 |
|
|
|||||
Womens healthcare is under unprecedented attack. Women across the U.S. are being denied access to basic reproductive healthcare and funding for research into diseases that affect women is being cut. Theres an urgent need for healthcare providers and, arguably, any brand that plays a role in womens daily lives, to step up and transform women’s health services and spaces through feminist design. Feminist design taps into womens and under-represented groups needs in order to create tools, services, and environments that combat systemic oppression. Propelled by the inequalities that surfaced over the COVID-19 pandemic, the current feminist movement is more intersectional and self-critical, shifting focus from the individual to large-scale change making. Feminist design champions equity for all. Feminist design goes beyond adapting things to make them more accessible or friendly to women and girls. The goal with this approach is to make transformational change by questioning design as an entire system, by considering the systemic biases embedded in the design processes and asking ourselves what might be possible if these are challenged. Designs inherent gender bias Like almost every industry, design has historically been shaped by patriarchal structures. With everything from smart phones to crash test dummies based on the requirements of the average male, women have been neglected by normative design. The Women in Global Health report found that during the pandemic only 14% of female healthcare workers had properly fitted PPE. The industry continues to be male dominated; A survey by the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) in 2019 showed that women make up 61% of the design workforce but only 24% are in leadership roles. The design of healthcare facilities is often rooted in hierarchical, paternalistic doctorpatient dynamics with environmental conditions that disfavor and often endanger women. For example, bright fluorescent lighting typical in hospitals has been found to increase stress levels and hinder the release of birthing hormones in laboring women. By contrast, feminist design explores how sensorial design can reduce stress and improve overall well-being, and shifts the emphasis to care, listening, and shared decision-making. For example, well-being is integral to the design of the Pearl Tourville Womens Pavilion in Charleston, South Carolina. The space was designed based on feedback from patients and staff, and features calming acoustics and aims to create a more welcoming, homelike atmosphere.Likewise, the design of the Barlo MS Centre in Toronto, responds to the specific challenges experienced by the people it servespatients with multiple sclerosisand includes a customized gymnasium, high-tech lecture spaces, and an Activities of Daily Living Lab, where patients can learn how to modify their homes. Women drive healthcare spending yet their needs are unmet As well as the obvious health and societal benefits, there is a major economic case for feminist design. An investment of $350 million in women-focused research could generate an estimated $14 billion in economic returns by increasing productivity, reducing healthcare costs, and lessening the burden of disease, according to a report from Women’s Health Access Matters (WHAM). Women make 80% of healthcare spending decisions, according to McKinsey & Company research, yet solutions tailored to their specific health needs remain underfunded. This provides a huge opportunity for brands, start-ups, and healthcare providers to deliver new value by transforming women’s health services, tech, and spaces. Principles of feminist design Feminist design promotes reciprocal practices in which communities act as consultants, shaping decisions from the outset. There is no one-size-fits-all design solution: Every environment and its community is different. Problem-solving needs to be experimental and, above all, participatory. Ultimately the vision comes from within the community, and designers make the reality happen. Here are some key ways to embed feminist design into products, services, platforms, buildings, and spaces: 1. Enable people to take ownership of their health and informationEmpower women with knowledge and equip them with tools to improve their health at their own convenience. FOLX Health has done this for the LGBTQ+ community, as the first ever digital healthcare provider designed to meet the medical needs of this community, offering online consultations with medical experts and deliveries of treatments direct to peoples homes. 2. Provide comfortable and safe spacesUnderstand the needs of diverse audiences and design flexible spaces to accommodate them, from family-centric areas with play spaces for children to intimate spaces for those breastfeeding or experiencing loss or trauma. Ensure basic facilities can be adjusted to accommodate different body types and abilities. Bring psychological comfort with soothing colour palettes, natural textures, and adjustable lighting.Nature is vitalbiophilic design principles can aid healing. Prioritize natural light, curved forms, and sensory stimuli. With its beautiful, yet functional, design, the Tokyo Toilet project is an example of how design can transform the most commonplace aspects of everyday life. 3. Build education programs and resourcesHelp women monitor their health, track symptoms, and make informed decisions through user-friendly interfaces and experiences. Inspire curiosity and exploration so people build a connected ecosystem of partners and information thats expansive and accessible. This is showcased by Midi, a health platform for women over 40, where women can access virtual consultations with medical specialists trained in treating menopause symptoms. 4. Provide platforms for community voicesInclusive language, accessibility, and privacy matter. From healthcare workers to patients and architects to policy makers, create a safe space for diverse groups to share their experiences, showing trust in their expertise. Foster a sense of belonging and establish a reciprocal feedback loop to drive strong relationships and open dialogue. This approach informs womens health research platform the Lowdown, which aims to enable women to review and research their health conditions, symptoms, and medications. Designers as activists Designers have the power to make real social impact by centering their work around empathy, care, and collaboration. The most transformative waves will come from those who dare to interrogate internal design processes and challenge convention. Feminist practitioners, like pioneering architect Phyllis Birkby, have long resisted dominant power structures and imagined alternative futures. Their activism feels ever more urgent against todays political backdrop. Practices like experimental storytelling, community-building, education, an radical testing offer ways to reimagine how we live, care, and design. When mindsets shift, so too can policy.
Category:
E-Commerce
In the lobby of the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an enormous sculpture made from thousands of feet of plastic twine falls from the ceiling. It’s entrancing. As you look up, your eyes take in how the fibers change color from blue to green to red to orange as it undulates across the space. While the piece looks abstract, each fiber actually has a precise meaning. The artwork was created by artist Janet Echelman is inspired by climate data guided scientists at MIT. Each strand of fiber represents the temperature of the planet over a period of time and the color signifies how hot it is, with blue and greens reflecting cooler climates than the reds and oranges. The sculpture goes all the way back to the ice age, but the most thought provoking part is our current moment, represented by a single yellow piece of twine. It then spreads out into a broad web that represents future centuries: Based on how we act right now, the future could look shockingly red or a calmer blue. As you look forward, into the museum, you see a wide range of possible pathways, from a deep red representing the worse outcomes of global warming to a more hopeful future represented by blues and greens. The piece is called Remembering the Future, drawn from the Sren Kierkegaard quote, “The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.” [Photo: Anna Olivella, Courtesy of MIT Museum] Echelman insists that the point of this sculpture isn’t data visualization. Instead, it is meant to take in the immensity of climate change without a feeling shock and paralysis. “It’s meant to be contemplative,” she says. “My hope is that it unleashes a sense of agency.” Echelman was first inspired to use fibers to create art in her twenties, when she saw fishermen casting out large nets on beaches in Asia. She began hand-crafting large sculptures from plastic fibers that have been displayed all over the world. In 2022, one of her works called “Earthtime 1.78” was installed in Milan. It was meant to symbolized interconnectedness, since the fibers are intertwined; the whole structure moved with the mind, reflecting how we are all subject to forces of nature. [Photo: Anna Olivella, Courtesy of MIT Museum] Echelman created this piece during her residency at the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology. For three years, she collaborated with Caitlin Mueller, a professor in MIT’s departments of architecture and civil and environmental engineering, to create software that would translate the data into a digital structure that Echelman could use as the basis of the sculpture. Raffaele Ferrari, a professor who models climate data, helped guide the research and visual different climate futures. In the lobby, museum visitors have the opportunity to play with a screen that features a digital twin of the sculpture. Using your fingers, you can digitally adjust the ropes of the sculpture, and explore the technical tools used to create it. Caitlin Mueller, left, and Janet Echelman, right. [Photo: Anna Olivella, Courtesy of MIT Museum] While the sculpture’s design required involved a lot of technology and software, the piece itself was made by hand. Echelman says that it took her team about a year to weave the pieces together. “Each piece of twine was woven slowly, bit by bit,” she says. “This is very much a handcrafted object.” Echelman says she was inspired to create the piece because she struggled to take in all the news about the state of the planet. “It’s like we’re getting texts every day in all caps telling us that the planet is on the verge of collapse,” she says. “It’s too much to think about, so I found myself avoiding the topic entirely.” She wanted to create a sculpture that would be visually intriguingsomething that makes you look at it, rather than away. And importantly, she wanted to visualize the many futures that lie ahead of us, depending on how we choose to behave in our own lifetimes. Indeed, our moment is represented by a single yellow cord. The tension of each cord is thoughtfully calibrated, but the yellow cord carries the highest tension. “It’s meant meant to reflect how much tension there is in this moment, and how much the choices we make now matter,” she says. [Photo: Anna Olivella, Courtesy of MIT Museum] Michael John Gorman, the director of the MIT Museum, says this piece was installed at the lobby of the museum, which is open to the public, so that the entire community could enjoy it. He says that people often come into this area, which has seating, to eat lunch or have a coffee from the museum’s cafe. At night, the sculpture is lit with lights to accentuate the different colors in the sculpture. “The artwork touches on one of the most important issues of our time,” he says. “We want as many people as possible to take it in.”
Category:
E-Commerce
It’s the size of a coaster and looks like a toy, but when the needle hits its groove, it’s immediately clear that Tiny Vinyl is exactly what its name suggests: a tiny vinyl record. Measuring just four inches in diameter, it’s a miniaturized version of the familiar 12-inch records that have existed in one form or another for more than 130 years, and just as playable. Shrinking the record down to pocket size is an unexpected evolution for this old technology, but starting later this month this new take on an old concept will be hitting stores nationwide. Tiny Vinyl, the Nashville-based company behind this concept, has more than half a million small records coming off the presses for an exclusive retail partnership with Target. More than 40 tiny records will be released in the next two months, with a mix of contemporary artists and well-known rereleases. New acts like Doja Cat, Chappell Roan, and Doechii stand alongside throwbacks like 1999-era Britney Spears, early hits from the Rolling Stones, and Christmas singles from Frank Sinatra. Each will retail for $14.99, and, like 45 RPM singles, will include one song on each side. [Photo: courtesy Tiny Vinyl/Broken Bow Records Music Group] The idea was born two years ago when toy industry veteran Neil Kohler was thinking of new ways to expand the universe of one of the toys he’d helped bring to market. Toymaker Funko has seen massive global success with its Pop! line of collectible pop culture figurines. Kohler noticed how many of the company’s best-selling figurines were musical acts, and thought it might be fun to create tiny playable records that could accompany the toys. He started socializing the idea with people in his circle in Nashville and got talking with Jesse Mann, who’s had a long career managing bands and putting on music festivals. He thought the tiny record idea could stand on its own. [Photo: Ethan Lovell/courtesy Tiny Vinyl/Warner Music Group] The two reached out to Nashville Record Pressing, a vinyl production facility that opened in Nashville in 2022. They found that it was technically possible to create tiny playable records, small enough to fit in a pocket but big enough to hold up to four minutes of audio. That’s more than enough for most artists today. “Thanks to Spotify and other trends in music generally, the average length of a song is getting shorter and shorter,” Kohler says. And thanks to Spotify and other trends in music, the experience of listening to music has become increasingly digital in recent years. That’s also led to a hunger among some listeners for a more analog or physical connection to music, whether in the form of records or compact discs or even cassette tapes. From a revenue and fan building perspective, there’s also a growing interest among bands and record companies to physically get music into the hands of fans however they can. Tiny Vinyl is a new way to do just that. [Photo: courtesy Tiny Vinyl/Concord] After soft launching the format on merchandise tables for a few touring indie artists last year, Kohler and Mann saw enough demand from both artists and fans to start thinking bigger. Last fall they partnered with Urban Outfitters for a limited release by violinist Lindsey Stirling. It sold out within the first day. Kohler reached out to contacts at Target that he had from his toy industry days and the ball got rolling on what would become an even bigger retail launch. The vinyl resurgence The partnership comes at an interesting time for vinyl records. Despite the age of the technology and its seeming replacement by tapes, CDs, and streaming, records are surprisingly resilient. More than 55 million vinyl records were sold in the U.S. in 2024, up from about 13 million in 2016. Oddly, many of those sales are to people who aren’t actually listening to the records. A report from 2023 found that 50% of vinyl record buyers do not have turntables on which to play them. “They never even open the shrink on the vinyl,” says Kohler. [Photo: Ethan Lovell/courtesy Tiny Vinyl/Universal Music Group] These collector-fans are not the market Tiny Vinyl is chasing, or at least not the only one. Kohler sees the small records his company is producing as a new music format, less skippable than a streaming service but easier to engage with than a full-length record. “We’re trying to create more of a digestible vinyl experience, and hopefully bring people into the vinyl medium with a couple of songs at a pretty accessible price point,” he says. Mann, the music industry veteran, says the shrinking of the record has appeal on both sides of the merch table, giving bands another revenue-generating way to engage with fans, and giving fans an affordable takeaway alternative to a tour T-shirt that can cost upwards of $50. That’s why Tiny Vinyl insisted on making their mini records as similar to existing records as possible. “Being able to play on a regular turntable at the normal turntable speed, which is 33 RPM, was really important to us. If we’d made it some wacky new speed, or even 45 seemed like it was edging more into the exotic space,” Mann says. Being new while also being familiar led the company to mimic some of the standard elements of the record as we know it. “We number each edition on the spine of the record. We put them in authentic gate-fold mini album jackets, just like a 12-inch vinyl, and it has a mini inner sleeve,” Kohler says. “It’s scaled proportionately to be just like a 12-inch vinyl with a mini label in the center on each side.” [Photo: Nathan Zucker/courtesy Tiny Vinyl] A new form factor One downside of Tiny Vinyl’s tiny size is that some record players, especially old ones, can’t actually play them. The tone arms on these older machines are designed to automatically stop right about where a Tiny Vinyl starts, which is where a conventional 12″ record would have its printed label. Some record players have the option to disable this auto-stop feature, but older and lower-end players are just not compatible. But for those with record players that can handle them, playing a Tiny Vinyl is remarkably similar to the experience of a standard 12-inch record, from pulling it out of the sleeve to plopping it on the turntable to watching it spin as the needle drops down. Just like vinyl, but tiny. [Photo: Nathan Zucker/courtesy Tiny Vinyl] Easy to conceptualize, but as it turns out, not so easy to create. Kohler says he and Mann worked with Nashville Record Pressing for more than year to figure out how to make such a small record play correctly. The closer to the center of a record, the smaller its grooves become to maintain a uniform playback speed. Cramming that into the space of a record just four inches across took some extra effort. “The physics of playing vinyl at that scale were not trivial to overcome,” says Kohler. “It’s not rocket science, but it’s nontrivial, and we’ve got a patent submission to try and protect that.” Its main problem solved, the company has its eyes on expansion, accepting orders from big name acts as well as indie groups looking to augment their touring merch. They’re even looking beyond just making tiny records. One obvious next step: tiny record players. Kohler and Mann wouldn’t say when something like that might be available, but tiny record collectors may soon have another item to add to their hi-fi setup. “We are in development on those things now,” Kohler says.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||