The Larger Picture: A Designerly Approach to Making the Invisible Domestic Workloads of Working Women Visible

ABSTRACT

The pandemic in 2020 and the resultant global lockdown led to new dynamics in the homestead. Families faced an accelerated process of digitization of conventional processes like education and white collar jobs. Working women with children of school or kindergarten age were forced to redraw the boundaries between the personal and the professional as the entire family essentially functioned from home, which increased prevalent gender inequalities. Tasks like 'planning', care-giving, emotional care etc. go unaccounted for and remain invisible to other members of the household. We present a feminist design research project that explores how design research can contribute to greater social justice and gender equality by a fairer distribution of domestic labour. We conducted semi-structured interviews in India during the pandemic lockdown, to elicit both explicit as well as tacit information on daily workloads of working women with families. We found disparity in domestic duties between genders, with specific regard to the circumstances created by the 2020 pandemic conditions. Based on our findings and analysis, we prototyped a visualization tool that makes invisible domestic work visible. Our research contribution is a design research methodology to generate insights to enable creation of design interventions for social justice. This was achieved through use of established design research methods, that are conventionally used in face-to-face settings, which were then adapted to exceptional pandemic conditions that required social distancing where communication was remote, and usually virtual. © 2021 ACM.