Join the movement and keep your activism alive!
What would you call the invisible mental distress caused by the pressure of an oppressive social system like patriarchy? If there was no term to define this condition before, you can now find it in The Feminist Textile Glossary and spread it out! The purpose of my project is to design a product in the form of a physical dictionary which aims to capture the many shades of feelings, facts and conditions which have always existed in our patriarchal reality but have always been neglected from a social and, consequently, from a linguistic perspective. If you don’t have a name for something, then it is harder to talk about and it is taken less seriously.
From a design perspective, my project aims to translate all the neologisms of the feminist glossary into textile pieces thanks to coded algorithms ruled by visual-linguistic parameters established by the designer. The textile and graphical aesthetic which will couple each term of the glossary is in fact generated from a specific data source. The visual data which are feeding the generative design algorithm are taken from Instagram, a social digital platform whose media content has been always affected and influenced user engagement. The parameter of this system takes advantage of Instagram trends, that is hashtags: specific keywords combined with a hash symbol that let people share specific content with other users.
The application I decided to design is a textile tent — made out of the digitally generated cloth — whose function is to accompany young activists in the urban areas of the city and provide them with a ready-to-use activist kit that you can fold and bring in a black backpack, part of the same kit. Besides showing the visual meaning of the feminist glossary words, the colourful textile tent wants to suggest the importance of a simple gesture such as wearing a backpack and occupying a public space to talk about known and unknown feminist issues. The Feminist Textile Glossary is a design project halfway across a public service, a design product and a live political performance. Hence the designer physically impersonates the project itself and the meaning behind it, acting at the same time as the spokesperson of the glossary and of the itinerant feminist movement.
One of the purposes of the design project is to explore the latent imaginative space of new feminist concepts using Artificial Intelligence as a creative and generative medium. From a design perspective, my project aims to translate all the new words of the feminist glossary into textile pieces thanks to coded algorithms ruled by visual-linguistic parameters. For this reason, a specific digital data-processing system has been designed for translating words into images to be transferred to textiles. From a technical perspective, coding technology takes inspiration from the idea of generative design. The information technology function is a combination of programming languages which make use of different libraries: HTML5, CSS3, JAVASCRIPT, jQeri, WebGL. The function which is specifically used to generate the manipulated image is programmed with OpenGL technology algorithm.
The idea of the textile dwelling was the natural and logically consequent application of the feminist glossary. It represents on one hand a meeting point around which people can open a debate promoting the new feminist concepts, but also an identification symbol for a fresh new feminist movement whose purpose is to create a community and engage people with creative propaganda.
The application of a dictionary into a physical design product in this case is crucial both from a design and from a political perspective: it allows the perfect dissemination of new feminists concepts in an analogue and old-fashioned way: occupying a public space, talking directly to people and approaching a new creative method for itinerant political propaganda from town to town.
Some of the most powerful actions to be a part of are those where people are coming together and celebrating community and resistance. Towards social problems or injustice most of the people see themselves as neither part of the problem nor the solution. This silence and invisibility allows the troubles to persist and the oppression to be perpetuated. If we start to get informed, if we start to acknowledge and speak up we are already half-way to our activistic achievement.
