Kel Jackson
The Adults in the Room Aren’t Listening: Creating Interventions to Confront Bias in Design Narratives Through Colour Design

By empowering children’s voices in the product creation process, can we confront gender stereotypes in color design?

Inspired by her career as a Color Designer, Kel Jackson sought to explore the power designers have in defining gender through the aesthetic storytelling of products. Finding in her practice that color is a powerful tool in this narrative of communicating gender most recognizably in children’s products. Aiming to break through the stereotype that blue is for boys and pink is for girls, Kel sought to design tools to enable more profound expressions of Intersectional Design in Color Design. To accomplish this Kel explored how design uses color, the origin of gendered color and how color designers collect information to create narratives. Leveraging this knowledge she designed a series of workshops which were tested with two groups of educators and researchers along with a family in the United states to test usability and clarity with the intention of creating a better prototype for future testing. Through this journey Kel unlocked the potential for creating interventions for designers using design tools like color to confront gender bias in the design process. Using the test workshops to uncover areas for further exploration Kel created a set of prototype design probes leveraging color and the metaphors we place onto color, for example red is associated with stop but also studies has shown red is associated encouraging risky behaviors. Kel seeks to continue her research of creating interventions to confront gender bias in the design process.