Behind Open Doors

INTRODUCTION

This is a research scholarship I was involved in with Alexander Jenkins, Simon Nicholls and Sarah Baker. Media discourses about gender and sexuality are often highly polarizing and reinforce binary thinking. However, people’s experiences and feelings often bend, blur and break society’s binary codes. Behind Open Doors is an experience created in order to unbox gender by design. It aims to repurpose user experience design methodologies to encourage intimate reflections about gender and sexuality that emphasize complexity and contradiction.

Through design intervention, in the shape of a participatory experience, the project seeks to emphasise the queerness of everyday life. It flips design methods by making data the foundation for shared understanding rather than data collection being the starting point for generating design solutions. In doing so, it questions the power of the designer. By repurposing the UX method of cultural probes the project seeks to foster empathy not as a means to a market, but to encourage compassion and an ethics of care.

Participants will participate in two workshops in which they will gain insight into the gendered experience of themselves and others. They will be asked to create a gender box that includes a digital visualization of their gender identity and a multi-sensory journal to be completed over the conference.