Insight: Research revealed that a combination of high housing costs, high living expenses and commuting pressures means that women often have to have a career 'trade-off' between ongoing career enhancement and maternity.
Response: A speculative 'virtual design city' where designer's are able to work to work remotely and to catch up on work while they sleep – ostensibly, to open up 'free time' in for designers' to be able to cope with family pressures. The city uses a dream-like aesthetic, and was built using Minecraft brick by brick using the in-game features. The 'gamification' refers to the gamification of the workplace. In theory, each of the major studios would be able to own space in the 'city'. The designers work would export after each night (day of work) to real life. The world was also built with a punitive capacity – any deadlines missed / inappropriate behaviour and the perpetrator can be sent to the an in-game feature called The Nether which represents a nightmarish hell-scape.
nsight : There are many hurdles that present themselves to women when trying to climb the career hierarchy particularly family / home life, pay gap, use of language, men, confidence gap, and, other women.
Response : A coat with coloured, oversized, shaped pockets that represent the hurdles mentioned. The size of the pockets convey physically, the weight, and the enormity of these hurdles on women. This is also shown through the challenging nature of wearing the garment. The pockets get in the way, are too large to easily manoeuvre around people, further emphasising the struggle of navigating the hurdles that women contend with. In wearing the attire, perhaps to work, there’s potential for a dialogue to be opened in everyday work life about the lack of representation of women in leadership roles within the design industry.
Insight: Through a series of interviews, women within architectural education and industry shared concerns and experiences surrounding the societal pressure of having children at a certain point in their career. It's a long journey to becoming fully qualified architect, and the age when you’re freshly qualified aligns with the age where women feel most pressured to start a family. Many felt the need to choose between a family or a career.
Response: In a dystopian future, maternity and paternity leave has been eradicated to aid with the UK's work ethic and economy. It is a legal necessity for children aged 0-4 to be a part of the workplace with their parents. To assist, the government has developed a children’s board book to introduce them to working life, and to understand the dynamics and expectations of their new workplace.
Insight: A female driver or front passenger who is wearing her seat belt is 17 percent more likely than a male to be killed when a crash takes place. And a 2019 study shows that for a female occupant, the odds of being injured in a frontal crash are 73 percent greater than the odds for a male occupant.
Response: Matryoshka dolls are used metaphorically, as a design paradigm, known as the “matryoshka principle” or “nested doll principle”. It denotes a recognizable relationship of 'object-within-similar-object'. This is evidently how designers see women when it comes to safety. Women are not scaled down men which is, however, what the dummies used to represent women in crash tests are. The doll set takes inspiration from other traditional Matryoshka dolls but on closer viewing, the dangers behind this data gap are exposed.
The test dummy as the outer doll seemingly represents safety and rigorous testing. The second doll is the most decorated and life like, representing the female with statistics for increased likelihood of moderate injuries compared to a male driver or front passenger. By the third ‘doll’ which states, with a bright red background, that females are 17% more likely to die than their male equivalent, there should be no doubt in the audience’s mind what the point of the set is.
Insight: Why is it that gender disparity within industry is considered a woman’s problem to navigate? Regardless of a woman’s competence, talent, and confidence in her creative work, she will still more than likely be met with obstacles as a result of unconscious bias and sexism. Women are not the problem, the male-dominated industry and its insistence on being the norm is the problem. So what if the men of design became more active change agents in achieving gender equality in industry? This is an industry that prides itself on being forward thinking. Therefore, designers owe it to themselves to turn their critical eye inward and seek to find creative solutions to the issues impacting women within the industry.
Response: Using the existing Unequal Stories platform, I set out to challenge the design industry directly by devising a brief specifically for the men of design. This brief asks them to utilise their skills as designers and their privilege as men to play a more active role in tackling gender inequality. Accompanied by an open letter, this brief would be emailed as a pdf directly to leading male creative directors and designers across the design industry. The open letter and brief could also be disseminated via design press such as It’s Nice That, to spread awareness of the project to the wider design community.
Insight: In today's design world the data show that 78% of the workforce is made up by men and only 11% of leading roles are occupied by women. The numbers are merciless. To change requires a great economic and mental effort but the benefits derived from it have been widely documented. Moreover, the ease with which this data can be found shows that the lack of change within industry is not dictated by ignorance but by choice. If companies continue to actively block diversity, they should be p to face the issue head on.
Response: The vision at the start of the project was to exaggerate the problem to get attention. Thus was born the idea of creating a mask to literally take the voice away from female employees. Creating a blueprint of the mask itself gives anyone interested the opportunity to create one, turning an object of oppression into a tool for protest. Although the idea may be considered controversial, the point is not to find a solution but to get people talking about the problem.
Insight: Coming from a classical music background, my instinctive response to Unequal Stories was to use this industry as a comparative lens for reinterpreting data concerning female representation across the creative industries. A few examples of findings which struck me most were:
- Women were considered too provocative for a seat in the Wiener Philharmoniker orchestral pit until 1997.
- Many design studios won't disclose their design teams, or even what percentage of them are female.
- On average, only 36% of UK architects in the ten highest-earning practices were female in 2019.
Response: Given the lack of transparency around gender equality in the creative industries, I wanted to collate my findings in a single space, where one could easily draw comparisons between various fields. 'A seat at the table' draws attention to the inequality in creative industries by interpreting the term quite literally. A website with simple pink vs. blue illustrations of chairs occupied by women vs. men in studios, in orchestra pits, at desks etc. forces visitors to acknowledge the stark imbalance, with blue drowning out pink in many of these workplaces. The use of the gendered colours was meant to visually problematise they issues at stake.
Falmouth University: Girly-Toys – Cristina Vasile
Insight: According to the Design Council the product design field is the most unequal sector within the creative industry with women making up only 5.3% of the workforce, less than 14% of which are not even in a senior position. Further analysis reveals that in 19 out of 20 eligible design occupations, women earn on average 18% less than men. This discrepancy is strongly linked to the gender division we experience from a young age with toys, which deters children’s perception on career opportunities and cultivate enthusiasm towards traditional gender norms.
Response: Girly-Toys is meant to showcase the absurdity behind dividing boys and girls through toys from a young age but to also spark conversation on the matter of the dangers of gender bias. The problem with barriers that women face in their professional as well as personal life start from childhood years when they are expected to play with toys that prepare them for domestic roles rather than toys that encourage critical thinking. The issue appears clearer when the situation is reversed.
Insight: In the Uk, 78% of the design industry is male, and 87% of the design industry is white.
Response: Peacock is an application where you can build your own AI White Male designer for virtual work. In the current work from home environment due to the pandemic, your white male AI would be filtered over your own face and move as you move, so your colleagues on Zoom, Teams or any other online work program would see your White Male designer instead. This means you can also apply for jobs without fear of rejection due to your gender or the colour of your skin.
You would realise once you have created your AI that the program is an awareness campaign to shed light on the imbalance in the industry. The project would be part of a much larger campaign aiming to diversify design. The discomfort felt while essentially erasing women and people of colour in the design industry would also make people think about the inequality in the design world.
