Designing Speculative Futures for Feminism: The Role of Designers and Participants the Exploration of Social Movements

Language is a medium of communication that allows us to categorize, objectify, obscure, or abstract the world around us. While it provides us with structure, it also tightly connects us to societal conventions, which are not always egalitarian in nature. This is particularly relevant as it pertains to the persistence of socially imposed gender disparities - both genders are consistently victimized by the use of negative value judgments and derogatory terms based on appearance, personality, beliefs, or perceived status in relation to their gender. In contemporary society, feminist groups have long attempted to address this issue. Despite this, changes in North American society’s characterization of women and men have been insufficient to rectify the problem. Further, over the past decade the term ‘feminist’ has itself become largely pejorative due to the movement’s lack of cohesive direction and disconnection with prior definitions, as well as various stereotypes associated with the ideology. This thesis explores the potential of textiles and worn or consumer based product based artifacts as means to incite discussion and reflection on the frequent redefining and recontextualizing of the term ‘feminism’ in North American society. To that end, it reviews academic literature and examples of North American popular culture that pertain to both positive and negative uses of the word, and subsequently designs satirical artifacts to break down contemporary feminist discourse and gain an understanding of the polarizing theories within the movement. Phase one includes artifacts created by myself, the designer, while phase two and three contain artifacts created through collaboration and discussion with participants. This body of work describes an evolving generative model in which the designer acts first as an instigator of designed content, to a facilitator of speculative co- creation that draws on participants’ abilities to create narratives and ‘re-imagine’ garments and finally to designer as reactive speculator where participant created artifacts are expanded upon in order to open up sites for further discussion and future actions.