Today’s Plan• housekeeping1. INTERVENTION– DDS & New Topia– user = everybody– problems

2. COPRODUCTION– gendered intervention– why should we care?

3. MAKING THINGS PUBLIC & EMERGENT EFFECTS– Anna and Jonathan– ungendering

4. GROUP WORK– coproduction– making things

public/emergent effects

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

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

“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, self-doubt, 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)

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)

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)

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)

why should we care about gender dichotomies?

the pillars, shutting down our optionspolicing behaviors, bodies, lives

discriminationviolence

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

“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.”

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)

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)

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)

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.

“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”

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?

WHAT DO WE WANT?

– mutual shaping– coproduction of gender and technology– symmetry, complexity– avoid gender essentialism– avoid technological determinism

NEXT TWO WEEKS …