Designed Environments and Women's Studies: A Wake-up Call

Abstract

The natural environment has long concerned Women's Studies. But attention to designed environments has been among the missing. The places and spaces we create for human use are missing from women's studies teaching, journals, and conference agendas. This omission occurs despite the importance of our homes, our streets and neighborhoods, our workplaces, the tools and things we use, to women's well-being and empowerment, and despite the rich outpouring of feminist work in and related technology fields, which has grown remarkably over the past two decades. This essay is a wake-up call-a call and argument to put designed environments on the women's studies agenda. The first section reviews feminist literature in and space-related fields, including architecture, urban planning, industrial design, geography, graphic design, and relevant technologies. The second part suggests how these materials can be integrated into the curriculum. I argue that the strengths of Women's Studies-its interdisciplinary character and social commitment-can be drawn on to incorporate this critical feminist work on designed environments as both a course subject and within a broad range of disciplines. Women's Studies has long been concerned with the environment. But this has meant the natural environment. Mainly through eco-feminism, we have focused on women's relationship to nature, on how to preserve it, on how to prevent its destruction. But the designed environment-the places and spaces that human beings and create-is largely absent from the women's studies agenda. Designed environments are virtually ignored in our teaching, our conferences, our journals, despite the rich outpouring of feminist work in and related technology fields, and despite the critical importance of the environments where we live, work, and play to women's well-being and women's empowerment. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.45 on Wed, 05 Oct 2016 05:16:38 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms DESIGNED ENVIRONMENTS AND WOMEN'S STUDIES 101 At a conference I organized, Re-Visioning Design and Technology: Feminist Perspectives, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in November 1995,2 the response was remarkable. I had no trouble finding feminist practitioners and academics from the fields of architecture, urban planning, communication and information technologies, industrial design, engineering, and graphic to come together not only to critique how our environments are designed, but also, and more important, to show us how they could and should be designed. Two days of intensive exchange, producing exciting ideas and projects, underlined the importance of their work. But the experience also underlined the extent to which theirs and similar work and approaches-although clearly resonating within their fields-did not appear in women's studies courses and classrooms or at conferences in the United States and internationally. Designed environments remained among the missing. This, then, is a wake-up call. This important feminist work needs to take its place on the women's studies agenda. My essay is in two parts. The first part reviews the literature, showing what a rich source of materials exists in these fields. In the second part, I will argue why and how such teaching should be integrative, providing examples for curriculum design. One of the great strengths of Women's Studies is its interdisciplinary character. In challenging conventional wisdom in a wide range of fields, we have transgressed boundaries, made new connections, and developed integrative models for knowledge and for action. So, too, should this be the approach to designed environments, following the model of the CUNY conference that initiated a conversation across the disciplines. As we seek to build these subjects into the women's studies curriculum, we should avoid separating them out as discrete entities, but rather develop them in an integrative way, and so move from theory to action. The splits between and technology are a case in point. In both the academy and popular concepts, is usually associated with the arts, with the aesthetics and appearance of a product, technology with machines and engineering, with function. Yet in the real world of architectural and engineering practice and industrial product design, the aesthetic and the functional are intertwined and interdependent. That feminist perspectives are geared to speak to this fragmentation will be addressed in the second part of this essay where I consider approaches to feminist teaching about designed environments. The literature, however, tends to fall into disciplinary categories-such as architecture, graphic design, or engineering-which will structure my review. The following will concentrate on the design fields of architecture, urban planning, craft and industrial design, graphic design, and related areas of geography and of technology. Most of the literature is from the United States and Great Britain.3 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.45 on Wed, 05 Oct 2016 05:16:38 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms