Reimagining Futures: Matriarchal Design and the Work of Unlearning

What might design look like if it prioritized care over control, and what would it take to teach that?

At Design As Activism 2024, a workshop entitled Matriarchal Design Futures: A Collective Work in Progress invited participants to explore those questions through practice. Led by Heather Snyder Quinn in collaboration with Ayako Takase, the session builds on their broader body of work examining how the matriarchal values of caregiving, reciprocity, collective learning, and ethical stewardship can reshape design methodologies and outcomes.

Rather than positioning design as a tool for solving isolated problems, the workshop asked participants to interrogate the systems that produce them, and to imagine an alternative future. Through shared exercises and dialogue, the workshop reflected an ongoing inquiry within the ID community: how can design challenge (and transform) power structures instead of reinforcing them?

The framework of Matriarchal Design Futures asks designers to unlearn patriarchal design training (“standard” or “traditional” design training) and confront the systems under which they’ve been “trained”—a word Quinn uses deliberately.

Traditional design pedagogy, shaped by industrialization and capitalism, often prioritizes:

• Efficiency
• Consumption
• Solutionism

In contrast, matriarchal design pedagogy centers:

• Plurality
• Relationality
• Care

Participants began with language itself. Through glossary-building and revisionist dictionary exercises, they were asked to redefine dominant design terms. Words like matriarchal—intentionally imperfect and provocative—became openings rather than constraints. The goal was not to replace one fixed definition with another, but to expand meaning: There isn’t one future. There can be many.

For designers skilled in imagination yet shaped by rigid systems, this reframing is essential. Quinn emphasized that futures work requires unsettling the present, not simply optimizing it.

A Values-Centered Framework

The workshop introduced a speculative framework co-created by Quinn and Takase through their teaching and community practice. The values at its core included: care, joy, ethics, respect, holistic thinking, and intuition.

Quinn, an Associate Professor at DePaul University, described the work as both pedagogical and cultural. Influence can begin with a single student, a single classroom but ripple outward into industry. Examples include teaching someone to recognize an ethical dilemma in an interface or coaching a future manager to lead with care in moments of conflict. These small interventions, she noted, accumulate into systemic change.

The Circle as Method and Metaphor

The visual language of Matriarchal Design Futures reinforces its philosophy. Circular diagrams replace hierarchical charts signifying continuity, collective learning, non-linear growth, and shared authority.

The circle also holds layered symbolism: the nest, the womb, the earth. At the center sit the values to be nurtured. Around the perimeter: the forces to be resisted (capitalism, extractivism, domination, perfectionism).

Rather than imagining escape from these forces, the framework prepares designers to engage them consciously with the understanding that everyone in the circle is both teacher and learner.

During the session, a recurring tension surfaced: How do designers resist harmful systems while still operating within them?

One reference point for the workshop was Superflux, the London-based speculative design studio known for futures work exploring social and environmental resilience. Their oft-cited reminder grounded the conversation:

For Quinn and Takase, this insight is pragmatic rather than compromising. Most students will enter capitalist workplaces and should aim to transform from within rather than withdraw.

Designers can carry alternative values into existing structures, modeling new ways of working, leading, and creating. Change, in this view, is both incremental and radical.

As the session turned toward education, Quinn posed a series of guiding questions: What does it mean to teach with care and joy? How do we move away from elitism? What barriers must be removed? What systems must be rebuilt—or burned down?

The work resists the myth that only exceptional designers matter. Instead, it affirms collective contribution and ongoing growth, or what Quinn calls a “work in progress” ethos. The framework unlerlines that there is room for bold, radical change and also room for steady participation. Both are necessary to building more equitable futures.

At its heart, Matriarchal Design Futures is not about replacing patriarchy with matriarchy as a mirror hierarchy. It is about designing for the pluriverse, a world where many ways of being, knowing, and creating can coexist. It asks designers to:

• Unlearn inherited systems
• Embrace multiplicity
• Lead with care
• Imagine beyond extraction and consumption
• And, crucially, to see themselves as agents within an unfinished, collective process.

Because the future of design is not singular. It is relational and evolving. And it is still being shaped by all of us.

Design as Activism was part of Art Design Chicago 2024, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.

Design as Activism was funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art in connection with the Chicago History Museum’s Designing for Change: Chicago Protest Art in the 1960s-70s.

You can learn more about Matriarchal Design Futures: A Collective Work in Progress at matriarchalfutures.design, and you can read the full proceedings of Design As Activism 2024.