Apropos the earlier conversation about gender and design, this from -Robots That Fill an Emotional Vacuum- in the Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/28/AR2006122801309.html?referrer=email about a robotic vacuum cleaner:
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"The Roomba is wonderful!" says Kazuko Price, a family practice physician in Alexandria who says her patients include a lot of "kids who come in and mess up." Her robot cleans four rooms. "Well, sometimes he's dumb. He keeps going back to the same place. I kick him." She's named hers Robert.
Why does she thinks it's a boy? "Because I'm a she, that's why. I like guys."
On Epinions.com, a reviewer named "Leisure Larry" writes: "This was the first household item ever I gave my wife as a Christmas present. . . . I don't think many husbands would even dare and fewer would survive giving a vacuum cleaner as a Christmas present. It worked . . . she was thrilled!!"
She's named it Karlson.
[snip]
Indeed, the vast majority of Roombas get named, according to Angle. Kids name 40 percent of them when they're barely out of the box. The naming decision leads to questions of whether a Roomba is male or female. Rosie is the most common name, says Angle, after the robotic maid of "The Jetsons."
But the Roomba does seem kind of male, in an eager-to-please fifth-grader way. Adding to its Y-chromosome cred is that you wish it had a little more memory, and that its meanderings weren't so random. There's even a group on Amazon discussing why so many people view Roombas as male, although one contributor says, "Our Roomba is named Rhonda" and accordingly now sports "ponytail stickers and googly eyes on it to give it more personality." You see, the robot used to freak out the owner's toddler daughter. But after they converted it "into Rhonda -- she fell in love with 'her.' "
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I've been trying to find time to make a contribution to this long-since thread (and the not-wholly-unrelated thread on glass ceilings for female graphic designers on Design Observer at http://www.designobserver.com/archives/020303.html) but time is not on my side these days but for a different angle on the gender and design theme, I thought some might be interested in an anecdote about my senior-level graphic design class last semester. They were doing promotional material for the East Carolina University baseball and softball teams. (In case it's not obvious to non-Americans, those are male and female sports, respectively.)
The students presented a wide range of posters to the sports marketing people and the coaches. The reaction was "Everything here is better than anything we've ever had or anything we've ever seen. We can't decide." I got the students to the point of understanding that their role as designers was to help the clients understand what they need; the students all agreed that the clients needed an integrated communication program so the clients' tendency to want to use all of their work was a bad choice. With one poster direction for each sport as a centerpiece, they set about creating the range of materials needed.
The self-selected teams were all male except one female (baseball) and all female except one male (softball.) The baseball group sent everyone off with the task of each of them creating a piece for the campaign. When they reconvened, the group discovered that their contributions did not fit well together and tried to retreat to the client request for a series of unrelated items. The softball group worked together through most major design decisions and divided up tasks only after a consensus on their direction.
Gunnar
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