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RQ: Social constructs, such as gender, change the arc of technologyā¦
RQ: Social constructs, such as gender, change the arc of technology trajectories (e.g., the rate/direction of product design innovation).
RQ2: Social constructs become implied world views/orders and shape your environment and training. Do gender norms implicitly shape design cognition in predictable and measurable ways?
Method: Experimental psychology method, the Implicit Association Test (IAT)
Implicit associations are socially constructed, reinforced through group based norms.
Are engineers taught to value performance and innovation? Does this affect what they prioritize in design decision making?
Results from IAT indicate that people more readily associate innovative functional product attributes with masculine-associated products
Results indicate a strong masculine bias (regardless of participant gender). Which means we're all likely trained to associate masculinity with innovation. This limits the technological imagination
Contribution: Created a Gender-Design IAT to test for associations to masculinity in product attributes and male gendered persons
Contribution: Results indicate that people associate masculine beings with masculine products (work-industrial domain) and feminine beings with more feminized products (home-domestic domain) in accordance to the Gender Value System
Homeš” and workš¢ spheres of gendered labor and division. Work as primary/functional, home as secondary/aesthetic
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RQ3: How is innovation conceptualized and presented in an interactive consumer product? Apple Watch case study (2015-2024)
Method: building off of gender value system theory and mapped that to creating a grading scheme and codebook to code hardware features/tech specs and external documentation (marketing/landing page and purchase pages)
What we did: Investigated connection between innovation and masculinity in a 10 yr product case study of the Apple Watch. Through analyzing tech specs, visual marketing, purchase pages, we see masculinity and hyper-masculinity increase as the relative level of innovation decreased (according to our mixed-methods approach)
Premise: Looked at the world's most profitable and influential technology company: Apple Inc and their best-selling wearable device, the Apple Watch (sold more than 115M since 2015)
Looking at this consumer product reveals structural patterns (design, marketing, product language) to illustrate how dominant ideas about gender and innovation are materially and rhetorically embedded in interactive consumer products
Findings: (1) It's hard to keep innovating year in, year out. Even Apple struggles in our capitalistic world to keep up (2) Innovation is tiered across product lines with Ultras being the most masculine and innovative. (3) We saw No F or HF cumulative scores for watches. Further reinforces idea that femininity is not innovative
Created a mixed-methods framework to operationalize gender in a normative way using GVS theory. We affirmed that language plays a major role in the gendering of consumer technologies
Future Work: Research offers new feminist informed framework for interrogating assumptions around what is innovative in interactive product ecosystems
Future RQs
- What are ways to subvert and amplify gender inclusivity through the design of interactive consumer products?
- How can design metrics be reimagined to recognize feminine-coded or non-dominant contributions as innovative?}
- What interventions might disrupt the alignment between masculinity, technical advancement, and product `premium-ness'?}
- How does product group stratification reproduce cultural narratives around gender and value?}
- What does it mean to measure innovation through a post-gender binary lens?}
- And, how might these dynamics differ across product categories, markets, or sociotechnical contexts?}
Creating New Design Theories and Models: Challenging conventional : theories of innovation, integrating a feminist lens, offering new ideas for product betterment (expanding the technological imagination)