Design and Feminism: Revisioning Spaces, Places and Everyday Things - Softcover

How well do our designed environments - the places and spaces where we live, work and play - meet our aesthetic and functional needs? Increasingly, the distinction between the spaces considered public and private or work and home are becoming more blurred. As a result, innovative designs are needed to meet the challenges of our ever-changing environment. Our streets, parks, dwellings and tools are designed to a ""one-size-fits-all"" standard, and the responses of the design community to meet diverse needs have been mixed at best. This work offers feminist critiques of these inadequate design standards, and suggests ideas, projects and programmes for change. Each contributor asks how we might think differently and more inclusively about human needs in the environments in which we live and work. The interdisciplinary essays reflect the writers' diverse fields - architecture, planning, industrial and graphic design, and architectural, urban and design history. Essays cover such subjects as rethinking the American city, graphic design and the urban landscape, working at home, special needs in housing, theories of women and design, redesigning architectural education, and a photoessay on industrial designs. A review essay of the literature in these fields rounds out the collection.

Joan Rothschild is a research associate at the Center for Human Environments at the Graduate School and University of New York. She is the author of Machina Ex Dea: Feminist Perspectives on Technology; and Women, Technology, and Innovation.