Feminist Democratic Design: Design/Building Coalition Perspectives

This paper works with our Feminist Democratic Design framework (FDD) (Celis and Childs 2024). FDD involves three analytically distinct phases or sets of activities: design thinking, designing, and building (Celis and Childs 2020). The first involves imagining democracies otherwise, and requires descriptive and creative work; the second, generates a live, working ‘menu’ of democratic practices and devices from which emerges the re-design; and the third, involves repairing and refashioning work, engendering over time ‘refinement and revision’ of the design (following Saward 2021). When it comes to ‘who’ designs across all three phases, FDD foregrounds the role of design/building coalitions. The one doing the design cannot be a single, heroic, patriarchal, colonial, designer who purports to expertise, objectivity and neutrality. Instead - and indeed to meet feminist standards - a design/building coalition does the design work. They are local, intersectionally-inclusive (Place 2023, Marina 2023; Saward 2021; Lowndes and Roberts 2013), collaborative, caring, and generative (Durose and Lowndes’ 2021; Martinez 2023, 209-10; Armbrust 2023, 38). Their work is premised upon acknowledgment that communities are able to solve their own problems (Place 2023, 17), and that ‘everyone brings expertise and is capable of designing in some sense’ (Toppins 2023, 30). In this contribution, and for the first time, we bring new empirical data to questions of FDD in general, and specifically, to exploring the potential of design/building coalitions. The ERC Synergy QUALREP project provides innovative, qualitative data derived from collaborations with women’s groups and organizations making intersectional claims regarding maternal mortality/obstetric violence, sex work/prostitution, and abortion, in five countries (Belgium, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and the United Kingdom). Such groups are indicative of precisely the actors theorized as constituent members of any design/building coalition tasked with undertaking FDD’s three phrases of design thinking, designing, and building. Based on the Belgian and UK cases, this paper examines the ‘who’ and ‘what’ of FDD from the perspective of select women’s groups and organizations. Using digital diary data - text, photos, and videos - we analyze the groups’ experiences of acting politically, particularly: (a) strategies considered successful in changing political attitudes, policies, and laws; (b) how they would like politics to work; and (c) the changes they deem necessary and/or desirable to redress the inequalities of, and to meet women’s interests, and especially the interests of minoritised and marginalised women. Building from these empirical findings, we further theorize feminist democratic design principles, practices, and ethos, with both (b) and (c) capturing the groups and organizations’ notions of intersectionality and democratic innovation. In so doing, our paper directly addresses a key workshop question, Which normative standards and infrastructures promote co-creation of inclusive democratic spaces?, and directly engages with three workshop topics, 1: Normative grounds for feminist innovations 2: Design principles for feminist innovations, and 3: Infrastructures that equalise access and influence in practice.