Social Design Feminist Genealogy

“If we are going to create feminist futures, we have to create them through intergenerational solidarity and through the quality of our relationships with those who came before us and those who come after.” (*)

The social design class of 2021/22 reclaims itself as a feminist space within HFBK Hamburg and especially within the design department. Therefore we are installing a feminist genealogy that looks at the past, present and future of the class. It is an effort for building continuity and establishing a learning culture of social design, one that is collectively nourished and allows us – the students – to become hosts and caretakers of the class.

The interest in creating a genealogy of the social design class started with an empty room in which we found ourselves at the beginning of the semester. Finding no traces of the previous professorships we wondered what might have happened in this place before. How was the space inhabited, by whom and by what? What was the content, knowledge and topics that circulated in here? 

Discourse, pedagogies and history of social design at the HFBK became the focus of our research during the winter semester 2021/22. We traced the beginning and the development of social design education in order to discover how habits, routines, protocols and methodologies of the current Social Design class echo those of previous ones.

The research produced a collection of insights, perceptions, memories, gossips*, which we gathered both through factual materials from sources such as the official archives of the HFBK and from interviews with the former professors of the Social Design class: Marjetica Potrč (2011-2018), Jeanne van Heeswijk (2018/19), Johanna Dehio (2020/21) and Rosario Talevi (2021/22). 

Download the Social Design Genealogy Zine

The genealogy group is Anna Unterstab, Charlotte Perka, Jenny Mehren, Maria Rincón, Marie-Theres Böhmker, Ronja Soopan and Zineb Mahassini.

(*)  Alex M. Roe: To Become Two. Propositions for Feminist Collective Practice, Archive Books 2018.