Unveiling Lived Experiences:

A Co-Design Workshop for Women's Spaces

The design of public and private spaces profoundly shapes how individuals — particularly women — navigate and experience the world. Too often, these spaces are created without direct input from the very people who use them, resulting in environments that can feel unwelcoming, unsafe, or simply inadequate.

To address this gap, we hosted a Co-Design Workshop focused on women’s lived experiences, aimed at informing future approaches to designing women-centric spaces. This blog offers a glimpse into the insights, methods, and collaborations that emerged from this meaningful engagement.

The Power of Co-Design

The design of public and private spaces profoundly shapes how individuals — particularly women — navigate and experience the world. Too often, these spaces are created without direct input from the very people who use them, resulting in environments that can feel unwelcoming, unsafe, or simply inadequate.

To address this gap, we hosted a Co-Design Workshop focused on women’s lived experiences, aimed at informing future approaches to designing women-centric spaces. This blog offers a glimpse into the insights, methods, and collaborations that emerged from this meaningful engagement.

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Workshop Objectives & Approach

This workshop was grounded in a feminist participatory research framework, placing women’s lived experiences at the center of the design process. The core objectives were to:

Foreground women’s voices
Systematically map everyday experiences
Reimagine domestic, community, and workspaces
Strengthen collective agency through participation

Every stage of the process was designed to be encouraging, non-intrusive, and women-led wherever possible, ensuring comfort, trust, and openness among participants.

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Co-Creation Activities

The heart of the workshop lay in creative, hands-on co-creation exercises that translated conversations into tangible expressions. Participants were encouraged to share their daily routines, challenges, and aspirations through making and visual storytelling.

🔹 Prototyping Dream Spaces

Using materials such as cardboard, fabric scraps, and small everyday objects, participants created physical models of spaces they wished to improve or redesign. These miniature prototypes allowed abstract ideas to become visible, shared, and discussable.

🔹 Visual Narratives

Through collage-making and other visual methods, participants represented a day in their life as workers. These visual stories revealed moments of ease, struggle, joy, and aspiration, capturing emotional and practical dimensions of everyday environments.

🔹 Documentation & Storytelling

A key outcome of the workshop was the creation of short documentary films capturing the co-design process, participants’ voices, and the final artifacts. Alongside these, maps of daily routines and collective insight charts formed a rich body of qualitative data.

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Outcomes & Reflections

This workshop was more than a design exercise — it became an act of collective empowerment. By partnering directly with SHG members, the process generated:

Community-driven design insights
Recommendations rooted in lived realities
Shared ownership of design ideas

These outcomes will inform future design strategies aimed at creating spaces that genuinely support women’s comfort, safety, and agency.

We are currently synthesizing these findings into detailed visual and written reports and look forward to sharing the full scope of outcomes from this collaboration.