Throughout the semester I have been examining technology’s relationship to gender and how technologies can either hinder or promote equal treatment of women. Through a series of prototypes I have honed my area of study and my domains of practice to focus on how technology can be used to mediate and promote gender equality in household chores. I have come to this idea through a number of experiments, artifacts and tests and will continue to develop the idea through more specific prototypes and user tests in the Spring.
I started the semester by exploring the underrepresentation of women in the tech industry by creating uniquely “female” products. These concept pieces played off of negative stereotypes and exaggerated female characteristics to create products that were funny but absurd. My goal was to show that harmful stereotypes keep women out of the design process of technology. As opposed to absurd and silly products women would probably have different and valuable perspectives and ideas to bring to the table.
I next focused on finding out if there were cultural association between different types of technology and gender. I gathered an assortment of technologies, interactions, colors and products and asked people to gender each item by sorting it into either a male or female box. I hoped to find out if interactions could be designed better for women by seeing which items people considered male or female. While I did encounter some striking results (everyone agreed that the dimmer switch was female and the desktop computer male) what I learned from this process was that I was more interested not in the perceived (and forced) gender assignment of a product but the implications of that interaction or products role in a cultural context.
I wanted to know how a technology could be actively feminist – that it could treat men and women as equals or inspire, force or promote that its user treat men and women as equals. After looking at past examples of both female technologies (women are the intended users) and feminist technologies (a technology that makes women more equal) like birth control and the tampon, I attempted to make my own feminist technology piece by mixing a high technology with a feminine need and 3D printing a menstrual cup. While this was a provocative combination, it fell short of my real goal: to practically and actively better the situation of women in today’s society — an idea which I think should be present in all designs.
It was within this framework that I came to my current trajectory for the Spring semester. Designing for gender equality is an inherently good design practice. Other social ideas like sustainability and accessibility are integrated into the design process. We never design something in a less sustainable way; we always opt for the more sustainable process. Designing accessibly is beneficial not only to those who need things to be accessible, but also to all users because it makes them easier to use. Likewise, designing for gender equality will benefit not only women, but everyone. Design criteria should include an accounting for gender equality. Moving into the Spring semester, I am focusing on creating one instantiation of a technology designed with the promotion of gender equality integrated into the process.
I decided to focus on the distribution of household chores and an interface that could promote gender equality through the more equitable balance of these tasks.
On average in couples where both partners work, women do around seventeen hours of housework per week while men do less than six.[1] These numbers exclude childcare which often also falls to the women. The result is that the burden of housework falls on many women putting extra strain on both their personal and working lives. Working hours that could constitute a part-time job doing laundry, dishes and cleaning makes juggling a successful carrier more difficult. It also makes it much easier for women to become the primary caregivers when they have children because they are already doing a lot of the associated household chores. As Gillian Robinson said, “It is difficult to see how women will ever have the same opportunities in the labour market if equality at home is not achieved.” Because I want to design something that will give women access to equal treatment and equal possibilities, I decided to start with this domain since it can touch so many parts of our lives.
This project falls into a realm of design focused on behavior change through different motivational interfaces. Not only must my ultimate device be able to record and display information it must do so in a compelling way that, in conjunction with interpersonal conversations, helps alter the users perception and action. Other online games or mobile applications exist around chores and distributing them but I am more interested in behavior modification systems like Nike Fuel Band or Jawbone UP. While the chore apps approach the same subject matter, they do so in a way that just looks to record or distribute tasks whereas I am more interested in the type of interactions shaped by the fitness systems in which the user is motivated by incremental challenges and social affirmation.
In the coming months I will conduct more research as to what type of behavior change techniques I want to employ and what types of interactions I will use to execute them. Some possibilities include a if… then… structure (in which the couples create individualized rules and enact the rewards or consequences), a Ulysses pact structure (predetermined punishment), a self-motivated rewards system (gamification), social competition (networked with facebook) or some other type of motivation.
Even if my individual system cannot motivate the extreme user (for example, a person who believes that a women’s place is in the home) I think that it could still make a valuable impact by being present in subcultures and influencing the value set of those who see it. For example, baby-changing tables only used to be present in women’s bathrooms. It was decided that they should be put in men’s public bathrooms as well. Even if no men actually used them their presence there was a powerful indicator of social norms and cultural expectations. If a man walked in and saw the table he might think that it was there because other men needed to use it because other men helped change baby’s diapers which would mean that maybe he should also be helping change his own or future baby’s diaper.[2] Even if my project is not successful in motivating all men to help more in the home, it will add value by indicating that there is an interest and expectation that men and women should be equals both at home and in the workplace.
The prototype I am currently working on has two parts: a physical and a digital interface. After interviewing five couples about what chores they do, how they divide them up, their attitudes towards housework, the satisfaction they gain from housework and how they perceive their partners contribution, I decided to focus not on the total contribution of each person to all household chores but on one or a few chores which are particularly unpleasant or contentious for individual couples. These could be different from couple to couple.
The couple would talk and decided on a chore (or chores) to focus on. The physical portion of the interface would be placed in a spot associated with that chore for easy, location-based access. When either person completed that task they would press a button to indicate their contribution. The iPhone app would harvest and visualize this information sending reminders, showing daily or weekly goals and awarding individual or collaborative prizes.
The portion I need to focus on most now is the mobile interface. I need to determine how this interface will motivate users, the look and feel and the individual interactions. To do so I will need to conduct more research about behavior change and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of systems like Fuel and UP as well as other technological interventions. I will then make paper and digital prototypes to user test with think-aloud protocol. After settling on an interface I will have to do the actual program which I think will be straightforward if time consuming. I plan to use WiFi enabled Arduinos, a web server and a web or native application.
A tentative schedule:
| January | Research behavior change techniques |
| January | Research and experiment with look and feel |
| February 1-10 | Develop Paper Prototypes Round 1 |
| February 10-20 | Develop Paper Prototypes Round 2 |
| February 20-30 | Develop Paper Prototypes Round 3 |
| Mid-March | Begin Development |
| March | Physical interface development |
| March | Digital interface development |
| May | Debug |
The process of making and testing in the Fall semester worked very well for me to continually evolve my thinking. By forcing myself to articulate my thoughts in an object, I revealed the flaws and nuances of my motivations and untimely ended up heading in far different directions than if I had just researched continuously without making and presenting in between. Therefore, for the above tentative schedule I have tried to incorporate three rounds of prototypes to center cycles of revision and research around. While these will probably be much less drastic changes than in the Fall semester, I think they will be useful for continuing the development of my project.
In the Spring semester I will to continue trying to answer the question of how to integrate designing for gender equality into the design process. I will use household chores as a pinion to engage this larger exploration and to experiment with how we can use technological interventions and designed interfaces to change behavior and cultural outlooks. By doing so I hope to make one instance of a feminist technology that incorporates a social goal into the process of solving a specific problem.
[1] Robin Yapp, “Working women ‘still do housework,’” Daily Mail < http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ article-206381/Working-women-housework.html>.
[2] Feminist Technology (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010).
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