Thinking about the different possibilities of approaching the research question and the intervention, I started considering how our minds and interpretations are shaped by our environments.
What if the gap I’m interested in is the gap in our minds concerning biases and sexist practices that we have normalized? How could we red flag our own red flags in our mind? Are our minds also designed by others or by ourselves? Are we even aware of possible new worlds that we cannot even describe yet?
If I continue down this path, I need to specify which part of the mind I’m referring to, as it is currently too ambiguous.
In an attempt to gain experience and start building a larger network of people interested in social change, I began working on designing and creating a festival by the end of August with a focus on Artivism in collaboration with Skaped, an organization focused on working with Artivism.
It feels like the right place to explore the possibilities of to making interventions since they are open to any of my ideas.
However, I feel there are many gaps I need to fill in. My project leader, her name is Erin, recently asked me what I want people to do in my workshop or performance, and I’m still unsure about it. I’m a bit overwhelmed by how to arrive at an answer and define my focus of interest again.
That being said, I will have the opportunity to reach a large audience, and I want to be ready to give my best. The Festival is going to be held in St Margarets House on Bethanl Green by the end of August.
Facing the challenge of changing my focus of interest has led to many fears. Nevertheless, I think it’s the right decision since, as I’ve said before, focusing on the sexist biases of objects was something that I didn’t feel was part of my expertise or something that would come easily to me. Realizing that and doing an internal review of topics that interest and motivate me, I understood that, of course, gender and inequality are subjects that drive me and have always been important to me. I decided to focus on the notion of safety and security that girls and women have on the streets, facing daily acts of sexism and misogyny that are highly reprehensible and disgusting.
With that in mind, my main concern lately is how I can frame my new interest within my previous research question. I’m afraid to abandon everything I’ve researched for a new subject that has its own set of complications and interests. Finding the gap I was interested in helped me understand that I need to delve deeper and, in a way, revisit everything I did in the past months.
My previous question was: How can we help people identify and question designs that reinforce power structures and inequality from a gender perspective? How can I frame this into my new subject?
Also, where does “Flag the Gap,” my project idea, fit here? Have I focused too much on the result and not enough on the process?
In my attempts to bring clarity, I’ve contacted The Feminist Library and a student from the MA in Social Innovation at LCC who is researching a similar topic. I’m also approaching new books related to the subjetc, and might get in contact with Make Space for Girls organization.
It’s been very overwhelming dealing with the uncertainty of the project. I thought I had my path clear, but I discovered a phase of emptiness—if that makes sense. It feels like I’m starting from scratch, but at the same time, I know I have to trust the process.
The topic of gender biases in objects is no longer my main focus. I’ve been rereading books about sexism and misogyny and reflecting on why I’ve always been passionate about this topic. It makes me feel powerless, scared, and mad. Trying to define how these feelings relate to my project, I concluded that the subject that interests me the most is safety and security. The fear women have of being abused in different ways, and the fact that many of us experience it and need to keep moving forward.
Author Laura Bates created a blog called the Everyday Sexism Project, where women post about the horrible interactions they have experienced. I feel so connected to this because I’ve been through it, as have many of my friends. It’s a horrible feeling. As women, we experience this daily, and it’s just outrageous.
Thinking about how to relate this to my project, I need to rethink Flag the Gap and how the red flags could be part of this idea.
Could a red flag be a way of calling out sexist and abusive behaviors?
I had the idea of using red flag stickers for people to use in their environments, showing what they understand as their own red flags.
To address concerns about the environmental impact, I thought about using materials that are accessible and easily usable, such as rocks. I’m still not sure how, but maybe replacing red flags with red rocks that people could use.
Thinking about rocks led me to consider the weight many women have to deal with. It’s an invisible weight, but it’s there. Holding the rock, carrying the rock, owning the rock, and throwing it.
After a couple weeks of time to rest and reflect and two different tutorials, I’ve got some clarity on what is going on:
My project is facing growing pains, which is okay. It just needs an adjustment of focus.
It would be interesting exploring the idea of how people right now within the systme raise their own red flags, how do people call it out when they feel the gap and how could we speculate of new ways of doing it.
Also exploring curatorial activism and the role of protesting in our society.
About my research question: It should show an MA level, so there’s a need to not oversimplufy it. Once I have a new focus, I need to add it a little bit more of content.
Funily engough, Flag the gap has a gap of focus. So, hopefully I will find and area that intercrosses with my personal interests, something who I am and my interests in gender equality. Maybe exploring migration situation + law + gender.
Not forget that by creating people interacting, there is a recolection of data and as researcher I need to be aware of what I am going to do with it.
I still have one worry: finding a narrative that interests me could feel a bit like appropriating personal narratives that are not mine.
I find myself at a point where I struggle to take action. I now understand everything Richard and Zuleika talked about regarding perfectionism and procrastination. You don’t fully grasp it until you live it, and I’m living it now. At the beginning of the independent study period, I knew I wanted to take some time off, so I decided to take a week. Then another week passed, and I felt motivated but not enough to actually start my intervention. Now it’s the beginning of a new week, and I’m struggling to get the ball rolling.
In the past few days, I’ve had the chance to meet different people at various social gatherings. Whenever I describe the master’s program, everyone is very impressed, but of course, they always ask how my project is going. I get really nervous because I have ideas but still no tangible results. It’s hard, but at the same time, the solution is literally to go and do things. But there’s this fear—the fear they’ve been warning us about—of failing. What does it really mean to fail?
With all this in mind, I want this blog post to be my active intention to get the ball rolling again. Hopefully, by the end of the month, I’ll have lots of interventions and iterations to show.
Attached, my presentation for my tutorial the 08.07.24 with Diana
It is interesting how research leads you to take unknown paths. At the beginning of this year, I had some clear areas of interest in the box of uncertainty task: as a lawyer, I wanted to research law and design. I was also interested in gender issues, and lastly, in ignorance. As time passed and with different experiences I lived, such as being part of the university Hackathon, I decided to start researching deconstructing the truths given about Design Thinking and Innovation. Through that research, I ended up reading about the Maintainers and all their community efforts about re-signifying repair and maintenance, which I think is absolutely brilliant. Nevertheless, I feel like I’ve been distanced from my main concern, which is Law, Design, Gender. And I still think I don’t have an angle to start my next project. I’ve found so many interesting agencies, NGOs, and people through my research, but I’m still kind of afraid to contact them because I’m still not sure why I’m contacting them. At the same time, I think I need to start talking to people, I know that. But yeah, it’s scary.
And I just wanted to clarify, that even if the repair and maintenance topic is probably something I’m not going to focus on in my big final project, it was soooo interesting reading and talking about it, and it really changed my perspectives on how I relate to my surroundings. So I’m grateful and appreciative of the EPP task.
Also, I’ve started a spreadsheet with all the quotes from books and readings that I’ve found interesting. I don’t do it as often as I should, but it’s an interesting work in progress: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lMAqkazBqhIudidgiZQKKO1Xo_nTUuqrPTNnoPp10aI/edit?usp=sharing
This task was an interesting challenge because there are so many uncertainties that we think about every day, but we often don’t realize about them and let them pass. However, acknowledging and naming them became a very validating, self-reflecting activity. I say that it was validating because it allowed me to actively understand where some of the many concerns and uncertainties have come from.
To start the project, I began with some creativity exercises that helped me activate my brain to tackle those difficult questions. For this, I participated in a “Thinking through Drawing” workshop given by the university. During the workshop, we were invited to not think too much, we just drew as the ideas came, and afterward, we reflected on what we did. The teacher also asked us to think about one project we had to develop, and of course, I chose this one. From this exercise, I could see what my main uncertainties were because they surfaced easily while I was drawing.
Uncertainity #1: Law, legal design, and how it is presented to society.
After working in the human rights NGO, I discovered I was very curious and interested in approaching different ways to understand and create better legal services, specially because I saw people struggling to understand their own rights or anything law-related. That’s when I stumbled upon legal design. To give some context, according to Margaret Hagan, the director of Stanford’s Design Lab, “legal design is the application of human-centered design to the world of law, to make legal systems and services more human-centered, usable, and satisfying.” For me, legal design is about democratizing law, giving people the opportunity to understand their rights and act with knowledge. Law is supposed to be for everyone, but in reality, only some privileged individuals have access to it, mostly people who have the priviledg to study or to affort a lawyer when needed. Following this path, I decided to work in a design consultancy where I collaborated with clients applying legal design and conducting creative workshops using the design thinking methodology to create improved and more empathetic legal services. This was a crucial experience because it taught me basically everything I know about design and design thinking. Nevertheless, I kept wondering if legal design is the only way of improving law? Could there be better ways of interacting with law in a more humanistic approach?
My experience working with design thinking applied to law and legal services was the only thing I talked about. Being in this course has made me reflect on what questions we are not asking yet and how we could formulate better questions. I decided to start reading about design methodologies, and in my exploration, I discovered the book “Re-imagining Design” by Kevin G. Bethune. As I started reading, I found his conversation about how multidisciplinary innovation is the future and how designers should question the reasons they are designing. It resonated with me because, after all, I’m a lawyer doing an MA and sometimes finding the connection between two disciplines so different could be hard. In his book, he briefly mentions a TED talk called “Design Thinking is Bullshit” by Natasha Jen, and as soon as I read about it, I watched it immediately.
Surprisingly, this talk made me question everything I’ve taken for granted in the last couple of years. Natasha points out how design thinking is the watered-down version of what designers do and makes interesting points about how design thinking promises innovation, but innovation is not really a thing; it’s a quality that cannot be instantly delivered as design thinking promises. She criticizes the common bootcamps agencies and universities sell to teach design thinking. I found this very very interesting because I’ve been part of this bootcamps, even so, I’ve been facilitating in different moments this bootcamps! Understanding how design thinking also plays a part in the capitalistic ways of approaching solutions made me view it with different eyes. People want the instant satisfaction of resolving big problems without having a more holistic view of the problem.
This made me reflect on my experiences working at the design consultancy and question if legal design is the only answer to creating better and more humanistic ways of approaching law. It made me question what are the things that I’m still not seeing, and it definitely made me feel uncomfortable about what could be the next step because I really don’t know what could be the answer.
Uncertainity #2. Gender equality and design
Related to legal design, as a feminist, I also became very passionate about understanding how design (and law) has become part of contributing to the reproduction of systemic oppression and made me think about if the entire system has been designed for a default male standard, is gender equality ever possible?
To back my thoughts, I started reading two books: “Invisible Woman” by Caroline Criado Perez and “Design Justice” by Sasha Costanza-Chock.
The first book states with data that most services created and designed have a customer – the default male, and there is no data that represents how women experience those same experiences males are living. The data does not give women a voice to ask for better services because the system is not interested in having this data. Why has the reference man still been a reference for every service created, even in medicine? For this, I also found very interesting watching a video called Everything is designed for this man, even drugs
The book “Design Justice” explores precisely how this cis-normality has given some unwritten rules on how design should be interpreted and how the system is biased against women or any other gender that’s not male. The author also states: “Design Thinking is deployed to reproduce a colonial political economy with design imagined at the top of the value chain as a key process to be managed only by firms from the Global North.” As a lawyer and a design enthusiast I find such a big responability of being aware of this things that were never taught to me. How could we make design better? How could we make law better?
Taking for granted how things have been designed is such a dangerous assumption. I feel uncertain about how could this situacion improve in a more systematic way, but I find in fascinating.
Uncertainity #3. Ignorance is bliss
It generates a lot of uncertainty for me how people, including me, decide to stay ignorant of certain situations to continue living happily. It happened to me when I worked defending victims of police violence. Once I quit, I decided to stop reading the newspapers, listening to the radio, and talking to friends about politics. I decided to be blissfully ignorant. But I know it is not the solution because I’m also aware that being participative in everyday situations and taking an informative stance is also a form of activism. How could we overtake the truth of things that happened and not decide to remain ignorant?
Conclusion
I chose these uncertainties because I want to find answers to my feelings. Maybe I won’t find an answer to everything, but at least I tried, and this course is about that – trying with purpose.
