1. Today’s Plan
• housekeeping
1. INTERVENTION
– DDS & New Topia
– user = everybody
– problems
1. COPRODUCTION
– gendered intervention
– why should we care?
1. MAKING THINGS
PUBLIC & EMERGENT
EFFECTS
– Anna and Jonathan
– ungendering
2. GROUP WORK
– coproduction
– making things
public/emergent effects
2. intervention vs positivism
problems with intervention:
– intended use and actual use diverge
• always unexpected uses
– who should we design for?
• not just for some supposedly homogenous group called
women
solution?
– focus on methods, procedures instead of
outcomes
3. DDS and New Topia
• configuring the user as everybody
– even computer-illiterates!
• design processes
– I-methodology
• learning styles (trial and error)
– hardware choices
• user profile
• women under-represented
• innovation becomes more important
– text interface becomes graphical interface
– public terminals removed
4. “Whereas male users of DDS predominantly
adjusted the technology to their liking, many
female users had to adjust their lives to be able to
use DDS (Rommes 2002a). Moreover, the use of the
metaphor of a city as well as the learning style of
“playing around” turned out to be highly
problematic for women who used DDS for the first
time. For most of them, the “inclusion work” they
had to put into adjusting themselves to the script of
DDS simply was too much. The frustration, selfdoubt, and anger they experienced while they got
acquainted to the interface were not matched by
the attraction DDS offered them (Rommes 2002b).”
– (Oudshoorn et al 2004:55)
5. problems?
• “As almost all designers were male and
technologically highly competent, they made DDS
into a masculine technology.”
– (Oudshoorn et al 2012:44)
• “Since the project teams of New Topia and DDS
consisted mainly of men, and the few women
involved in the design of the DDS largely adopted
a masculine design style, the interests and
competencies inscribed in the design were
predominantly masculine.”
– (Oudshoorn et al 2012:53)
6. clear path to better designs?
“Even the most feminist, gender-aware design
may in the end reproduce old or create new
societal inequalities, if only because there are so
many actors involved in the co-construction of
humans and ICTs”
– (Rommes et al 2012:657)
7. main conclusion
“feminist concerns such as unequal distribution
of power and the reiteration of gender
dichotomies should be explicitly addressed in
every phase of the development of technology”
– (Rommes et al 2012:658)
8. why should we care about gender
dichotomies?
the pillars, shutting down our options
policing behaviors, bodies, lives
discrimination
violence
9. next slide’s quote is from:
Lohan, Maria and Wendy Faulkner. 2004.
“Masculinities and Technologies: Some
Introductory Remarks.” Men and Masculinities
6(4):319-329.
quote is on pg 322
10. “the relationship between technology and society is seen
as mutually constituted. By the same token, gender and
technology are seen as mutually shaping or, in a more
poststructural trope, as coproduced. This is a central tenet
of feminist technology studies. It means that specific
technological artifacts may be gender shaped and may
have gender consequences and that this process can be
charted in the design and use of technologies. …
gendered presumptions may be designed into artifacts
and … those same artifacts may be flexibly reinterpreted
by users to have different meanings and uses. In this way,
they illuminate the different social contexts within which
particular gender constructions and particular
technologies appear, thus demonstrating that even the
nuts and bolts of technology warrant a feminist gaze.”
11. think/pair/share
“Technology is one of the mechanisms through
which gender makes, maintains, and questions
the masculine and feminine. The design
practice, in which a technology comes into
being, is therefore understood as a gendered as
well as a gendering process”
– (van der Velden and Mörtberg 2012:664)
12. think/pair/share
“Shavers that are designed especially for men or
for women can be read simultaneously as the
inscription of gender in design as well as a
scripting of gender by design.”
– (van der Velden and Mörtberg 2012:665)
13. making things public
– script analysis neglects user agency
• BUT: deinscription
– unpredictable/unintended circumstances
– still, ‘making things public’ can help script analysis
• “next version of the design, when the technology is used”
(van der Velden and Mörtberg 2012:666)
emergent effects
– once you make an iteration of your technological
design public
• new possibilities are created
• some possibilities are closed off
– “design and gender, and their relations, are emergent”
(van der Velden and Mörtberg 2012:671)
14. ungendering the design
“who and what is made invisible or silenced in the
design” (van der Velden and Mörtberg 2012:675)
ungendering
“making space for a gender not yet ‘said’, the
unknowable gender of the unknowable Other” (van der
Velden and Mörtberg 2012:679)
"If I live long enough to see the world break free of the
gender binary, will I find home not as a butch dyke, a
woman by default, but as some third, fourth, fifth gender?
Some gender that seems more possible since trans people
have started to organize, build community, speak out about
our lives. Some gender I have already started reaching
toward." -Eli Clare.
15. “engraved with a gold
rose ... a beautiful
symbol of your
aristocratic dignity. Its
small and compact
design adds a warm glow
in your hands like a
precious gem”
16.
17. GROUP WORK
– HOW IS THE LADYPHONE A SOURCE AND CONSEQUENCE
OF GENDER RELATIONS?
– HOW IS THE MCALC A SOURCE AND CONSEQUENCE OF
GENDER RELATIONS?
– when they are ‘made public’ what ‘emergent effects’ might
we discover?
18. WHAT DO WE WANT?
– mutual shaping
– coproduction of gender and technology
– symmetry, complexity
– avoid gender essentialism
– avoid technological determinism
