Who is at the design table? Who isn’t?

Do you think that you are designing for everyone? If so, what aspects about this design are actually for you? Which aren’t?

Who are the other stakeholders involved in producing your design (e.g., in your extended supply chain)?

Are you engaging future users in a process of co-creation and participatory design?

What larger systems or infrastructures does your product or service belong to?

Systems can refer to urban infrastructure, industrial systems, ecosystems, social systems, technological systems, and more.

What other issues, such as sustainability or racial discrimination, surface when considering the system as a whole?

Have you used Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA), for example, to determine the system’s environmental impact across all stages of production?

How might your design change as social or environmental relations change in the coming years?

For example, in which ways might your design assume a traditional division of labor? How are you taking into account climate change challenges?

Menstrual Cups

Key Intersecting Factors: Gender, Sex, Sustainability

A menstrual cup is multi-functional. In cultures where women cannot say “no” to sex, a menstrual cup can deliver contraception. It can also deliver vaginal medication, and, when a microbicide is added, protect against STIs and HIV. Where desired, it can also function as a fertility aid by retaining semen close to the cervix.

Menstrual cups are also reusable—a menstruator may need as few as four in a lifetime. Fifty billion tampons and pads clog landfills and sewers each year, meaning that the economic and environmental cost of these products is high. Life-cycle environmental assessment of menstrual products—from developing and processing raw materials; manufacturing, transportation, and distribution; and recycling or final disposal—reveals that menstrual cups support numerous UN Sustainable Development Goals and fight against global warming.

Water Infrastructure

Key Intersecting Factors: Educational Background, Gender

In sub-Saharan Africa, water-fetching is women’s work, and when villages lack water infrastructure, women and girls spend some 40 billion hours annually procuring water. Because this is largely women’s work, many women have detailed knowledge of soils and their water yields. This knowledge can be vital to civil engineering and development projects—for instance, in determining where to place wells and water taps.

Studies show that water infrastructure also improves education levels for children of both sexes, especially in rural areas. The biggest gains are in girls’ education, where girls’ school attendance rates have increased by over 20% due to water infrastructure improvements. Development Goals and fight against global warming.

Transportation Planning

Key Intersecting Factors: Family Configuration, Gender

Do our cities support caregivers? Transportation planners collect data by journey purpose to plan infrastructure. Traditional data categories include, for example, employment, education, and shopping. None of these categories capture carework—caring for children, the elderly, and households—even though, when counted separately, “care-related trips,” become the second largest category by trip purpose.

Why is this important? Caregivers tend to make “chained” trips—or multiple, short trips that are grouped together rather than one long commute trip. Taking into consideration caregiver travel patterns allows transportation engineers to design systems that work efficiently across broader segments of the population.

Playgrounds

Key Intersecting Factors: Age, Gender, Sexuality

Playgrounds integrated within residential complexes or urban areas can be specifically designed for girls and boys of different ages as well as for the elderly. The city of Vienna has redesigned a number of parks after a study found that girls are more cautious about using public spaces than boys. The policy response was the program “Gender-Sensitive Parks, Sports Grounds, and Playgrounds for Children and Young People.”

Various methods were used to include girls in the project design. The girls formulated three basic requirements: they wanted a facility for girls only, an area for play and sports not dominated by boys, and a “communication zone” for socializing within groups and for making new social contacts. These methods might be expanded to investigate the needs of LGBTQ+ youth.