Templates of Agency: Objects of a Social Design Program for Disadvantaged Girls

Abstract

Compared to the aesthetic-and market-oriented mindset associated with mainstream design approaches, social design is traditionally considered to be a field that focuses more strongly on the human perspective and community-specific insight (Kimbell 2011; Manzini 2015). It is also a field that pays particular attention to the cultural and anthropological specificities of communities and takes these specificities into account throughout its processes of research and design. This paper presents a social design project, FRUSKA, and examines it from a semiotic and educational point of view. FRUSKA is a design program for disadvantaged girls aged 10–18, aiming at skill building, raising self-awareness and building agency, in order to advance the participants’ life prospects. In an attempt to understand the community better, several objects were designed by the author and her students, based on preliminary research and inquiries conducted with the target group. Building on the premises of social semiotics (Hodge and Kress 1988; van Leeuwen 2005), these objects were specifically designed for the participants to build and customise during co-creation workshops: the participants could disassemble and personalise these objects in a way that is closer to their own aesthetics, filling them up with meaning as a means to practice agency. The design process, its application during workshops and the feedback from participants are analysed through the lens of intersectional theory (Crenshaw 1989), in order to understand the effects of differences in class, age, ethnicity and identity. The author concludes by discussing whether design can be meaningfully used as a language through co-creation.