Madam Speaker

Our approach began with research and immersion — understanding the systemic gaps in existing archives and the stories missing from public record. Over 18 months, we worked in close collaboration with the Victorian Women’s Trust to shape a new kind of archive — one that’s intuitive, participatory, and alive to cultural nuance.

The platform’s design draws from a hybrid visual language — part civic record, part activist zine. Lined cards, oversized quotation marks, and annotation-style highlights echo the rhythm of public speaking while reinforcing the content’s urgency. We categorised speeches by theme rather than identity to encourage users to explore shared challenges and movements across generations.

Accessibility and inclusion were embedded early. The site is fully WCAG-compliant and supports a public submission flow, enabling the archive to grow with community input. To humanise the interface, lead designer Eileen Li illustrated the hands of every woman involved in the project — a visual motif of care, labour and authorship woven throughout. Prototypes were tested with diverse user groups, including educators, media professionals and advocacy organisations, ensuring the interface served varied needs.

Development was handled in phases to align with content strategy and moderation processes. The result is a platform that doesn’t feel like a traditional archive — intentionally so. It is a space for voices to gather, be heard, and shift how we understand leadership in Australia. It exceeds the original brief by being both a historical resource and a tool for active cultural participation.

Madam Speaker satisfies every hallmark of good design: it is functional, elegant, accessible and enduring. It reimagines what a public archive can be — emotionally resonant, open-source, and culturally transformative.

The platform delivers a seamless user experience for all, from students and teachers to researchers and journalists. Its clear visual hierarchy and thematic navigation make exploration intuitive. WCAG compliance ensures it’s accessible to people of all abilities, while the open-source build invites future collaboration and adaptation. Visual storytelling elevates its purpose. Instead of stock photography or neutral icons, the design features hand-drawn illustrations — symbolic representations of the women behind the project. These illustrations offer a quiet but powerful commentary on authorship and ownership, reinforcing the feminist principles at the heart of the platform.

The platform functions as a living design system — one that can be replicated, forked, and grown by others. It reflects an ecosystem of design thinking, where care, participation and accessibility converge. As a Victorian project, it speaks with a local voice but carries national and international relevance. It demonstrates that design rooted in purpose can lead to systems change — not by simplifying complexity, but by making it legible and human. Madam Speaker communicates the immense value of professional design as a catalyst for equity, voice and visibility.

At its core, Madam Speaker is a feminist act of design. It breaks away from the conventions of traditional archives, where authority is often institutional and exclusionary. This project redefines the archive as a participatory, evolving, and emotionally intelligent space. The innovation lies in how the platform reframes the very idea of memory and leadership. Speeches are organised not by identity but by shared themes, allowing users to connect across issues rather than categories.

Equally groundbreaking is the illustrative layer: each team member’s hand was drawn and integrated into the interface, representing care and visibility at a systemic level. These are not decorative elements, but symbolic gestures — embedding identity into the architecture of the platform. The site is also technically innovative.  innovation lies in both form and intent: by centering the voices of women, it offers an open-source infrastructure that can evolve with the needs of educators, researchers, and technologists.

One of the most forward-thinking dimensions of the project is its plan for AI. History has a habit of favouring the loudest voices in the room, and for centuries, those voices have been overwhelmingly male. As AI increasingly mediates how we learn, govern and decide — training on digital content that is still disproportionately male — Madam Speaker is offering a course correction.

By curating a growing dataset of over 200 speeches by women across politics, science, protest, art and education, the platform is shaping the voices that AI will learn from next. In partnership with AI researchers and civic technologists, we plan to feed this diverse speech corpus into language models, challenging the status quo where leadership still defaults to a male tone. It presents a new model for how culture is remembered — and who gets to shape it.

Since launching in January 2025, Madam Speaker has established itself as a vital national resource. Over 250 speeches have been published and hundreds more are in the pipeline. Teachers are using the platform in civics and history curricula, journalists are drawing on it for references, and advocates are using it to train new voices in public speaking. Its influence goes beyond reach.

The project is shifting how institutions think about public memory and inclusive design. It has already contributed to national conversations around the representation of women in leadership and the biases that shape datasets, particularly in the context of training AI.

Madam Speaker was created on a lean budget, with a collaborative team of designers, developers, editors and strategists — proving that investment in thoughtful design delivers disproportionate cultural value. It’s an argument for why Victoria continues to lead in purpose-driven, progressive design.

The platform was built with sustainability in mind — not just environmental, but cultural. Its codebase is modular and extendable; its visual system resists trend and leans into function; its ethos invites public ownership. By 2026, we aim to publish 800 speeches, create tools to support emerging speakers, and expand the archive’s reach internationally. The archive is also being explored as a dataset for inclusive generative AI training — showing that its applications extend into the technological future of storytelling.

Madam Speaker strengthens Victoria’s reputation as a global leader in civic and cultural innovation. It proves that design can lead policy, shape discourse and build tools that last. And most importantly, it places women — and their voices — at the centre of the story.