About Women-Centric Design
Our methodology, design principles, and project contributors
WOMEN-CENTRIC DESIGN IS A PROJECT BY UNCONFORM
Women-Centric Design is a toolkit supporting design and impact practitioners to build products, services and systems that truly serve women. This project is and always will be a work in progress. Women-Centric Design is currently in beta version 1.0.
About
the project
Unconform is a design consultancy helping organisations embed a women-centric lens in their products, programs and process. We help organisations get smarter about women’s lived experiences, go further in their research faster, and be more equitable from the get-go. Learn more about Unconform.
About Unconform
Mansi Gupta, founder of Unconform, is a designer and researcher with several years of experience leading women’s focused projects in healthcare, finance, tech, education and more especially in the Global South. Her project experience drove both, the creation and the development of Women Centric Design. Learn more about Mansi.
About
Mansi
Women-Centric Design would not exist without the generosity, guidance and support of gender practitioners and our project contributors. Learn more below about how we developed this work and everyone who contributed to the project.
About the project contributors
OUR DESIGN PRINCIPLES
Our choice to use the word women (over gender or inclusive) is driven by our commitment to radical transparency, a core women-centric design principle. We choose to be radically transparent that our starting point and where our research is centered is with, and for women.
Radical
transparency
Women are far from a homogeneous group. Although the inspiration for Women-Centric Design encompasses a wide range of perspectives, our commitment extends to expanding the spectrum of voices we engage with and integrate into our tools. Our intention is to continually diversify the voices included in our research to enhance and extend the impact of these tools.
Acknowledging blindspots
Impact beyond women
While our primary focus is on women, we aspire to witness the development of methods, frameworks, and tools dedicated to the addressing the unique needs of other marginalised groups. Our hope is that our work can serve as inspiration and support for these initiatives, as each step taken in this direction brings us closer to the realisation of a genuinely and more just world.
Development of
Women-Centric Design
We could not have done this work alone. Women-Centric Design is the culmination of insights derived from extensive research and reflection with many, many gender and feminist practitioners over several hundreds of hours. These practitioners shared not only their own lived experiences but also those of the women they designed with and for. In addition to the research and reflection, we invited a group of practitioners to engage in a ‘contributor process,’ to provide feedback as we built out the components of the toolkit. Together with the gender practitioners, a total of 88 contributors gave their time, energy and knowledge to help bring this work to life.
Gratitude to our project contributors
This work could not have been possible without the thoughts, time and generous support of our gender, design and impact practitioners from around the world.
Thank you (in no particular order):
Maria Potorocyzn, Jane Finette, Danielle Barnes, Yomi Abiola, Sara Shahsivi, Christina Taylor, Kim Mackenzie, Katee Hui, Merida Miller, Suheil Tandon, Uloma Ogba, Mariana Santos, Ann-Elise Francis, Gina Romero, Lorena Fuentes, Devika Patel, Kanika Kumar, Sara Saeed Khurram, Hanieh Khosroshahi, Busola Boyle-Komolafe, Chaitra Chidanand, Katrine Marçal, Kalsoom Lakhani, Rose Wilder, Paulina Perez, Ana Pantelic, Nicole Gervasio, Kathryn Kosmides, Jona Repishti, Nancy Swanson, Shekhar Menon, Francine Irakoze, Tylea Simone, Rebecca Hope, Catherine Berman, Jasmine Burton, Sarah Sternberg, Gary Barker, Marta Guy, Halima Iqbal, Sid Singh, Susannah Walker & Make Space for Girls, Natasha Joshi, Hera Hussain, Laura Bloomer, Theo Gibbs, Laura Scanlon, Olga Miller, Leanne Atherton, Aleena Musanna, Tomasello Gi, Simar J, Kate Tallant Meier, Abby Covert, Abigail Schreider, Aaliya Jamal Zaidi, Betsy Ramaccia, Colleen Carroll, Flavie Halais, Evie Chung, Karen Patwa, Mar Llines, Marwa Muhammad, Fabian Pfortmueller, Rachel Sinha, Sue Snider, Noor Tehini, Grace Kwon, Victor Udoewa, Rachel Elsinga, Tania Cheng, Nilah Mitchell, Patricia Natalie, Nishita Tamuly, Maya Narayan, Supriti Bezbaruah, Joyce Muchena, Amirah Jiwa, Nicole Lenzen, Jeannette Weber, Anjuli Garcia, Deepanjali Lahiri, Chelsea Slater, Madhu M, Shabeena Sheikh, Jessica Espinoza, Clôd Baumgartner and Isabel Farina.
Special thanks to Alfredo Carlo, Giulia Ferrari and the team at Housatonic!