Feminist Futures: Health, Work, Spaces

What does it mean to design futures from a feminist perspective? How do we practice design in feminist ways? How are the futures of health, work and spaces reshaped when they are approached from an intersectional and LGBTQ+ inclusive feminist perspective? 

For the 2026 Spring and Summer terms, these were the collective research questions of this year’s MA Service Design students Design Futures unit. The key focus of the 8-week unit was to invite students to engage with Critical Service Design (CSD) (Salinas, L. et al 2024).

Critical Service Design is an approach that builds on service design tools and methods to envision and interrogate the socio-material configurations of possible futures. Rooted in speculative futures and participatory design methodologies, CSD challenges assumptions, disrupts the status quo, and fosters imaginative, ethically grounded responses to contemporary challenges.

Unit leaders, Prof. Silvia Grimaldi and Marion Lagedamont, in collaboration with the partner organisations, identified three domains for students to explore within feminist futures: work, health and spaces.

Work

• What might work look like if care work, whether professional or domestic, was valued as highly as traditionally male-dominated professions?

• How might we design workplace cultures that distribute caregiving responsibilities more equitably across genders?

The Work brief partnered with PILAA to reimagine work futures that genuinely value care, recognise the full spectrum of labour, and centre women’s working experiences across all life stages through policy, culture, and design.

Health

• What could menopausal education look like so that people in society are able to consider the effects of menopause on women’s bodies and lives?

• How do cultural taboos around menstruation and menopause influence our cultural understanding of these functions?

The Health brief partnered with the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies (ICFG), University of Bern, the European Health Futures Forum, and The Daughters of Mars to focus on the menopause experience and consider how technology, education, and cultural attitudes intersect to shape experiences of bodies throughout all life stages.

Spaces

• Who is allowed in different spaces; public, private, or semi-public? How do these permissions reflect or reinforce power dynamics?

• How might we design spaces that are safer and more welcoming for women, queer and trans people, particularly in contexts where visibility can pose risks?

The Spaces brief partnered with The Gendered City and Fem.Des. London to reimagine how the concepts of care, community, and collective wellbeing could reshape our approaches to spatial design to better serve the diversity of people who use them.

Throughout the unit, students were introduced to and collaborated with industry and academic experts, learning through lectures on gender, justice, decolonisation, and speculative fiction, as well as activities that grounded the service-based learning in horizon scanning, world-building, and reciprocity.

The 7 student groups focused their collaborative projects for alternative feminist futures within one of the three domains and asked the following speculative research questions: