How to make yourself a Feminist Design Power Tool

Introduction: Taking Instructions

The greatest potential, and the greatest threat, in writing instructions is that they can be subverted, reinvented, and recuperated for dubious ends. The object of the instructions outlined in what follows is to extend an invitation toward an ‘experimentation in contact with the real’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 2). These instructions are an invitation to simply go ahead and try to see what happens when you make contact with your local environment-world.

The challenge lies in altering prevalent practices that rely on (bad) habits, (mere) opinions, and (prejudiced) clichés. It’s a question of how to circumvent the empty platitudes you use to sooth yourself in the face of radical contingency as you struggle within your local universe of value, especially when it turns out, after all, to be wildly unpredictable. To take a risk, but also to take care.

While the user’s guide is intended to be received as a playful invitation, it is directed toward the serious question of how, as architects or becoming-architects, and also as artists and designers, you might alter your practices and think and do otherwise amidst your local environment-world. Playing off the idea of a ‘user’s guide’ (which is what instructions are), and extending an invitation to ‘do it yourself’ and mess with the instructions explored here, I will outline a series of steps. This will mean that I will take on a somewhat exaggeratedly pedagogical, although I hope not didactic, approach. There is an inherent and intended dysfunctionality in these instructions as they await further use, because they do nothing by themselves. They do not posit a readymade answer or a solution to a problem that is yet to be named, nor are they a well-planned choreography of the kind formulated in anticipation of a battle.

Ideally, a (concept) tool and its associated instructions emerge directly in contact with a given material field of action, a ‘site’ if you like, which erupts as a matter of concern that brings a number of interested subjects or actors together (Latour, 2005). The instructions I offer below are inspired by a great number of thinkers and practitioners, who admittedly come from a number of fields, not just from within architecture, design or art. If I sign what appears to be my own name to these instructions and tools, it is always in recognition of the great debt that I happily owe to my precursors. I’ll avoid where possible mentioning the big names, which can feel so overwhelming, so large and over-impressive; names, nonetheless, will necessarily appear here and there, as fleeting signatures. In addition, toward the end of each Step in this guide, I draw attention to examples. Beyond mere illustrations, the use of these examples is motivated by my own proximity with the work that they are the product of. I have learnt a great deal from the projects I present.

Instructions can also be verbally issued, such as between a client and a lawyer, between a patient and a doctor, or between a choreographer and a dancer. They might also be instructions on how to lead a life, even an ethical life, and how to do this from the midst of your creative practice, a discussion that will be raised in the final chapter, Step 6 of this guide.

It is all very well to offer up imperatives: Be creative! Experiment now! Such calls risk making matters worse, as the very act of creation that the architect, artist, or designer (as ‘creative type’) desires to succeed in is supposed to be a terribly mysterious, alchemical process. Architect-designers, unlike scientists, tend to be deeply suspicious of methods, and once methods become methodologies (as in established ways of doing things) then the architect runs away… fast. Creation is out of step with itself and cannot be second-guessed: it is less methodical, more erratic, taking wild leaps and making improbable connections. This does not, however, mean that instructions cannot be followed in curious ways to procure radical outcomes, or that methods cannot be improvised, or that provisional methodologies cannot be discussed or shared.

You must make your own map of your local environment-world – and better still, do this collectively – thereby making connections that expose you to other worlds and subjectivities in process. The feminist ethos that forms a supportive background here, and which will also loom into view from time to time, aims to unsettle the status quo, to question normative structures, and to disturb unconscious schema – to upset different renditions of what can also be described under the moniker of a hegemonic ‘image of thought’. The image of thought: meaning what it is to get stuck in a rut, to think that, to think of course it’s like that, naturally! So these instructions go about asking how can such dogmatic structures be challenged where they become most oppressive. An immediate problem arises in that it is often hard to see or recognise when and where you are oppressed. You rely on what you have come to expect as you traverse the familiar landscapes of daily life. This is what normalisation, what an internalisation of implicit disciplinary regimens, does: it makes everything seem ho-hum. Please carry on as usual. Everyday life, its habitual modes of practice and associated habitats, come to seem so regular, so acceptable, and oh so predictable. Right up until the point you are stopped dead in your tracks and realise you can proceed no further.

Regular habits, and how they assume a well-tempered habitat, can be comforting, like a feeling for home where every phenomenological nook and corner is felicitously known. Sometimes, it is exactly this regulated disciplined rhythm of life that arouses the desire to be disruptive, to be radical, that is, to cast out in another direction. To explore other modes of practice is exactly the challenge this instruction guide proposes to extend.

This holds specific relevance for the discipline and practice of architecture, which is at its core a conservative discipline, even while it attempts to make of its works something radical. In architecture, matters become quite paradoxical because architects usually want to make of their practices and forms something exceptional, something adventurously avant-garde, or else something that is simply good enough to make an appearance where it counts (print media, online, Web 2.0, etc.). The ambitions of an avant-garde or rather a neo-avant-garde too quickly empty out, and the best of intentions (of architects) risk turning into dull refrains. The advance party, the architectural vanguard, heads further into exhausted posthuman landscapes in search of illusions. Grasping at a mirage. Battling windmills. Becoming, all the while, more entrenched in old ways. One of those old ways pertains to the exclusion of certain persona, certain kinds of actors, from the ‘theatre’ of architecture. Although you are not supposed to complain, even today it’s important to ask: Where are the women architects? (Stratigakos, 2016). And further, what can women, and other minority groups do to architecture, conceived as a thinking and making practice?

As the title already indicates, these instructions will direct themselves toward a particular problem – how to construct a feminist design power tool. In the process the instructions assume a feminist ethos, not to mention a tongue-in-cheek approach, taking the form of a self-help guide for those confounded by an exclusionary discipline like architecture. It would be presumptuous to assume that the instructions in this book can solve the problems of all – of any – of the minority groups attempting to tackle the too often exclusionary, walled off domain of architecture. (It may well in any case turn out that everyone belongs to a minority group, in one way or another, and that everyone has a complaint to submit to the discipline.) While the modifier ‘feminist’ strongly suggests a position whereby women are understood as constituting a minority group that remains underrepresented in the teaching, practice and leadership of architecture, the use of ‘feminist’ also welcomes into the discussion other intersections and concerns, including class, race, ethnicity, corporeal capacity – difference, then, of all kinds. To ask what women do to architectural thinking and making also means to ask what any underrepresented group can do. This means to be alert to what we are missing out on in not listening to a multiplicity of voices that come from different positions and life situations and that adopt different points of view.

No doubt many who have ventured into the walled city of architecture have discovered, sooner or later, that they have something to complain about in terms of why they have not been able to ‘pass’ as an architect, or why they have been obliged to exit or escape, even once they have achieved their qualifications. There have no doubt been innumerable ‘attacks of the castle’, the stories of which should be told and retold (Cixous, 1997). Under the professional title ‘architect’, furthermore, the stress is too often placed on the architect as ‘designer’, a role that is still presumed to be the most exalted position in the professional hierarchy. It is the design architect who wins a prize for his signature building, whose serious face most often appears in the press. There persists a great temptation to lament the exclusions, the unconscious schema, the oversights and assumptions, the lack of diversity, equity and representation, even the lack of, or lower, pay. There is a great desire to contract the habit of making the count, of quantifying the exclusions, and listing the occasions of oversight. I speak here of the critical