QDC x Travelling U: Berlin Workshop
Event Description:
Queering Design calls for a fundamental re-architecting of core service design tools. The traditional service design blueprint, while excellent for visualizing logistics, is rooted in a capitalist, industrial logic — separating "front-stage" and "back-stage" labor, focusing on linear profit-driven transactions, and often overlooking the full humanity of the people involved.
Drawing on American pragmatism, post-capitalist theory, and feminist/queer design, we offer you concepts for three interconnected tools. They are proposed to be used not just as maps of a service, but as instruments for world-making.
We invite you to imagine and test these tools not as a prescription but an invitation. They are a starting point for inquiry and co-design with the very communities who will use them. They are a commitment to designing not just for users, but with co-owners; not just for the world as it is, but for the worlds we desperately need and are building together.
Philosophical & Theoretical Underpinnings:
American Pragmatism (Dewey)
Shifts focus from the service itself to the experience and inquiry of all involved. A service's value is determined by its consequences for the full community's growth and problem-solving, not just its efficiency or quarterly revenue.
Feminist & Queer Theory (bell hooks, Sara Ahmed)
Centers the "outsider within" and the "lived experience" of bodies. It refuses the public/private, frontstage/backstage split by acknowledging that workers bring their whole selves—their identities, caregiving responsibilities, and emotional labor—into every interaction. It "unlearns normative servicescapes" by designing for the specific needs of SOGIESC (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression, and Sex Characteristics) diversity, moving beyond tokenism to structural inclusion.
Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) / Post-Growth
Replaces the goal of exponential growth and value extraction with goals of sufficiency, regeneration, and distribution. The blueprint is designed to make visible the flows of value that are not monetary — trust, care, skill-sharing, ecological health — and to ensure they are circulated, not extracted.
What to Expect:
Light introduction to QDC and queering design.
Team up with people to speculate what some more-humanistic design tools might look like.
Make some prototypes of those tools.
Share what you learned through the process, and receive (if desired) co-authorship rights of insights generated.
2-3 hour experience.