Kel Jackson
Chroma-Actvisim: Exploring Colour Based Design Interventions to inspire Gender Inclusive Footwear Design
Summary
The children's footwear industry finds itself at a pivotal moment as young people are redefining the aesthetics of gender expression through colour. To remain relevant, designers must confront the historical gender bias and stereotypes still used to create design narratives that no longer represent the lived experiences and needs of the user as a step toward actualising design activist frameworks like Design Justice. My research acknowledges that biases do not exist in a vacuum by applying Black Feminist Thought through Kimberly Crenshaw's Intersectional Feminist Theory. Viewing how colour meanings are created and endured from an intersection-feminist perspective may lead to a deeper understanding of how biases used in colour meanings work together to develop and uphold prejudices. Leveraging a crucial time within the design process, I aim to design a norm critical based experience using colour to be tested in the concepting phase seeking to encourage discourse surrounding gender stereotypes and bias while helping design stakeholders create an understanding of what gender inclusivity is and how it may apply to their design process. Focused on addressing biases propagated in a system with the people within that system, I aim to engage in Human-centred Design. To identify constraining norms within the design process to build my intervention, I aim to compare and contrast stakeholder interviews and case studies with autoethnography unpacking my ten years of experience as a colour designer. This experience hopes to inspire design teams to readdress the gendered languages used in design narratives and how they apply colour to products to not only question binary-based colour meanings and applications but to encourage design teams to view gender as a cultural construct that can be aesthetically expressed through a broad and ever-evolving spectrum.
Additional info
The Scholastic realists believed that colour is merely the manifestation of properties belonging to an object (Chirimuuta, 2015), but how does that change when an industry of people invents and controls the colour of that object? I seek to explore how designers use colour as a tool to communicate to users through design narrative or visual storytelling to understand how gender biases might motivate design stakeholders (footwear designers, graphic designers, textile designers, colour designers, developers, product line managers and merchandisers) to propagate gender stereotypes into design narratives to create a colour based intervention to confront gender biases and stereotypes during the concept phase. In this sample, I aim to outline the need for an intersectional feminist approach in studying how designers use colour and its relation to gender bias in children's footwear design. While my research focuses on gender bias and stereotypes, biases don't exist in a vacuum and often work systemically together to marginalise others (Costanza-Chock, 2018). My research aims to acknowledge the complexity of the problem at hand and outline the possible confounding variables that may affect the viability of the study. I argue that examining the relationship between gender bias and colour design through the intersectional feminist lens will take a new perspective on gender stereotypes in footwear while also anticipating that if I unpack colour meanings with designers, intersecting biases will come to light. To create a potentially more effective intervention, I must acknowledge the relationship of gender bias to other biases.
I aim to build from frameworks like Design Justice by applying Black Feminist Thought like Kimberly Crenshaw's Intersectional Feminist Theory, which revealed how systems of oppression work together to uphold patriarchy and white supremacy and how the most impacted by those systems exist at the intersections (Costanza-Chock, 2018). To do so, I consider the reach of colour design in the design industry. I aim to examine colour as a driver of the design economy, technical innovations, and environmental impact. Colour has a integral economic impact on the fashion industry and the technical aspects of colouring footwear are an industry driver for innovation. To outline colour design's sociological influence through the intersectional feminist lens to illustrate how colour meanings leveraged during the design process touch on race, class, culture, gender and ability. Figure 1, shows the breath of how colour meanings can be unpacked through the intersectional lens and figures 2 and 3 show a closer look at gender and colour design and race and colour design.
While colour has a rich history of examination, knowledge of what a product colour designer does and how designers use colour as a communication tool is primarily learned and held by those practising colour design creating a gap in aspects of the design process in academia. My research aims to highlight this critical aspect of design aesthetics by combining my ten years of experience as a practising Colour Designer. I aim to both highlight the importance of colour design as a design tool, unpack the colour design process and test whether colour can be a tool to instigate change.
