Feminist design strategies for transforming design museums

Anja Neidhardt-Mokoena has been studying design museums.

ImageJens Persson

The research of Neidhardt-Mokoena, a doctoral candidate at Umeå Institute of Design and the Gender Research School (Umeå Centre for Gender Studies) at Umeå University, highlights the uncomfortable truth that design is part of reproducing systems of oppression that contribute to environmental degradation and discrimination based on race and gender. Cars, for example, are primarily designed and tested using crash test dummies based on male bodies, making women 47 percent more likely to be seriously injured. Trousers for women often lack adequate pockets, limiting access to essential items like keys, money, or a phone. Speaking of the phone, the production of aesthetically pleasing and functional smartphones often involves environmentally harmful mining and exploitation of labour.

Design museums can support design to move towards more justice.

Despite these issues, design is usually celebrated uncritically in museums. The story often centres around the single star designer – typically a white, heterosexual, able-bodied man – whose shiny objects are displayed with a focus on aesthetics rather than societal impact. Neidhardt-Mokoena argues that design museums – which hold a prominent status in pop culture, politics, and the industry – could actually facilitate critical dialogue on design’s role and lead to more just design practices.

“Design museums can support design to move towards more justice. However, they too need to change. Currently they tend to preserve dominant and problematic narratives and definitions of design. In my thesis, I develop feminist design strategies that can start such processes of transformation”, says Anja Neidhardt-Mokoena.

Neidhardt-Mokoena’s research is based on museum visits, hosting participatory design workshops, consulting literature about activist spaces and social movements, and conducting visual analysis. Through these methods, she provides analysis and understanding into how design and its museums reproduce systems of oppression. In addition, the approaches employed by Neidhardt-Mokoena contribute towards activism in the field of design, proposing strategies for how design could be redesigned so that it can better contribute to the development of more just futures.

In her thesis, Neidhardt-Mokoena shows that much can be learnt from community archives and activist spaces. These are places where people and material come together at the heart of social justice movements. They make alternative histories accessible, and with this enable new ways of dealing with the present as well as envisioning different, better futures.

The feminist design strategies developed by Neidhardt-Mokoena are envisioned to spark transformational processes in design museums. However, she believes that they can also be applied towards initiating change in other design institutions such as design schools, hoping to support developments towards more equitable and just futures.