In 2016, I hosted a series of ten feminist co-design workshops at the Women’s Center for Creative Work (WCCW), a feminist co-working space for artists and designers in Los Angeles. Together with collaborators, I explored how feminist thinking and design thinking can intersect to produce new forms of creative practice.

Each project followed a different direction. One of the most memorable outcomes was a “junk drawer” shaped like a woman’s belly. Users could fill the belly with discarded items as if it were “eating” them, then press on it to excrete the contents. Working from a mold of my torso, we developed two silicone prototypes. The design was both playful and symbolic, bringing a positive representation of a woman’s body into the workspace while commenting on the burdens and responsibilities often placed on women in society.

The photos and video below document the development of one of the prototypes.