This year, at the UIA International Forum 2024 Kuala Lumpur, we presented our paper "Gendered Experience in Public Space: Design as a Tool for Empowerment towards Social Sustainability." The paper reflects on the participatory design workshop "Her Place Her Say" to investigate the gendered spatial experience and address the need for effective communication and creative expression by the undermined female voices.
 
We focus on two primary research questions: Firstly, how does the issue of gendered inequality manifest in public space?  Secondly, how can creative acts in design be used to empower gender expression? 

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In addition to outlining the immediate findings from our workshops regarding the specific needs of female users in public spaces, this paper also reflects on the design and process of the workshops, with the results of establishing an experiential framework, the Tell-Walk-Make framework, for expressing embodied gender experience in public spaces.