The Feminist Design Manifesto was born from the desire to refocus design attention on people — all people. Feminism is not only about women: it is about systems of power that exclude along multiple, intersecting axes. This project is about design and people, about the impact of design on the world, and about the need for greater design awareness.
To simplify the application of its principles, the Manifesto was conceived as a design support tool. For this reason, its principles are organized across the stages of the design process. The six stages identified — Discover, Empathise, Define, Design, Test, Evolve — have been grouped into three phases: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation. This structure proposes a synthesis of the methods of Design Thinking, the Double Diamond, and Munari's method.

Feminist Design Manifesto

Inspiration

Discover
1. Feminist design is the approach of designing for every individual based on their intersectional identity. Feminist designers work in the service of society to achieve equality and social justice for everyone, bridging the gap between and within genders.

2. We believe in the responsibility of designing consciously. Those who choose not to adopt an approach unknowingly conform to the one proposed by the existing system.

Emphatise

3. Design is not neutral. Every project acts on the world and transforms it, whether we intend it or not. It is our responsibility to ensure that the impact of our project leads to the inclusion of individuals rather than oppressing and invisibilizing them by not considering them in the design process.

4. We cannot eliminate our situated point of view, but we must stop imposing it. To avoid introducing our biases into our projects, we must actively listen to the people we are designing for. Research must be grounded in the real world, not in our vision of it.

Ideation

Define
5. We reject the standard user. For decades, the male body, behaviour, and needs have been assumed as the universal parameter. Designing for the standard user means perpetuating the systematic oppression of anyone who does not fit it. Personas are a tool for indexing collected data — they do not replace interaction with real people and do not define who we are designing for.

6. We design knowing at all times whose experience our data reflects. We refuse to rely on aggregated data that treats people as an undifferentiated whole or extends the conclusions of a homogeneous sample to those who were not part of it. We actively seek and collect data that makes the intersectional identities of the people we are studying visible.

Design
7. We recognize that every design choice — form, material, name, texture — can reproduce biases that bear on people, creating oppression, discrimination, and inequality. We commit to a deep understanding of these mechanisms to actively avoid replicating them.

8. We design with people, not for people. Designing with those who belong to social identities different from our own enriches us and produces results that a homogeneous team could not achieve. We actively seek to expose our projects to the greatest possible social heterogeneity, aiming to address the issues that we may discover in the process.

Implementation

Test
9. Who participates in the testing phase determines which needs are considered. We refer to broad, heterogeneous samples to understand how our project might be excluding some individuals, and then we actively work to redress it.

10. Only those who live the problem we want to solve hold the information necessary to design a solution. We do not substitute their point of view for ours during the testing process.

Evolve
11. We call our work into question by listening to the feedback of those affected by the project once it is in the world. Every update is an opportunity to correct and improve our design.

12. Our projects will continue to exist after us. We aim to use the transformative power of design consciously to produce positive social change.

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The goal of this manifesto is to open a debate, to offer food for thoughts, and to redirect design's attention toward the society — all of it — for which, upon which, and within which it operates. The Feminist Design Manifesto is an evolving project: the conversation that will emerge from its first publication will inform the release of future versions.

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The Feminist Design Manifesto is the output of a master's thesis conducted by Nicole Lomuscio under the supervision of Professor Luisa Chimenz — University of Genova, in collaboration with Professor Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre — Université Laval.