Gender & Design – Design and Society

Review: Alexandra Lange’s Meet Me by the Fountain

Lange highlights the many lessons the design history of malls offers when it comes to designing for a thriving public realm.

About once a year I ask friends to meet by the fountain – the one in front of the railway station near the city I grew up in, in the north of France. This is what the title first brought to mind, and I wasn’t too far off. Lange examines the mall as an American form of architecture that provided a form of privately-owned public space for a wide range of people to meet and congregate. She points that, all of us in their thirties or older probably “has” a mall, its shape and structure living in our brain rent free. A form of architecture developing in the 1940s and expanding after World War 2, it peaks in the 1980s in the US, and I’d say a little later (1990-2000s) in France. The mall was the public realm of the suburbs, however tightly and privately controlled. The book shows how it came to be, and its cultural significance.

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Museums Want You to Think about the Conditions for Art Making

About the Museum of Craft and Design’s Fight and Flight exhibition, collective housing for artists, and books about their homes and studios.

What does it take to be, and continue being, an artist? First and foremost, a place to live. Cities and neighborhoods offering cheap rent often play an important part in establishing new movements. Think the Beats generation and North Beach in San Francisco, the school of Paris in Montparnasse or the role of the Provence landscape in the work of Van Gogh and the impressionists. The Museum of Craft and Design’s Fight and Flight exhibition asks what it takes to continue making art in a region, the Bay Area, known for its astronomical rent and costs of living.

Michelle Yi Martin, *Petaled Cosmos* (2023)

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The Artist is a Parent

What do we miss when we overlook parenthood in artists’ lives?

The Paris Picasso Museum 2023 exhibition,“The Collection in a New Light”, opens with Picasso’s famous portrait of his eldest son, Paulo. Yet, the way fatherhood shaped his work is rarely, if ever, examined. What do we miss when we overlook parenthood in artists’ lives?

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The Making of Heirlooms: Finding an Embroidered Clock

What makes an heirloom? How do ordinary people craft them? And a dive into kits and designs of embroidered clocks.

Street finds are one of the marvels of city life. Over the years, I’ve walked by small treasures and garden variety gifts to the passers-by, from a rare flora to appliances of all stripes. Street finds make inhabitants lives visible, pointing to who moves out, declutters, outgrows.

Then once in a while, there’s the family heirlooms. Walking up Page street towards Upper Haight, I found under a tree a clock boasting a hand-embroidered panel marking the 1988 wedding of the Joyces. I stopped because, while there’s a rich history of embroidered caskets and furniture, I couldn’t remember examples of clocks and well, I wondered how it ended up on the streets.

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Organising a Special Interest Group at ACM CHI

I helped organising two Special Interest Groups during the 2019 edition of the Human-computer Interaction conference called CHI (pronounced “Kay”), in Glasgow. Here are a few thoughts and tips about SIGs and their organisation.

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Curious and Dangerous: Participatory Design Research and Identities

A summary of a recent article, co-authored with Dr Katta Spiel.

We, design practitioners and researchers, care a lot about our participants’ identity. We invite them to participate because they belong to a group – a company, a classroom, a labor union, a community. Or because of one of their characteristics – they are children or they are over 60s. We try bringing to the fore marginalised point of views. We care about how our participants enact their identity through materials and crafts. We are attentive to our roles in the participatory design activities, mirroring our attention to the roles taken by children or adult participants. We rarely, however, describe our characteristics as researchers and designers and how they affect this process. Nor do we examine how participants may reject the very characteristics or identity labels that led us to invite them to participate.

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Design and gender studies

In 2015, Tiphaine Kazi-Tani and I organised a two-days conference on Gender and Design Studies with Design en Recherche. We were looking to foster design and research collaborations on a topic we had found crucially understudied. Especially given the gender gap in the design field, which seems to worsen after graduation. This article proposed an overview on the main research strands on the topic.

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