Image by Team 3
What does it mean to design futures from a feminist perspective? How do we practice design in feminist ways? How are the futures of health, work and spaces reshaped when they are approached from an intersectional and LGBTQ+ inclusive feminist perspective?
For the 2026 Spring and Summer terms, these were the collective research questions of this year’s MA Service Design students Design Futures unit. The key focus of the 8-week unit was to invite students to engage with Critical Service Design (CSD) (Salinas, L. et al 2024).
Critical Service Design is an approach that builds on service design tools and methods to envision and interrogate the socio-material configurations of possible futures. Rooted in speculative futures and participatory design methodologies, CSD challenges assumptions, disrupts the status quo, and fosters imaginative, ethically grounded responses to contemporary challenges.
Unit leaders, Prof. Silvia Grimaldi and Marion Lagedamont, in collaboration with the partner organisations, identified three domains for students to explore within feminist futures: work, health and spaces.
Work
- What might work look like if care work, whether professional or domestic, was valued as highly as traditionally male-dominated professions?
- How might we design workplace cultures that distribute caregiving responsibilities more equitably across genders?
The Work brief partnered with PILAA to reimagine work futures that genuinely value care, recognise the full spectrum of labour, and centre women’s working experiences across all life stages through policy, culture, and design.
Health
- What could menopausal education look like so that people in society are able to consider the effects of menopause on women’s bodies and lives?
- How do cultural taboos around menstruation and menopause influence our cultural understanding of these functions?
The Health brief partnered with the European Health Futures Forum to focus on the menopause experience and consider how technology, education, and cultural attitudes intersect to shape experiences of bodies throughout all life stages.
Spaces
- Who is allowed in different spaces; public, private, or semi-public? How do these permissions reflect or reinforce power dynamics?
- How might we design spaces that are safer and more welcoming for women, queer and trans people, particularly in contexts where visibility can pose risks?
The Spaces brief partnered with The Gendered City and Fem.Des. London to reimagine how the concepts of care, community, and collective wellbeing could reshape our approaches to spatial design to better serve the diversity of people who use them.
Throughout the unit, students were introduced to and collaborated with industry and academic experts, learning through lectures on gender, justice, decolonisation, and speculative fiction, as well as activities that grounded the service-based learning in horizon scanning, world-building, and reciprocity.
The 7 student groups focused their collaborative projects for alternative feminist futures within one of the three domains and asked the following speculative research questions:
Work: Caregiving
Team 1: The Ministry of Care.
What if the economy operated on care and empathy rather than productivity and profit alone?
Team 2: Human Dividend.
What if human qualities were valued more in an AI-driven world in 2036?
Health: Menopause
Team 3: Velaground™ – The Environmental Health Mediation System.
What if menopause care is finally normalised, but only through market-driven systems?
Team 4: Menopause Intelligence.
What if menopause were treated with the same information, intention, and involvement as fertility?
Spaces: Safety
Team 5: Bus Havens, The Future of Space 2039.
What if spaces were designed to create the feeling of safety?
Team 6: The Ministry of Social Wellbeing.
What if social participation became a condition for shared urban life?
Team 7: TrustMark™ – The Community-Led Safety System.
What if access to the city after dark was determined by social trust rather than physical infrastructure?
At the end of the unit, each teams presented their final collaborative projects using a combination of performance, speculative objects and interactive media to bring their peers, the staff and external experts into their alternative futures. Alongside the group presentations, each student was asked to write and publish a blog post on Medium explaining what they learned from CSD and feminist futures, and how the knowledge applied to their own practice as service designers.
Invite to the Exhibition:
Partners:
PILAA Equity Diversity and Inclusion Training
Date:
March to May 2026
Funder:
Knowledge Exchange Special Community & Impact Fund 2026 (LCC)
Project Leads:
Prof Silvia Grimaldi
Marion Lagedamont
Publications:
report coming soon
Links:
sample student blogs
Arunima Dhawan
https://medium.com/@arunima.mail.me/menopause-was-never-invisible-it-was-unprofitable-4b6e06e00724
Maitreyi Mandekar https://medium.com/@maitreyi.mandrekar/can-care-be-currency-feminist-design-futures-and-the-question-of-invisible-labour-c551fe1d4165
Mehal Chandra https://medium.com/@mehalchandra24/good-intentions-do-not-make-power-disappear-64d168ec8452
Full Credits:
Project Leads:
Silvia Grimaldi, Professor of Service Design and Transformation, Co-Lead Service Futures Lab, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London
Marion Lagedamont: Senior Lecturer in Prototyping, Materialising and Storytelling for Design Futures, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London
Partners:
Health:
Janet Michel (EHFF and University of Bern, Switzerland) and Nura Jahanpour (EHFF and Cambridge University)
European Health Futures Forum, Menopause Project (https://ehff.eu/)
Lucy Hope, Founder, The Daughters of Mars (https://www.thedaughtersofmars.com/)
Spaces:
Nourhan Bassam, Founding Executive Director, The Gendered City (https://genderedcity.org/)
Creator FEM.DES network (https://genderedcity.org/fem-des)
Toby Godfray, FEM:DES Director in London
Work:
Dr Ope Lori Founder and CEO PILAA
B.J. Woodstein, Research Associate, PILAA
Pilaa: Equality Diversity and Inclusion Training https://www.pilaa.co.uk
Experts:
Georgina Voss, Author | Artist | Visiting Professor, Science & Technology Studies, University College London
Malina Dabrowska Senior Foresight Consultant at Arup
Luiza Prado de O. Martins, Artist, Writer and Theorist
Aidan Harris, Queen Mary University London
Students:
Team 1: Petrina Gana, Jiayi Zhang (Tina), Maitreyi Mandrekar, Mehal Chandra
Team 2: Shenyue Jian, Eeshanee Badwe, Rashi Jaiswal, Smriti Bhandari, Hui-Chuan Hsu
Team 3: Thennarasu Sivakumar, Yao Yao, Shrawani Malkar, Srishti Madan
Team 4: Arunima Dhawan, Saee Mahajan, Yingze Luo (Elliott), Anisha Jhaveri, Haerin Lee
Team 5: Odelia Vaz, Tsz Ching Chan (Clara), Adib Ahamed, WanYun Lim (Kelsea)
Team 6: Hibiki Nagaoka, Yuan Tao, Riya Kamdar, Pei-Tsen, Lai (Yessika)
Team 7: Rucha Ghadge, Anushka Mathur, Riccardo Nembrini, Zain Megdad