In addition to the numerous interviews published on this website, this research project involved a messy design history workshop with Melbourne based designers Zenobia Ahmed and Dennis Grauel. We met up over Jitsi for numerous collaborative sessions to discuss and share knowledge on various texts we had collected, followed by a creative exercise in building crossword puzzles in response to the research we had done on various stories of women in design. Using the crossword puzzle as a design tool to explore stories of women in design, the workshop as a model for research and collaboration provided an opportunity to devote the time, and attention to stories that may have been left out of mainstream design history books. 

These artefacts also serve to confront individuals about their knowledge of design history and its potentially narrow perspective, and the importance of bringing these stories forward.

The methods described here allowed me to engage in research that is practice-based and is now an ongoing project that I will make space for in my graphic design practice. This page shows the puzzles Dennis, Zenobia and I created during this workshop. Feel free to save them and try to solve them!

This workshop took place over numerous days between September and October 2020. The collected texts used to create these puzzles can be found on our publicly available Are.na board here.

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Women Type Designers