequalities, and introduces an initial attempt through a graduate-level educational design project. Throughout the project, students critically reflected on existing orientations in designing to develop norm-critical gender lenses, contained the resultant disorientation emerging from the contrast between their critical approaches and local contexts, and explored novel directions as reorientation to address four different societal and cultural issues and develop 11 design outcomes aiming at gender equality, social justice-oriented empowerment, and cultural transformation. The authors analyzed the design processes and outcomes to reveal opportunities and challenges for developing and deploying norm-critical gender lenses in tackling complex, intersecting socio-cultural and political issues, under three themes: gender stereotypes, norms, expectations, and roles; intersectional power relations and inequalities embedded in the social structure; and social justice-oriented empowerment beyond the market-oriented individualistic neoliberal order. A shift in the perceptions of the role of designers, from creator/problem-solver to facilitator/participant, and design outcomes, from absolute solutions to intermediaries of sociological and political imaginations, is found crucial in this endeavor, which requires safe spaces for future designers to reflect on existing orientations, contain disorientation with negative capability, and explore novel ways through reorientation.

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Section: Meaning Of Empowerment For Designmentioning

confidence: 99%