Baumgarten, Lisa and Gebrayel, Imad

Across Europe, design conferences place gender as a contextual key player in their discourse to promote a progressive stance towards inclusion; but a deeper analysis reveals complex systems of tokenist gendering. A PR rhetoric pre­senting design conferences as central to a critical discourse, often conceals their reality1: while public efforts ensure gender diversity, many conferences fail to address its correlated intersections, contributing instead to a counter-discourse.

A lived inclusion effectively champions the main agents affected by the political agendas proposed by most design conferences in the face of rising populism and hate-speech. These conferences become “privileged design sites”2 when excluding people of color, individuals who are differently-abled and/or come from migration and displacement. Such sites claim to address urgent socio-political matters but hesitate to actively adopt a stance on curation, funding and programming. Such contradictions reproduce the paradigms that conferences pretend to critique.

Reflecting on this paradoxical “clash” between the critical claim and the unjust practices we argue that the matrix of domination3 and its intersecting inequalities should be addressed to create actionable fair structures. Intersectionality, first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw4, allows the overlap between identities and i.a. race, sex, class and sexuality to be fully incorporated in topical and structural foundations, time allocations, funding, safety, representation and outreach.

Building on an ethnographic analysis of conference structures and drawing from our experiences as participants, we propose alternative intersectional strategies to avoid reproducing precarity, exclusion and unjust power relations justified by gender as an autonomous criterion.

• Eye on Design, notamuse (2019): We Surveyed Gender Equality at the World’s Biggest Design Conferences—and the Numbers Are In. AIGA Eye on Design Magazine [online]. eyeondesign.aiga.org/gender-equality-at-design-conferences-by-the-num­bers/.
• Sasha Constanza-Chock (2018): Design Justice: Towards an Intersectional Feminist Framework for Design Theory and Practice. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Harvard University. [online] papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm.
• Patricia Hill Collins (2002): Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge.
• Kimberlé Crenshaw (1994): „Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color“. In: Martha Albertson Fineman, Rixanne Mykitiuk (Eds.): The Public Nature of Private Violence. New York: Routledge, p. 93–118.

Imad Gebrayel is a creative director and researcher specializing in identity representation and bilingual visual communication. He has produced visual and theoretical works around Self-Orientalism in Arab design, subjective mapping and archiving. He has also collaborated with several journalistic platforms on exploring common grounds between design and media outlets across Europe. These platforms include ACE, Verspers and currently Global Ground media, a newsroom running on CIVIL. Through engaged design practices and cross-cultural experience, Imad aims to actively participate in a healthier dialogue between cultures and markets, one that avoids stereotyping and cultural appropriation for a fair representation in design and communication disciplines. After years of experience as creative director of Mojo Ink – a creative studio based in the UAE with clients from the public and private sectors across the Middle East – he moved to The Netherlands to complete a Master’s degree at Master Institute of Visual Cultures, AKV|St.Joost, Breda and is currently based in Berlin.

Lisa Baumgarten lives in Berlin and wears many hats. She was trained as Communication Designer at the Department of Design in Darmstadt (DE) – were she holds her Diploma – the University of Portsmouth (UK) and the Estonian Academy of Arts (EE), from 2008–2014. As Art Director and Creative Consultant, she works for cultural institutions and corporate giants on analog and digital projects. While studying Cultural Sciences and Gender Studies at Humboldt-University Berlin, she has been researching into feminist design theory and design pedagogies since 2017. In 2019 she co-founded Teaching Design – a collectively gathered bibliography and conversational format focusing on design education from intersectional feminist and decolonial perspectives. As design educator – currently teaching at HfK Bremen and Burg Giebichenstein Halle – she focuses on pointing out scopes of action and empowering students to question and break through consolidated structures. Lisa gives lectures, organizes workshops and performs critical dialogs.

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