Hello. This is Kate.

I am Kate McEntee, a social design researcher and strategist.

I am passionate about learning from people. I seek to design for human awareness and social connection. My strength is taking on difficult to understand subject matters and making them understandable and applicable. My work creates tangible outcomes: communication for understanding like this, opportunities for engagement like this and this, and strategies for action like this.

What is the feminine in design?
Feminine design is an invitation to explore qualities, or moments, that infiltrate uniform structures and discourses in the design field. These moments often fall into conflict with modern values such as purpose, determination, universalism, Fordism, concentration and permanence. Designers working in spaces of social innovation, civic laboratories, political discourse and academia are passively and overtly forced to shape their work processes and outputs to fit into structured, and often detrimental, requirements for outputs and measurement (Abdulla et. al. 2016; Akama and Yee, 2016; Willis, 2017). Rather than using the term feminine design to create a dualistic paradigm between masculine and feminine, we are interested in using feminine design to explore and celebrate alternative practices for contemporary design, that have historically been used to denigrate people on the basis of gender. Using feminine to celebrate these qualities is a political, seeking to reframe and redefine perceptions of ‘feminine’.

Some qualities of feminine design include: nuanced; performative; not solution-oriented; invisible; uncertain; slippery; temporary; embodied; situated; incomplete; and reflexive. Listen in here: http://tinyurl.com/feminineindesign.

Feminine design is an ongoing research collaboration with Isabella Brandalise in Brasília and Jon Günther Andersen in Copenhagen. Please feel free to reach out if you are interested.