Thanks Eduardo

I think you are right in terms of designing in 'soul'. Some of our
postgraduate work in collaboration with Philips has been investigating the
development of Productality, (Product Personality), while another researcher
has been investigating Visual Literacy. The sense is that our literacy, our
understanding of meaning, is fluid. It is always about the 'now' and to some
degree soon out of date, dependent upon changes of context and perspective
over time.

However, there is a catch-22 for me in terms of gender, a conflict between
what I experience and what I believe. But maybe that is just me. I think
not.

I 'experience' femininity as relating to beauty and the interactions of
attraction and caring, while I 'experience' masculinity as utility and the
interactions of power and function. But I 'believe' that this experience is
profoundly sexist and questionable.

We surely follow and reinforce social expectancy models by genderizing
designs, and I think the focus might be better put to developing a more
inclusive literacy, which defines a greater diversity of identities, for
individuals and their product/service interactions to 'belong' to, as they
feel the need. I'm certainly not sure I support the neutral, uni-sex, middle
ground, as an inclusive solution to language and design. I believe we need
range and diversity as part of cultural innovation, and as part of each
cultural innovation I would include the need to immerse and engage with the
fluidity of meaning to stay in the 'now'.

Regards

Kev



Dr. Kev Hilton
Director of Research
The Centre for Design Research
School of Design
Squires Building
Northumbria University
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 8ST
 
Tel:  0191 243 7340
Fax: 0191 227 3148
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http://www.openfolio.com/users/kevhilton
http://northumbria.ac.uk/researchandconsultancy/Res_conf_06/kevin_hilton/?vi
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-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Eduardo
Corte Real
Sent: 20 November 2006 10:28
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Gender 101 and design

Dear Christena, Kevin, Ranulph, Gunnar, François

And after all, all



From the point of view of the maker, gender gives a sort of soul to the 
objects. Of course that there are a lot of studies about how gender gets 
meaningful in the objects and contaminates our relation with them, but I'm 
interested in the maker, now.

As you may remember Vitruvius established three categories for architecture:

Firmitas, Utilitas and Venustas. The later is obviously the one that 
underlines what is architecture from all the other constructions. In 
Venustas (Delight) there is one of six sub categories, more like a 
condition: Décor. Décor deals with the formal consonance between the 
building and its purpose. In is book; Vitruvius explained that the different

architectural Orders should be applied to different kind (I would say 
genders) of temples related to the god's characteristics. Doric to severe 
mature males like Jove or Neptune or Men-like women like Juno. Jonic to 
young frantic gods like Mercury or Apollo and some women like Minerva. 
Finally, feminine female like Venus should get Corinthian.

Later, in the Renaissance, while comparing the proportions of the columns 
with the human figure proportions, the three orders were compared to 
genders: Doric: Mature male. Ionic: Young male. Corinthian: Female.

Well, the orders have grown into five, by archeological evidence. To make 
faith in such aesthetical theory genders could be five. For the Ancient 
Greeks, it is fair to say that the young male was almost a different gender 
from male and female. Gender, like Christena said in one of her early posts 
on this subject, is not confined to male-female dichotomy.

For the production of the artificial sake let me tell you that "genderized" 
forms through the classical Orders contaminated the whole world. Not only 
geographically but also in depth contaminating the whole system of objects 
related with architecture from portable mirrors to lamps, sofas, chariots, 
boats, sleds, books, glasses. Only a blind person cannot see this. Look 
around in our cities.

Through Classic, Classicism, Neo-Classicism, Neo-Neo-Classicism the 
Mediterranean gods lurked into our system of objects, and it is still there,

here.

The road to individual may be very different from neutrality (of Finnish) 
since every thing is gendered and there are countless genders it come to be 
that each thing human or inhuman has it gender being that gender its soul, 
its mystery. I like to think that a Designer is a producer of soul like 
qualities on products that elevates him/her above any other producer. Or is 
the other way around: the one that is able to extract out any possibility of

a soul like quality from a product?

I must read Lawerence Durrel's Tunc, again. I remember vaguely Caradoc's 
speech, drunk, about the Parthenon, inquiring about the nature of the work 
of art.



Cheers,



Eduardo 

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