Edited by Alison Place
247 pages, softcover, $40
Published by MIT Press
mitpress.mit.edu

Alison Place makes it clear from the start: “In our increasingly globalized world—and our increasingly designed world—designers need to understand the complexities of power and be held accountable for the role they play in larger social, political, economic, and environmental systems. In other words, designers should all be feminists.”

Edited by Place, assistant professor of graphic design in the School of Art at the University of Arkansas, Feminist Designer features text and visuals from 43 contributors across sixteen countries on six continents. The book’s themes—power, knowledge, care, plurality, liberation and community—present diverse feminisms that challenge the traditionally patriarchal and Eurocentric approaches to design within a variety of disciplines while championing constructive change: Post-secondary curricula and postpartum apparel. Digital tools to fight housing discrimination and designing for the disabled. Trauma-informed and -responsive design and trans-centered voice-activated AI.

There’s graphic designer and educator Aggie Toppins’s case study on branding through an intersectional feminist lens and her take on “femvertising.” Type designer Aasawari Kulkarni pushes against what she calls “typatriarchy” with her Nari typeface. Graphic designer Benedetta Crippa argues for “visual belonging” and expanding design “to include many more voices.” Victor G. Martinez, industrial designer and educator, offers ways that men can help drive change in the design world.

With all the authors’ input, the Recommended Reading’s near-100 titles broaden the conversation that “[feminist] design is not only
what designers do or who does it,” as Place says, “—it is about how we design and why.” —Claire Sykes ca