2 0 1 6 - 2 0 2 2OYE! Collective: co-designing solutions to gender inequality
This is a story about designing a community service that makes feminism easy to practice in everyday life.
Role: Founder, co-director, and content creator for OYE! | Scale: Five years, two people, three cities, 1.2K community members, ~150 workshop participants
Introduction
I founded OYE! Collective in Barcelona in 2016 as my master's project, aimed at young adults in Bogotá who believed in gender equality but rejected the feminist label. Camila Rodas joined in 2017 and co-led from 2018. Over five years it became an online participatory design community, closing the gap between feminist theory and everyday practice.
Contents
Empathize phase (2016-2017): A year dedicated to understanding the gap between believing in gender equality and knowing feminist theory.
Methods: guerrilla survey, interviews, and a co-creation session with users, interviews with experts, and academic research.
Outputs: user journey, service blueprint, product design, value proposition canvas, and business model canvas.
OYE! Pilot (2018): Brand, product and service prototype with co-creation session.
OYE! Launch (2018-2019): Finding our footing and learning what our users really need by delivering the service.
OYE! pivot to “creative activism” (2019-2022): Connecting with a larger audience and developing our own design methodology.
OUTCOMES85 survey responses, 4 expert interviews, 2 co-creation sessions. Most people were afraid.
The barrier was shame.
A service, not a campaign.
Workshops in three cities, a podcast, a newsletter, a private community. ~150 people learning out loud.
Our peer-reviewed chapter reached Mónica Roa, who hired Camila and me to help her build her NGO, Puentes.
Published, then recruited.
63% believed in gender equality, but not in feminism.
THE GAPSource: "FEMCUESTA" Guerrilla survey, n=85, Young adults in Bogotá (late 20s/early 30s, middle-upper NSE), Dec 2016–Jan 2017 | Convenience sample from my social network. Treated as directional signal.I ran a co-creation session to explore emotions that fuelled the gap.
2017: 4 participants (2 women, 2 men): artists, an architect, and a political scientist, late 20s, Bogotá. All believed in gender equality; none identified as feminist.
Drawing made by participants. 
Post-its from the co-creation session.The participant’s encounters with feminist-identifying people and media had left them feeling judged, and from that judgment they concluded the movement was aggressive and irrational. Therefore, it was not something they believed could actually improve their daily lives.
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"I can't say I'm a feminist because then they immediately don't wan't to work with us anymore"
—Co-founder, gender equity consultancy (Bogotá), In-depth Interview, 2017.
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"I don't know how to act anymore! I could screw it up at every turn!"
—Male participant (late 20s, Bogotá), Co-creation Session, 2017
I interviewed experts to understand real-world consequences of the gap.
Then I interviewed four practitioners applying feminist theory inside institutions, where the stigma carries professional cost. They confirmed it from the other side: the word itself was the obstacle.
Opportunity
Design a service that leverages creativity and community to lower the barrier- to-entry of feminist knowledge (feeling judged), supporting the journey from being a shy beginner to actually understanding academic and collective proposals for change.
THE SERVICE DESIGNSo I designed a service that would support users in their journey towards feminist creativity.
The service consisted of 3 main experiences: learning, sharing, co-creating. Each experience was designed to balance out the main emotional pain points I uncovered in the research that kept people away from feminism.
Feminist creativity is needed because these users need bottom-up approaches. Gender inequality solutions feel imposed (top-down), so the service was meant to help people develop de capabilities needed to use their own creativity to design solutions to whatever inequality problems they were actually facing in their community.
Simplified service blueprint for OYE!What does a community feminist service look like? Educational, participatory and creative.
Curiosity leads. Nobody is condemned for asking the wrong question.
Everyone builds, nobody defends. Problems get solved together, not debated.
Innocence is the assumption. The goal is to educate, never to accuse.
Joy replaces fear. Play and an always-in-beta attitude make mistakes cheap.
OYE! Pilot
Before launching, I designed a co-creation session to test the experience I designed.
photos from the pilot co-creation session
Sample posts from early Facebook Fan Page 
Activity book prototypeCo-creation session videoOYE! Launch
Bogotá, JAN. 24 & 25, 2018
CoLAB Workshop, Valencia session, 2018
Peer-reviewed chapter published (2020)
PHASE 2After years of work, Camila and I co-authored and published peer-reviewed chapter exploring how Service Design can reframe feminist communication. In the paper we shared our learnings from implementing OYE! Collective and argue that digital platforms have the capacity to distribute information brilliantly but rarely build real learning capacities. Once content enters the network, it stops belonging to its creators. Genuine learning requires context, dialogue and contrasting perspectives, exactly what viral logic discourages.
The book is available on a Creative Commons License. You can find it here (only in Spanish)
PHASE 3Teaching how to design in a feminist way (2019 - 2021)
As we implemented OYE!Collective’s service, it became clear we needed to teach a method for co-creation. Not all feminists are designers, and not all activists are feminist.
Lessons learnedLearning in the age of viral content
Our most successful post taught us our most important lesson about creating an online community for learning. An infographic unpacking the Telar de las Mujeres pyramid scheme became OYE!'s most viewed and shared content ever. By social media metrics, a win. In reality, the content was stripped of its context and weaponized against the very women we were trying to inform and protect; it circulated through fear, not understanding.
This is why OYE! has always been more than content creation, blending online tools with offline spaces where honest conversation can actually happen.