HyperSext City

Drawing attention to the experiences of women, girls and LGBTQI+ communities by presenting data and intersectional narratives of gender.

HyperSext City presents a series of interactive platforms where ‘design’ transcends being merely a product...It instead becomes a research and a communication platform, which informs, raises awareness and continually involves its users/audience in the evolution of the displayed content.

Tuba Kocaturk, Design Institute of Australia (DIA) Juror and Professor of Integral Design at Deakin University

Making gender data visible, and generating new sources of data based on lived experience are essential tools in developing gender-sensitive approaches to design, architecture and urbanism. Through the multi-modal tools of crowd-sourcing, co-creation and material making, HyperSext City surfaces, activates and amplifies the voices and experiences of a diverse range of people who are not often heard.

Over the exhibition period (March/April 2020), the exhibition and aligned events developed agendas, approaches and expertise that communicate to practitioners and scholars in design, architecture, urbanism, and policy as well as those in aligned disciplinary areas and an engaged general audience.

The HyperSext HyperGraphic installation is based on stories, statistics and data that amplify the experiences of diverse communities whose voices are often unheard. Visually arresting, this black and orange graphic dramatically confronts us with the startling state of our cities. Globally, the statistics are striking in their consistency. On any given day, women, girls, and LGBTIQ+ identifying people are likely to confront violence and harassment on the street, at school, on campus, at work, at bars, catching public transport and online.

To orient our understanding of the complex discourses that contribute to issues of gendered spatial inequity the HyperSext Repository interactive website brings together statistics and quotes derived from significant research to help audiences further understand the stories behind the hypergraphic. These are sobering insights into the problems that underpin unsafety in our cities. The HyperSext Repository is an ongoing platform that interactively collates and references data and research by crowdsourcing from communities, researchers and individuals across the globe.

Acknowledgments

• Videographer: Ella Mitchel
• Web Designer: Hayden Dowd
• Photographer: Brett Brown