Critical Design: Taking a Look a Women's Sexuality
Fortune Cookies for Women's Sexuality
This project was created out of response to the question "How might we provoke emotion from people regarding women's sexuality?" A big topic, we know. My team and I came up with the idea of giving people an object they are familiar with, but changing the outcome people are used to receiving with said object. The object being, a fortune cookie. The outcome we are used to with fortune cookies is getting a slip of paper with our fortune on it.
We still gave people fortune cookies, but instead of a fortune we wrote a statement about women's sexuality. We asked the women of our social media platforms to share anonymously the experiences they have encountered regarding their sexuality. These became the statements inside the cookies.
Taking a Stand for Women's Sexuality
This was a follow up project to Fortune Cookies for Women's Sexuality. It started with the same question and took us further to think about what type of idea we could come up with that honoured what we had learned from women in the previous project.
My team and I decided to take a stand for women's sexuality by, well, standing. Literally. We designed three identical boards to have three true or false questions that we got bystanders to vote on.
The concept was to go against the taboo of judging women's sexuality in private, by forcing those who participated to judge not just one person's sexuality, but all three of use, in comparison to one another. We found in our research that a vast majority of judgement on women's sexuality is done behind their backs and hugely influenced by what the person is wearing. Those who participated in this had no information on the three of us other than what we were wearing and how we were standing.
Our goal was to provoke people by forcing them to judge women based on their clothing AND right in front of the person whom they were judging. We took a private interaction to a public one with the goal of making people feel how wrong this is. Hoping to leave them with the question, if it's wrong in public, why is it okay in private?
