Designing Beyond the Binary

by Jake Minden, Associate ASLA

image: courtesy of Jake Minden

Survey for Designing Beyond the Binary: Building Empathy and Gender-Inclusive Tools for Equitable Built Environments

Your input is needed for a survey on gender equity in design. This survey seeks to understand the place-based lived experiences of trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, queer individuals and communities as they navigate the places and spaces of daily life (home, work, school, public space, recreation, etc.). Your contribution will help generate tools for equitable design and support urban designers, architects, landscape architects, and interior designers in the co-creation of equitable and inclusive places.

The survey asks demographic questions, but no identifiable information is collected. All responses are anonymous. The survey will take less than 20 minutes to complete. At the end of the survey, there is an opportunity to enter a drawing to win a $100 gift card. (You will be asked to use an email address to enter the drawing, but your email will be unattached from any data you provide and discarded after the drawing.) For each response, up to 1,000 responses, we will be donating $1 to The Trevor Project, a non-profit organization focused on suicide prevention efforts among LGBTQIA2+ youth.

Take the survey. Your participation is greatly appreciated! The survey will remain open until the end of January.

While everyone is encouraged to take the survey, we are specifically encouraging participation by trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, queer individuals, and communities. Please share this survey widely among your personal and professional networks by sharing this post and survey link with your networks; a PDF poster with a QR code is also available to share with others. For more information on the research, visit our Instagram page. For questions about the research, contact beyondthebinary@mithun.com.

Designing Beyond the Binary is an interdisciplinary study of gender equity in the built environment. Through this survey we aim to better understand the lived experiences of trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, queer individuals, and communities as they navigate everyday spaces. The end goal is a set of actionable tools that support designers in their project work and design practices. Our research team believes the findings from this survey will be valuable to professional design practices, design research knowledge, and our larger industries as we strive for a more inclusive built environment.

This research is funded by Mithun.

Jake Minden, Associate ASLA, is a former Fellow with the Applied Research Consortium at the University of Washington. He is currently a landscape designer at Mithun, in Seattle.

Leave a Reply