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Thirty years after they began entering the field in significant numbers, a critic asks: Have women redesigned design?
By Karen Lehrman
April 2002
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Photo by Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis
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Have women redesigned design? Since at least the 1920s--when writer Charlotte
Perkins Gilman first proposed "kitchenless housing" as a
way to get women out of the home--feminist theorists and designers have
argued that female designers would use their über-compassionate
and collaborative natures to rid the field of its arrogant and exclusionary
practices. A new aesthetic would emerge that was not only less wrapped up
in ego but more concerned with altering the lives of women.
Well, you can certainly say that design has changed significantly since
the 1970s, when women began to seriously infiltrate the field--and
many of those alterations have stemmed from women. But I'd argue that it's
not female designers who have had the transforming effect as much as female
consumers. Moreover, this notion that female designers are not just different
from but actually superior to their male counterparts does them more harm
than good.
Take the issue of a feminine aesthetic. It's hard to find anyone--even
among those who emphasize female differences--who will claim that you can
look at a house or monument or car or stapler and say definitively,
"This was designed by a woman." Yet many say that they detect
a notable distinction. According to architectural historian Joan Ockman,
"Projects like Maya Lin's Vietnam memorial have a certain intentional
'otherness' and a kind of intensity that derives above all from their critique
of the dominant ways of thinking about things."
But you could just as easily argue that the work of Frank Gehry gives new
meaning to the concept of otherness. With his sensuous swirls of controlled
chaos, Gehry could be seen as far more "feminine" than, say, Marilyn
Taylor, who as chairman of SOM has continued the firm's cool Modernist
ethos. As architect Audrey Matlock says, "Do [these feminist theorists]
imagine that Zaha Hadid's powerfully angular Vitra fire station in
Germany is emblematic of a building designed by a woman?"
Pigeonholing female designers with a "relational" aesthetic that
might preclude them from wanting to build, for example, skyscrapers (considered
too phallic, impersonal, and oriented toward posterity) is not much better
than restricting women (as furniture makers have for a couple of centuries)
to a feminine "chintz" aesthetic. "When I was in graduate
school at Yale, a male critic told me that my designs were macho,"
Matlock says. "It was shocking to me. I had never considered my buildings
to have genders. At final review, one of the jury members described
my museum project as suitable for events involving 'blood, guts, and sacrifice.'
He said this with horror in his voice. The message was that the subject
matter I was exploring was inappropriate for a woman."
Although women don't share an aesthetic, many are more keenly interested
in aesthetics than men. Indeed, it's this interest--coupled with women's
responsibility for 80 percent of family consumer purchases--that propelled
our recent "design revolution." For better or worse, female consumers
are far more likely than men to judge a hotel by its window treatments or
a shaver by its shape. This forced designers in all industries to pay as
much attention to form as to function.
Female consumers have also pushed designers to, as MoMA curator Terence
Riley puts it, "tailor the product to fit the consumer, rather
than forcing the consumer to fit the product." Before the 1970s
and '80s, the different body shapes and strengths of women were rarely taken
into consideration, even in products designed specifically for them.
It's only been since the early 1990s, for example, that athletic-shoe companies
finally began making "lasts" (foot forms) of women's feet.
Until then women's shoes were based on scaled-down men's lasts.
Female designers have been able to take this new user-friendliness a step
further by forcing male colleagues to think about products from a woman's
perspective. Ayse Birsel relates that when she was working in Japan on reconfiguring
the toilet she suggested making it easier to clean. Her colleagues, who
were all men and had never cleaned a toilet, didn't think that was important.
"So I told them to go home and clean their toilets." The next
day the cleaning issue topped the agenda.
Design engineer Kiersten Muenchinger started Umbrella Insights to make products
expressly for women. Two products she is particularly interested in redesigning
are the personal digital assistant and the cell phone. "These devices
were originally developed to make task scheduling and communication more
convenient--both areas in which it is traditionally considered that women
excel," Muenchinger says. "However, these devices have been developed
and redeveloped with the gadget one-upmanship and bells and whistles that
have little to do with organizing tasks and communication"--and much
to do with attracting male purchasers. She adds, "But if you redesign
the products with the goal of getting tasks done and communicating, you
could have a completely new product and a willing purchasing audience of
women." Fair enough. But men like task completion and good communication
as well. Why not just improve the product for everyone? At this point a
"woman's perspective" should probably just be used with women-only
products. Otherwise designers and marketers risk reemphasizing traditional
roles and behaviors.
What about the process-oriented changes women were supposed to bring to
the table? For example, are female designers less hierarchical and more
collaborative? Have they made design less arrogant, competitive, and individualistic?
The profession certainly has become more interdisciplinary and interested
in consensus building, but it's not clear that this can be traced directly
to the involvement of women. In fact, some feminist theorists argue that
women are forced to be aggressive and individualistic because of the sexist,
competitive nature of the field. And competitive fields draw competitive
people.
So would the transformation of design have been greater if more women had
successfully infiltrated the field? "I am not certain that
women are well served when portrayed as self-effacing bleeding hearts,"
Matlock says. "For women to create opportunities in what we all understand
to be a very difficult profession for women, they have to be excellent
marketers and aggressive in business, as well as good designers." There's
no reason that any profession should have to lose its competitive aspects
to be "suitable" for women. And taken to its logical extreme,
an emphasis on the alleged all-consuming collaborative nature of women implies
that they don't make great leaders and don't possess the self-interest needed
to originate.
Of course, women haven't comprehensively permeated design. They comprise
80 percent of textile, interior, jewelry, and fashion designers but only
10 percent of architects and urban planners. In film production and
industrial design, 20 percent are women. And part of the reason for these
skewed percentages is no doubt sexism. Women who have achieved success in
architecture, for example, are typically either married to their partners
or have created their own practices.
But the other part of the reason just as clearly involves choice. Highly
competitive fields often preclude starting families. "If you want
to control your hours, you will never be more than a designer," says
architect Deborah Berke, adding that she was able to establish her own firm
because she put off having a child until her career was secure.
Feminist theorists and designers may want to stop pushing for women to redesign
design, which has proven to be counterproductive (and sexist), and start
worrying more about the very real barriers that keep many women designers
from doing what they'd like to do.
Karen Lehrman is author of The Lipstick Proviso: Women, Sex & Power
in the Real World.
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