Designers should think
about gender at a
level of sophistication
beyond color and
shape. We should be
reflective and conscious
of the assumptions of
use and user being
built into our products.

March + April 2010

interactions

reaction to simple inversions.
Just recently, I bought a male
friend of mine a new home
gift—a tool set with flowery
handles and a pink case. He
laughed and gave me a quizzi-
cal look; he instinctively knew
he was not the intended user
demographic, even though the
tools themselves were of stan-
dard size and perfectly usable.
(Notably, my women friends
have never laughed when I
bought them tools in standard
(manly?) black or yellow.) In
1989 the Barbie Liberation Front
pulled off a stunt where they
switched the voice boxes of
Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls–gender
assumptions about likes and
dislikes were laid bare as Barbie
growled fighting words and G.I.
Joe crooned, “Math is hard.”
Designers are not passive
bystanders in the production,
reproduction, reinforcing, or
challenging of cultural values.
We actively create artifacts and
experiences. We design prod-
ucts with implicit or explicit
assumptions about how prod-
ucts will be used and by whom.

We mentally simulate the product user who is part of an imagined story of the product in use—these imaginary people are drawn from our everyday lives and usually have a gender, perhaps a shape, size, age and ethnicity. Thus we embed imagined, gendered others into our designs, inadvertently reproducing cultural norms because they seem so “natural.” And so in a chain of reification and reproduction, products are wired in subtle ways that reflect and reinforce existing cultural assumptions.

Theorists, observers, and designers who decide to take an alternative perspective— who, like the Barbie Liberation Front, decide to take steps to ask questions that challenge “naturalness” and embedded assumptions—often find that when one puts women at the center of analysis, assumptions about the user as male become clearer and one discovers fresh approaches to old questions. With an eye to the question: “What if the world were different?”, here are some observations I have made in the past couple of weeks:

Ergonomics. Early pilot seats
were not designed for the aver-
age female body, and only in
recent years have car seats
and steering wheels become
highly configurable and thus
able to accommodate the
slightest of adults—who are
usually women. Recently, I
bought a framed backpack that
was designed with the female
shoulder-to-hip ratio in mind,
and it is the most comfortable
backpack I have ever owned,
allowing me to carry much
more weight than I could in
the past. My “weakness,” as I
perceived it when using my old
backpack, was actually a design
flaw in the product, which was
intended for a male skeletal and
muscular frame.