Making women designers Googleable. The methodology behind the Flemish Architecture Institute Wiki Women Design Project
Zsuzsanna Böröcz
In Ghent (Flanders, Belgium), on 2 February 2022 in the Design Dialogues series, Vera Sacchetti, design critic and curator, and Mindy Seu, author of the anti-canon Cyberfeminism Index, reflected on female creativity under the title Design X Female Building Power. This open discussion focused on crucial female contributions with a plea for redefining the meaning of design and making the female designers more visible on a permanent basis. Although it was not Sacchetti’s first invitation to Belgium as there have been plenty of recent international initiatives, the choice of her and Seu to host the dialogue emphasizes the major leap Flanders has recently taken in recognizing women designers past and present.
Crucial in this was the Wiki Women Design Project, a two-year initiative by the Flanders Architecture Institute started in October 2020 in partnership with Docomomo Belgium a.o. The project set a milestone by bringing women designers out of the shadows and demonstrating their influence on Belgium’s design heritage. With the tagline renovatio memoriae the project wanted to break the vicious circle of invisibility and contribute to a more inclusive history through the use of Wikipedia.
This contribution wishes to showcase the methodology behind the Wiki Women Design Project as a best practice example which could be replicated in other countries. I will show how an extensive working group of volunteers, students, designers, researchers and project partners were brought together to organize 11 writing sessions, one of which was the collaboration between Docomomo x ULB and Faculté d’Architecture La Cambre Horta on the topic “Women at architecture schools”. The sessions took the form of edit-a-thons, a well-known format in which communities come together to write and publish on a particular topic. So far, 282 participants edited, translated and/or corrected about 240 Wikipedia articles. We will dive into a wide range of issues: How were the partners chosen? Which team was behind this project? What kind of preparatory work was needed for the writing sessions? Which archives were used? How the specific topics of the writing sessions were linked to the partners expertise? What kind of technical guidance was organized during the writing sessions? Who did the IT supervision? We will also talk about the organizing of an International Symposium, the launching of an open call, the set-up of the Instagram page, the ambassadrices, presented through short films. Besides the successes of the project we will also discuss the challenges concerning the content and the ‘only women’ approach.
