Book Review: Alison Place's Feminist Designer and a Collective Call to Change

From each other, we learn and together, we change.

That is the underlying reprise of the newly published book Feminist Designer, the first book in nearly three decades to examine feminist thinking in design.

Edited by Alison Place, Feminist Designer: On the Personal and Political in Design was published in September 2023 by the MIT Press. It examines the intersection of design and feminist theory, but doesn’t stop at representation. The book expands on "the how and why" of design in the context of feminism and disrupting power hierarchies. 

The bold purple volume features contributions from 43 different writers from 16 countries, outlining how they use feminist thinking in their creations and environments. Through essays, interviews and narratives, Place collects a menagerie of examples that begin to scrape the surface of the moving target of feminism. The various viewpoints recognize the intersectionality of feminist identities and multiplicity of perspectives that go into changing our world.

Split into six sections, Feminist Designer covers power, knowledge, care, plurality, liberation, and community — each introduced by an Alison Place essay. Throughout the various topics, each essay or interview comes down to the underlying key word together.

For example, in the plurality introduction, Place poses the argument that seeing relationships — between parts of a system, people and systems, and designers and people — is essential to plural understandings of people and their problems and helps us "respond to trouble" out of a sense of care over those for whom we design.

Likewise, in the knowledge section, human-computer interaction designer Maryam Mustafa reminds readers that when we design for someone, we should design with them, rather than making things worse by assuming that we are making them better.

Within the community section, industrial designer and education Victor G. Martinez recounts a story of collecting key words from Indigenous and women's ways of knowing. "Their findings reveal pathways for feminist ways of designing that center empowerment, collaboration, humility, respect, authenticity, and equity," he wrote, highlighting the inherent collective nature of these identities.

Some of the perspectives contradict each other, but that adds to the conversation — while we might not always agree, our differences contribute to a well-rounded society and understanding and support of those differences make us stronger.

But how do we move past words into action in the design industry? How do we translate arguments into spaces and products that help us move forward together?

"If design mediates our relationship to established power structures — whether they be familial, institutional, historical, economic, political, cultural, or social — then every design decision either reinforces or subverts a power dynamic," Place wrote.

The book challenges us to take a step back in every moment of the design process to consider how our creations and workflows respond to power.

Are we creating caring and encouraging learning environments for emerging designers? Does our design cater to an idealized user or function with flexibility for multiple people? Did we listen to fix or did we listen to understand and support others in creating their own solutions?

All of these questions and more are up for discussion in Feminist Designer.