What is design?
Design is a project, a plan that shapes something. It is also defined as an “original conception of an object or work intended for mass production”.
Design is the prior process of mental configuration, the “prefiguration”. It is commonly applied in the context of industry, communication, marketing and other disciplines requiring creativity.
The term is also used to refer to the appearance of certain products in terms of their lines, form and functionalities.
On the other hand, what is gender?
In case anyone is still confused about the difference between “sex” and “gender”, the first one refers to the sexual characteristics of our body (genitalia, chromosomes, hormones…); the second one, although it also has to do with our sexuality, is related to the social dimension of this area, to how we interpret and label our bodies according to how they look.
In most societies around the world we organise ourselves based on the man-woman binary system, which includes roles and expectations about what behaviours, thoughts and characteristics we should have depending on whether we are a male or a female.
In this way, and insisting on looking at it from a socio-cultural rather than exclusively biological point of view, we cannot deny that the gender we are assigned at birth depending on our sexual characteristics does not always correspond to how we ourselves feel about our bodies. Sometimes we may not even want to have a gender.
Gender is, in essence, a way of ordering us, of categorising us.
And, if, at this point, we can say that gender is something invented by humanity, why not say that gender is DESIGNED?
