Design with a female touch

Text of the editor

Last June a show entitled Dissenyadores arrived at the Vic Social Club that brought together the work of ten pioneering Catalan female designers. Besides the exhibition, its curators – teachers Teresa Julio, Teresa Martínez and M. Àngels Fortea – published a catalogue that contained a short biographical note about each designer. I hadn’t heard of any of them, but that wasn’t surprising as I’m not that familiar with the world of design. I happened to have visited Barcelona’s Museu del Disseny, where I had observed that most of the objects on display in the show Del món al museu. Disseny de producte, patrimoni cultural had been created by male designers. To all this I should add that I was continuously coming across the hashtag #onsonlesdones in the tweets sent by several of my friends.

Faced with that situation, I asked myself whether the world would be different had its objects been designed by women. Thinking about my friends and contacts, I realised that among all the people I know, most of those who worked in the field of design are women. So I decided to ask their opinion — I wanted to know their thoughts, as professionals, about the links between the world of design and women, based on their own knowledge, their feelings and views …

The texts presented this month have been written by them: female designers who, working in different fields of specialisation, aren’t perhaps too used to writing such texts and yet have made a huge effort to speak in the first person about their hands-on experience.

(Highlighted image: Anna Bunting Branch. The Linguists)

Articles: 

“Automatic Racism: Emoji, Normativity and the Big Fail of the Predetermined Universal User”, by Marta Delatte.

“La masa y la grasa”, by Cristina Real.

“The Kitchen and the Clock”, by Paula García-Masedo.

“The Role of Women in Industrial Design: A Survey of the Past to Redesign Today’s World”, by Cristina Noguer.

“We want to be all”, by Ingrid Picanyol.