A practical approach to queering design
By: John Warren Hanawalt
Tags: Queer, LGBTQ, Design, Technology, Diversity

Queer design is collective

Although empathy has been packaged up as a neat little Design Thinking™ books, workshops, and proprietary consulting models, the queer designers I know have a lifetime of experience in empathy on even the most skilled sprint facilitator.

A lot of queer designers I’ve talked to feel they are able to more fully put themselves in others’ shoes because of how much time they’ve spent pretending to be someone else.

We’ve turned a survival mechanism of being able to move through spaces that aren’t for us into a professional adaptation. And we bring that outsider perspective with us when we enter the field.

In design today, people on the outside are considered edge cases and most large organizations don’t design for them. But as Eric Meyer says, “When you say ‘edge case’, you’re really just defining the limits of what you care about.”

A lot of queer designers I’ve talked to feel they are able to more fully put themselves in others’ shoes because of how much time they’ve spent pretending to be someone else.

So it’s not enough to bring outsider perspectives into the design process, we need to bring in people currently relegated to the edges of our practice and actually center them in our work.

One way to do that is having diverse teams. Studies have shown that diversity leads to increased productivity and innovation, although the queerer the design industry becomes, the less we should need to rely on business metrics to argue for what’s right.

We also have to expand our definition of a design to people who aren’t traditionally included in it and embracing a spirit of co-design.

We need to enroll our “edge cases” as our partners in the design process to create work that serves them as well as it does everyone else. We should do this not because products that accommodate users at the margins do a better job at meeting the needs of everyone in middle (although they do) but because we should be challenging the idea that the experiences we build should have margins at all—or that the business’s margins should define them.

We must also challenge the idea that we are the ones who should be building these designs. Communities can solve problems for themselves when they have the resources and designers from within those communities are empowered to do so.

Very often, what a problem calls for is not a designer to unlock the solution but the political will to enact what we know will work (usually money, usually controlled by people who’d rather not see the problem solved). Not every nail needs design thinking or an interface or a logo.

“I am not a beginning. I am not an end. I am a link in a chain.” ― Keith Haring

I think queering design means letting go of our egos as designers. There’s still such a cult of celebrity in the field. We’re taught to revere individual designers who make iconic work, like Milton Glaser and the I heart New York logo. We pay less attention to work created by teams or ephemeral work that eschews a sense of “timelessness” to improve people’s lives now. A lot of us are still chasing that FastCo Design spotlight, the retrospective of our work, or the seat of honor at an AIGA gala.

But some of the most memorable queer designs aren’t attributable to one person. The “Silence = Death” poster, which I think is one of the most striking designs in history was designed by a collective. Feminist activist artists the Guerrilla Girls work anonymously to keep focus on the issues their work addresses.