Unit 1: Secondary Research

The Catalysts of my Research

Four texts have primarily catalysed this research: The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) by Shulamith Firestone, Gender: Key Concepts in Philosophy (2006) by Tina Chanter, Are we human? Notes on an archeology of design (2017) by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, as well as Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (2019) by Caroline Criado-Perez.

The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970)

• submits the idea that the social class system that impedes equality in society is rooted in the biological reproductive differences between the sexes
• conceptualises a post-revolutionary cybernation in which technological advances are utilised to eliminate ‘sexual classes’ and conceive an equitable structure that is freeing to both sexes (1970, p.202)
• ‘requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduction’ (1970, p.11), which entails threatening the ‘social unit that is organised around biological reproduction and the subjection of women to their biological destiny’: the family.’ (1970, p.206) 
• calls for the creation of tools that would dismantle the nuclear family and by extension, the patriarchy
• is written at a time when racial tensions ran high and brings forth the ‘intricately interwoven’ relationship between ‘sex and racism’ (Firestone, 1970, p.105)

Gender: Key Concepts in Philosophy (2007)

• addresses contemporary questions of gender and sexuality 
• questions the relationship between Marxist/Psychoanalytic Theory and Feminism
• reformulates questions of power and ideology
• emphasises the importance of intersectionality
•  quotes Feminist French philosopher and theorist Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) which highlights the extent to which ‘maleness is understood to be the norm’ within our societal structures (de Beauvoir, 1949)
•  submits the idea that the ‘conflation of universality with masculinity’ extends to several modes of discrimination and privilege, including race, class, sexuality and gender
• points out how women’s crucial role in society has long been disregarded and excluded from analyses of production
•  describes how ‘social trends, customs, beliefs, and prejudices’ ‘limit and prescribe’ Woman’s role in Society (2007, p.14)

Are we human? Notes on an archeology of design (2017)

• discusses the omnipresent nature of design
• sheds light on the malleability of human identity
• explores the maladjustment between human, tool, and environment 
• discusses how design ‘routinely contracts radical inequalities’ as ‘the expansion of the capacity of one group’ is always ‘done at the expense of another.’ (2016, p.70)

Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (2019)

• shows how globally, women do ‘three times the amount of unpaid care work men do.’ (2019, p.40)
• expresses that in a world largely built for and by men, women, which represent half the population, are being systematically ignored
• shows the ways in which invisible bias with a profound effect on women’s lives
• illustrates the hidden ways in which women are forgotten, and the impact this has on their health and well-being

Initial set of Visuals

The initial set of experiments in my Portfolio was inspired by an article written by Caroline Criado-Perez for The Guardian (>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/28/invisible-women-by-caroline-criado-perez-review<).

Titled The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes, the article criticised how mens’ lived experiences have been taken to represent those of humans overall – thus ignoring half of the World’s population. This female-shaped ‘absent presence’, as Criado-Perez describes it, is the gender data gap. The consequences of this gap range from uncomfortable to deadly.

Despite being less likely to be involved in car crashes, data shows that women are ‘47% more likely to be seriously injured’, ‘71% more likely to be moderately injured’ and ‘17% more likely to die.’ That’s because cars have been designed using car crash-test dummies based on the ‘average’ male.

It is not until the mid 2000s that female crash-test dummies were introduced and even then, the female dummy is not representative of the female anatomy as ‘It is just a scaled-down male dummy.’

1. Women are Not Scaled Down Men is a quote by Criado-Perez (quoted above)
2. One-Size-Fits-Men is the title of a chapter in Invisible Women by Criado-Perez
3. OMEN represents the marginalisation of women in our contemporary societal model
4. WO MEN emphasises androcentrism
5. Represents the exclusion of women
6. DUMMY represents two dolls in a car; a crash test dummy as well as a sex doll. This piece represents, both, the trivialisation of women’s wellbeing as well as the objectification of women.

Contrasted against a black background, the capitalised bold white text sends out a plethora of important messages. The red accents represent power and passion.

In commerce, a level playing field is a concept about fairness, not that each player has an equal chance to succeed, but that they all play by the same set of rules. In a game played on a playing field, such as rugby, one team would have an unfair advantage if the field had a slope. (Level Playing Field via Wikipedia)

This visual represents the unlevelled playing field that contains men and women. The grainy green background is overlayed with faint white text to emulate white paint on grass that would be found at a professional sports playing field. The tennis court is distorted and the man is serving in what seems to be an unfair game. The woman is weighed-down by the burdens of her everyday life.

Unfolding Connections: Koto : What is Branding?

This Unfolding Connections lecture was given by Deanna German from Koto. 

Koto’s design process can be boiled down to the following four steps:

Research: understanding

Strategy: substance

Identity (visual & verbal): inspiration

Delivery: implementation

Fundamentally, a brand is made up of: 

• Brand identity: The core elements that define how a brand looks, sounds, behaves – logo, colour palette, imagery, typography, motion, illustration etc
• Brand strategy: The vision, mission and positioning of a company, how it’s placed in a market, what makes it different
• Brand personality: The emotional qualities we associate with the brand/its overall tone
• Brand communication: How the brand lives across marketing and comms (adverts, brochures, app and website etc.
• Brand experiences: The physical interactions people have with the brand (customers/users/team members)

According to German, a graphic designer is ‘a person who assembles images, type, and/or motion graphics together to create a piece of design.’ A brand designer however, ‘assists in assessing and defining a brand.’

The Paradox is a satirical representation of a woman that is unable to reach the kitchen cabinets. In a world in which women are consistently taking on 3/4 of the World’s care-taking responsibilities (see primary research folder), one would hope that kitchens would be accommodating to them.

Addressing androcentrism

Based on Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, this set of drawings aims to show that male centrism marginalises other individuals and identities.

This series is heavily inspired by a chapter in Are We Human? (2016) by Colomina and Wigley. Indeed, in the context of architecture and design, Colomina and Wigley state how ‘human dimensions become the dimensions of the designed world’ (2017, p.150) That claim has consistently proved itself to be exclusively valid through the lens of the average caucasian man. Aiming to remove these ‘maladjustments between human and environment’ (2017, p.156), human-centring architectural systems (see Kiesler and Le Corbusier) have long been developed to dimension ‘the designed environment on the basis of an idealised “normal” male body.’ (2017, p.157) If design encompasses the capacity to grow the highly-malleable species that is Human (2017, p.23, 205), then design that habitually centres one half of the population must hinder the marginalised half’s capacity to flourish.

This body of work was created using Adobe Photoshop by overlaying drawings on a textured surface to emulate the feel of Da Vinci’s piece.

Caroline Criado-Perez: Gender Data Gap

In her 2019 book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado-Perez mentions the various areas in which women are ignored. The marginalisation of women is evidenced accross several realms that are represented in this labelled riso print:

Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery : Mixing It Up: Painting Today

 This art exhibited contemporary painters whose works are drawn by contemporary political discourse.

An empowering piece by Lisa Brice was particularly interesting to me. Brice reimagines paintings of women from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by liberating them from the restrictive male dominated art history.

‘Sometimes the simple act of repainting an image of a woman previously painted by a man can be a potent shift’, Brice observes. In this painting representing ‘female artists and models in studio settings’, the subjects are said to be performing for themselves and one another and not the male gaze.

Exhibition at the V&A : Bags : Inside Out

This exhibition was attended with the intent to explore the Human / Tool relationship, particularly in the context of women and purses, a long-lived historic relationship.

Described as both an ‘everyday necessity’ as well as a ‘style statement’, bags have been considered as a ‘private possession and a public statement.’

Whilst the (highly ad-placing) exhibition displayed a creative array of bags, I would have hoped that it would have mentioned the sexist undertones that lie under the history of bags.

A 2016 BBC article by Catherine Snowdon titled The hunt for women’s clothes with pockets discusses the aforementioned. Snowdon states how, during earlier days, women relied on their husbands to carry money and other necessities which rendered pockets as unnecessary. During the second World War, ‘women were encouraged to wear trousers and more practical clothing as they went out to work to replace the men who had been sent to fight at the front – this meant pockets became more the norm.’ (2016) In the aftermath of the war, there was a rise in the desire to be ultra feminine; that’s when populations witnesses the disappearance of pockets.

In contemporary times, there are ‘concerns about pockets affecting the lines of the garment, making it sit strangely on a woman’s figure’ (2016) which means that, for women, aesthetics are considered more important than utility. This topic has been brought up by Caroline Criado-Perez in her book Invisible Women (2019). Criado-Perez also states that one of the reasons that women carry bags is because of their inadequate pockets. (2019)

Unfolding Connections: Protest Stencil : Subverting the City

A non-televised, immersive Unfolding Connections lecture was given by a designer from the collaborative political graphic art project Protest Stencil (est. 2016). The group’s projects usually entail creating public-space interventions (or subvertisements) that protest against injustices. Often ad-hacking advertisement spaces using radical messages on carefully designed posters, the lecturer gave interesting pointers on various points of their process.

• Ad-hackers do not require formal art training – anyone can do it
• Simple bold graphic design can garner a lot of attention / legibility
• Ad-hacking can be used as an attempt to democratise public space and take it away from corporations
• Globalisation in the context of ad-hacking: standardisation of products around the world simplify the process
• Ad-hack manifesto is readily available via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U64SvPXUAo8
• Subvertising is less illegal than other kinds of street art as it does not require any damaging

To amplify the voices of the voiceless, Protest Stencil aims to work as closely as possible with the groups’ they subvertise for.

BIOLOGICAL DESTINY : a series of abstract hand-made visuals

The root cause of the exclusion of women from contemporary society can be traced to a universal and rigid societal structure that routinely excludes women and places reproductive differences at the very core of its beliefs. Achieving the full immersion of Woman in contemporary society entails freeing her from the shackles of the patriarchal societal unit that confines her.

This first piece represents the hyper-sexualisation and shaming of women. It depicts a young person getting undressed. The green background colour represents youth. The word ‘shame’ is labelled several times over the piece of clothing that is being removed. In appealing to the male gaze, there is societal-induced shame.

The eyes in the above piece represent the ever-present male gaze. The audience in the bottom is witnessing the societal links between the woman and the biological destiny (represented by the egg) that has been ascribed to her (Shulamith Firestone). The contemporary newspapers aim to represent contemporary society.

An unstable societal structure is represented by a game of Jenga. The structure is held by women, who are both, misrepresented and underrepresented in the media.

Feminist Breakthroughs and Protests

In her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, American feminist author Shulamith Firestone conceptualises a post-revolutionary cybernation in which technological advances are utilised to eliminate ‘sexual classes’ and conceive an equitable structure that is freeing to both sexes (Firestone, 1970, p.202). The creation of this structure requires the ‘revolt of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduction.’ (Firestone, 1970, p.11)

Feminist and women-lead protests have lead to several breakthroughs. Those breakthroughs are documented in the Feminist Breakthroughs in the United Kingdom publication (c.f. portfolio PDF).

Some of these revolutionary strikes/protests include:

• The Matchgirls’ Strike at the Bryant & May factory where women workers fought against the dominating, patriarchal world of matchstick making. 

Outcome: ‘abolition of the system of fining workers for being late, deductions from wages to cover cost of paste and brushes and the recognition of the Union of Women Match Makers by management.’ The strike also lead to several more strikes that aided in the ‘rise of New Unionism.’ (Source: >https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/history/2018/03/21/women-work-and-health-the-match-girls-strike-of-1888/<)

• During the 1968 Ford Strike, Ford sewing machinists halted production at all Ford UK plants to fight for equal pay

Outcome: the 1970 Equal Pay Act that ensured that women were paid the same rate as men for the same work. (Source: >https://www.citywomen.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/gender-equality-timeline.pdf<)

Conceptualising an Impactful Protest Sign

Inspired by the Subverting the City lecture as well as by the ideas posed by feminist theorists, notably Firestone and Chanter, I took it upon myself to create protest signs that would, at least, raise awareness surrounding the aforementioned feminist issues that I had been researching.

Creating an impactful protest (as proposed by Digital Content Strategist Brooke Tully via >https://medium.com/brookes2cents/how-to-design-an-impactful-protest-sign-2d12965f684<) entails:

PLANNING 

• What is the protest fighting towards?

The protest is fighting for the immersion of Woman in contemporary society

• What are the posters’ message approach?

Different approaches, as proposed by Tully:

1. call-to-action approach: clearly informs the audience on what to do/what not to do (eg. ‘Keep your laws off my body’)

2. make-a-stance approach: states why you’re at the protest and why the issue matters to you (eg. ‘Fighting for the rights our mothers won’)

3. get-attention approach: ‘utilises humour, wit, recent events/pop culture, shock value, etc. to get noticed and stand out.’ (eg. ‘Pussy grabs back’)

CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT

• Conceptualising the poster on paper or digitally

DESIGN

• Considering size, colour, font, spacing and busyness

For the above step, I referred to the Protest Stencil lecture.

Making an Impactful Protest Sign

The making process proceeds the conceptualisation. The posters were printed on glossy A3 paper (much like most of the protest signs I’d seen) at my local print shop.

Material to create handles were purchased from the UAL arts shop. They were trimmed to a desired length using a scalpel and a metallic ruler.

The materials were then put together using glue and double-sided tape.

The Protest

All whilst taking precautions, photographs of the signs being held were captured in Leicester Square’s streets.

Faking an AD-HACK

London is overwhelmed by advertisements. Inspired by the Protest Stencil lecture (see above), I captured a series of photographs of public places in which ads are exhibited. I then relied on Photoshop to ad-hack those public spaces.

Unfolding Connections: Greg Bunbury : Design on Purpose

Given by Greg Bunbury, this engaging Unfolding Connections lecture surrounded the topic of social-focused advocacy in design. Bunbury shared ethical ways in which designers could navigate their realms and, taking on an intersectional standpoint, pointed out the importance of acknowledging one’s set of privileges when designing. ‘The value we possess as designers comes from what we think, not what we do’ and ‘what we do impacts what we believe.’ Bunbury encouraged the audience to create and use tools that enable a positive impact on the world.

Bibliography:

• Chanter, T. (2007) Gender: Key Concepts in Philosophy, 1st ed. London: Continuum
• Colomina, B. and Wigley, M. (2016) Are we human?. 1st ed. Lars Müller Publishers
• Criado-Perez, C. (2019) Invisible women. 1st ed. London: Penguin Random House UK
• Firestone, S. (1970) The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. 1st ed. United States and Canada: Bantam Books
• Snowdon, C. (2016) The hunt for women’s clothes with pockets. [online] BBC News. Available at: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37084813> [Accessed 15 January 2022].
• Tully, B. (2017) How to design an impactful protest sign. [online] Medium. Available at: <https://medium.com/brookes2cents/how-to-design-an-impactful-protest-sign-2d12965f684> [Accessed 15 January 2022].