Design Like a Woman

One milestone from future vision to present, in the period immediately following my redundancy, was to edit the book I wrote for my Master of Science in Strategic Design. This book is the foundation to all that you see here. It set out the manifesto and method for what is now Wild Flowers Wild Futures, and eventually, I’ll be publishing some of the material here.

In editing the book, which had lain untouched for a year, in Dropbox, not even printed out, I came across the small ‘chapter’ I wrote on Feminist Design. Going through the somewhat familiar text I could sense that I had reached an energy block during the writing of this piece as it lacked the punch and zestiness of some of the rest of the tome. Even one year on I was hard pushed to find the energy to improve the work, and instead questioned whether it even ‘needed’ to be in the book.

I think I wrote something along the lines of ‘this is a nice to have but is not necessary for overall success in the coaching program’. I wrote this not because I fully believed it, but because I wanted to excuse my recalcitrance at refusing to improve the piece. But also there was definitely some unconscious bias that the content about women designing was sort of ‘less than’. I had of course given plentiful pages to the design theory part of the book which was focused on two male thinkers.

Now, being unemployed and having the space to be more curious about my thoughts, and engage intellectually with things, I pondered a moment on what was going on. I knew it was just wrong to dismiss feminist design as some kind of accessory piece to the Wild Flowers Wild Futures offering, so as I often said in my corporate career when we hit road blocks or inspiration deserts: Go back to the evidence. I re-read the books that had guided my thinking on feminist design, and as I read, I began to realise that where I’d gone wrong was to focus too much on feminism, and what was ‘wrong’ with the designed world which ‘othered’ women, so huge and important as to be unwieldy for a non academic to handle. In effect I had gotten in too deep, when I wanted to remain light. Conversely, I had not focused enough on celebrating the unique characteristics of design done in a female way, which arguably is a much more joyful starting point for a brand that is all about the joy of designing your wild and wonderful future.

So as I often do, I worked on ‘reframing’ my approach or focus. The result was a celebration of ways in which women design (and even this is apparently controversial for some, and please, on this note, I am as a woman, happy with where I have gotten to with this and I do not want to get into gendered constructs).

I got (good) shivers down my spine when I begun this reframing; I realised that ‘Design Like a Woman’ as I renamed it, could take up space and be a central pillar to our coaching and Garden Parties. It would make both offerings much more female centric, it would be celebratory, and it would open up a ton of new ways of expressing our ideas by re-purposing often devalued ‘female’ forms of creative expression, as the main showcase for ideas about the future, and encouraging long treasured ‘female’ ways of doing design (behaviors) as the backbone of how we work both one-on-one and in our parties.

Here’s a succinct run down of where we stand on Design Like a Woman.

And without this book, I would never have gotten a grip on any of it at all: Alison Place: Feminist Designer.

Design Like a Woman Manifesto:

The designed world is largely male driven, and women are designed for as an afterthought or not at all.

Design that is celebrated and awarded, or considered ‘iconic’ is often that done by men.

Women have centuries of history of producing and making, decorating and service design; and yet often because these design activities originally happened in the home, or for the domestic side of life, they are not considered design, and do not enjoy visibility. Think embroidery; floral design; ceramics; meal preparation; quilt making; room design; clothes making; homeschooling; gardening; remedy design etc.

Female design behaviors are unique and can be characterised by the following traits: collaboration; emotional and personal dimensions are included in the design and are therefore made visible; fragmented; meaning done in small snatches of time, in between caring for other humans; messy in a glorious way: think curves and mashup rather than straight lines and perfection; designing with what they have around them; designing to improve the lives of people close to them; making, producing, small scale and local. Lastly, they design best in comforting, supportive environments.

Across our Garden Parties and one-on-one coaching we celebrate everything listed out above. You’ll find quilting squares and embroidery hoops in our design kit; we use floral design and gardening in our team building; and we do everything in comforting, supportive environments whether online, at the Garden Concept, or at a space of your choosing. Plus, we make everything we do visible: you take home your work from our parties, and you share your work on your Futures Canvas in one-on-one coaching.

Designing Like a Woman provided us with the ‘how’ and core ‘behaviors’ of Wild Flowers Wild Futures.
We had the methods and prompts (many of which arguably authored by men), and yet Design Like a Woman is how we go about the work, and how we showcase our thinking. A perfect balance.

Futures Thinking for you and me: It actually works

Welcome to the first of our Homegrown Futures Thinking posts.
Making Futures Thinking and Design accessible to you and me.

All posts are an AI Free zone!

I’m writing this piece somewhere north of Scotland as I fly to Doha, on my way to Dubai, where we’re launching this beautiful business. As always, a dark plane cabin, blankets and the white noise of the engines provide a fertile environment for thinking and reflection. So here I reflect a little on some elements of the journey so far, whilst I make a physical journey.

Since I got laid off ‘expectedly unexpectedly’ on November 19 2024 (it was a shock but the prospect had been hanging over me for almost a year), I’ve been learning and doing, pretty much every single day. Except for when I went ice climbing, which I did a lot of, but even then, I was thinking. I’ve mastered website design, really reinvigorated and interrogated the Wild Flowers Wild Futures coaching method, invented the Futures Canvas, become fluent in the language of our business, and its pillars, so I can pitch it with confidence, but one thing I still find difficult is to distill the Futures Thinking methods into short social posts a la Instagram. So blogging seems to be the way forward. I know I wouldn’t invest or spend money and time on an endeavor, if I couldn’t assess its fundament. So this is what the Homegrown Futures Thinking blog (does anyone even use the term blog anymore?) is all about. As well as a somewhat lofty mission to demystify the tools of our offering so they feel usable and knowable to regular people like all of us.

So does Futures Thinking actually even work?
In therapy it was often evident to me that one would be asked to commit to a certain method or approach without the time being taken to explain why, how, or better still, have the therapist themselves talk about having used it and finding it useful. I found therapy and indeed conventional coaching, some of the most lonely experiences of my life.
No collaboration, no personal interaction between client and therapist, and certainly a one way street.

Whilst we are absolutely not therapists here at WFWF, we have used the lived experience of therapy and allied services to design something different. We aim to offer an experience where not only do those who encounter our offerings understand why we believe in them, and where they come from, but they will know that we are also actively participating in the methods ourselves and visibly so.

In one on one coaching I personally collaborate with each client on a shared private Futures Canvas, so I can put down my thoughts, share links to background reading, and truly lean in to the work the client does. Better still she can see that I’ve been online and actually looked at her hard work more than 5 minutes before our session. It’s transparent, and it’s shared accountability.

I wanted to share a little story to demonstrate that we live and breathe our methods, and we make that visible. I tried to do this over the weekend on Instagram, using videos, but I was dissatisfied with the outcome if I am honest with myself. At the time I felt it would be so much easier to write about it than show it in a video, so here goes.

So a little theory if I may, to set up! Futures thinking always starts right now in the present, where we take on a different lens and look at our present with new spectacles on. We search for signs in our belongings, our life experiences to date, weak signals of change in our world, trends which seem new but interesting to us right now. From that starting point, only then can we begin to imagine and design scenarios of a future we desire. Ensuring that the scenarios we design contain a good dose of the present means two things: 1) The scenarios are plausible and or possible because they are not detached from our reality and 2) there is a tangible link between ‘future’ and ‘present’, meaning that by visioning the future deeply, and growing the hunger to bring it to life, we necessarily have to change, and begin work, in our present.

This is so appealing to me because when you decide to invest time in life coaching or the allied self help activities world, arguably you are looking to make change right now, but also improve your life over time. Futures Thinking is the only codified approach I’ve found to date which truly sets out intentionally to do that. It also can be argued that it’s not helpful for any ‘life change’ work to be so aspirational as to be unachievable without some huge material or physical upheaval or change. Preferable to me in this age of excess, is a minimalist approach which takes what you are and what you have right now, and takes it somewhere interesting. For most of us, Eat Pray Love (I’ve never read it but I know enough) is simply not a reality. And guess what, if you run away from life, eventually you have to come back to it.

Ok, so how does this work in real life. Let me tell my story. So I am getting more used to saying it out loud but yes I got laid off. The corporate VP was dethroned. I cried in public. I had night monkeys. My corporate identity was a HUGE part of my present. But within a day or so, and a lot of cleaning and tidying of my apartment, listening to gentle podcasts and cooking, I had time to scan my life for the things I was really into, my trends, my signs and signals. From the ashes of my corporate career I was able to salvage a love of coaching women, designing workshops using design and futures techniques, getting people out into nature. From the other part of my life I saw signals of increasing commitment to climbing, adventures, and a desire to be more creative and intellectually driven. I also recognised a deep bone aching loneliness, and thus early signs of a trend of trying to forge relationships. I remember well the Saturday after ‘That Terrible Tuesday’, that I pulled out a sheet of paper from my notepad and wrote a vision of my future, based on these diverse signs and signals. At this point it was a coaching business one on one only, with executive women. No name. Nature involved somehow, but not sure how, but nevertheless coaching. I wrote on the bottom of the paper: ‘Go live march’. I worked back from March, month by month, to November 23rd. Listing out the experiments and ‘to—do’s’ I felt would link future to present time. And, without being dictated to by the piece of paper, which I stuck in a prominent place in my home, I began to work on the list. Interestingly, a quick re-entry back into the corporate world was nowhere on this list.

Of course reading this now, you know that I is now We and We (Lucy my sister, and I) are indeed ‘Going Live in March’. But more magical is the immense changes to my present that this future vision brought to me. I for sure did not do all that was on the list. I added more to it, in the ‘cloud’ I call my head. The end product has, as a result of my travel from present to future, become stronger, better, more beautiful. I’ve made new relationships and engaged intellectually with the world again, I am flying to Dubai, I took financial risks, and felt scared but empowered, I let my son ‘be’, a bit, I climbed an awful lot, I cooked and nourished myself because I realised this too was part of my future; to coach others in growing their garden, mine had to be plentiful too. I could go on, but I just wanted to share this. The method, even in its most basic iteration as shown above, works. Which tells me that even in a short space of time in one of our Garden Parties with a Difference, you too, can change your present, and achieve a future goal in a matter of months.