Chip maker and technology group Intel says that women are emerging as the dominant users of technology and if it continues to enhance its ease of use, the fairer sex will continue to dominate the adoption of technology.

This is the opinion of Genevieve Bell, Intel fellow and director of interaction and experience research, who noted that European women spent more time on social networks than men, sent more text messages and used more location-based services on phones.

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The Femme Den started thinking about gender and design five years ago as an expansion of Smart Design’s commitment to understanding people.

Introduction
Smart Design’s think tank presents an ongoing discussion of how gender should be included in good design.

Women are 85% of the consumer market. But how do you reach them?
“Approach women like you do wild animals, with caution and a soothing voice.” I have to agree. Targeting a female audience requires a delicate, nuanced approach.

Why girly designs directed at women often backfire
Women don’t always take kindly to being isolated by gender or being told that they’re “different.” There needs to be a rock-solid rationale for separate, visible design solutions.

How a gadget can draw women while impressing men
Good technology doesn’t necessarily have to be overly complicated. Just look at the Flip video camera, whose intuitive UI appealed to women, while still impressing techie men.

“As information swirls all around us, we have begun to build an attention economy where the value of a piece of content is driven by how much attention it can attract and sustain. It’s all about eyeballs, especially when advertising is involved. Countless social media consultants are swarming around Web2.0, trying to help organizations increase their status and profitability in the attention economy. But the attention economy doesn’t just affect the monetization of web properties; it’s increasingly shaping how people interact with one another.

Teens’ desire for attention is not new. Teens have always looked for attention and validation from others – parents, peers, and high-status individuals. And just as many in business argue that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, there are plenty of teens who believe that there’s no such thing as bad attention. The notion of an “attention whore” predates the internet. Likewise, the notion that a child might “act out” is recognized as being a call for attention. And it’s important to highlight that the gendered aspects of these tropes are reinforced online.

So what happens when a teen who is predisposed to seeking attention gets access to the tools of the attention economy?”

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But, there is a “darker side” to this world, which includes changes in gender relations and power dynamic, a potential increase in violence, substitution of money or a change in expenditures, invasion of privacy, and increased control by a male partner.

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But, there is a darker side. Targeting women with mobile phones can cause changes in gender dynamics and family expenditures and may relate to increases in domestic violence, invasion of privacy, or control by a male partner.

This article will look at the pros and cons of targeting women with mobiles in the developing world.

Part One (“The Good”) highlights the current landscape and identify some of the benefits of mobile tech for women. It also includes a brief discussion on some the challenges and barriers.

Part Two of this series will get at the darker side and identifies some of the potential dangers in targeting women with mobiles.

User-driven development methods and tools are being developed and tested – focusing on the demands and desires of female users.

The project, which is co-financed by the Danish Enterprise and Construction Authority (DEACA) as part of its programme for user-driven innovation, brings together development and market-research specialists, scientists and designers in an interdisciplinary collaboration.

Female Interaction has been initiated by design-people in collaboration with Aalborg University, Aarhus University, Bang and Olufsen, GN Netcom, Danfoss and Lindberg International.

The project sets out to offer a novel approach to user-driven innovation in businesses by bringing together scientists, businesses, designers and market analysts for purposes of developing new process models and guidelines and new results for the benefit of the user.

Erica Eden, senior industrial designer at Smart Design, and co-founder at Femme Den, was one of the speakers with her talk “Designing (for) Women: Bridging the Gap Between Assumptions and Realities“.

Femme Den, said the host introducing Erica on the video, “is a group inside Smart that focuses on women, as consumers, as final users but also as designers. [...] They look at women as a departure point for an ‘extended usership’ project. Extended usership is when you look at a minority that might have some kind of setback like being a woman and you decide to actually take that as a departure point for the design process to be used by everybody.”

Abstract
Why is gender important? Smart Design’s Femme Den explores the gap between assumptions and realities about women. As practicing designers, they apply new ways to design for the elusive women’s market. To create products and experiences that women love, designers must better understand their lives, as well as their clients’ objectives and perspectives. Femme Den co-founder Erica Eden will discuss methodologies to meet the needs of, and effectively communicate with, these three interconnected groups.

- Watch video
- Download transcript
- Download slides

New York Times story on Erica Eden

According to Spillers, gender as an audience sensitive criteria (differentiation) is barely present in North American technology product design (where it is much easier to do) let alone Web experiences. In Asia there is more design innovation in this area, he says, and Spillers cites the example of Toshiba’s Femininity series.

Comscore just released a new study last month (June 30 2010) entitled Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet.

The worldwide study adds some key insights into the growing research on gender differences on the Web and in particular around social networking usage. Spillers reports on the key insights and their implications.

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(via Usability News)

Here are the articles available for free online:

interactions: exploring aspects of design thinking
Richard Anderson, Jon Kolko
Popular discussion of “design thinking” has reached a point of frenzy. Unfortunately, there is often little depth to the discussion, and for many, the topic remains elusive and vague. While each issue of interactions has included articles about or reflecting the application of design thinking, this issue addresses the topic a bit more directly.

Evolution of the mind: a case for design literacy
Chris Pacione
As we come to the end of the first decade of the 21st century and what many consider the end of The Information Age, a recent flurry of books, articles, and initiatives seem to indicate that a new, pervasive mind shift is afoot. It’s called design, and like arithmetic, which was once a peripheral human aptitude until the industrial age forced it to be important for everyone, recent global changes and the heralding of a new age are positioning design as the next human literacy.

Design thinking in stereo: Brown and Martin
Paula Thornton
By 2006 an IIT Institute of Design interview with Roger Martin, titled “Designing Decisions,” told of his conversion to the concept when noting the language and behaviors of designer friends. That same year, Tim Brown presented fundamental thoughts on design thinking that also caught my attention. By the end of 2009 both Martin and Brown had released books on the topic.

Designing interactions at work: applying design to discussions, meetings and relationships
Roger Martin, Jennifer Riel
Ultimately, designers and business leaders want the same thing: transformative ideas that can be translated into real value. Yet, even with this common purpose, the interactions between design teams and business leaders often represent the biggest stumbling block to the development of breakthrough ideas. How often has a brilliant design idea been strangled in its infancy by a client who could not, or would not, “get it”? How often is breakthrough innovation stopped short by number crunchers who don’t understand the process of design or the insights afforded by it? And how often do business folks moan that designers lack even the most basic understanding of cost and strategy?

From Davis to David: lessons from improvisation
Liz Danzico
Improv is extending its practicality. Designers have been adopting improvisation design methods in their own practices. Made more visible by organizations such as IDEO and Pixar and the research of people from Elizabeth Gerber at Northwestern University and Steve Portigal at Portigal Consulting, we’re seeing how improvisation can be powerful in interaction design work. With collaboration activities in particular, improv becomes especially important when untangling complex problems that require teamwork or just getting a client unstuck.

Technology first, needs last: the research-product gulf
Don Norman
Design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories, but essentially useless when it comes to breakthroughs.

Sugared puppy dog tails: gender and design
Elizabeth Churchill
Designers are not passive bystanders in the production, reproduction, reinforcing, or challenging of cultural values. We actively create artifacts and experiences. We design products with implicit or explicit assumptions about how products will be used and by whom. We mentally simulate the product user who is part of an imagined story of the product in use – these imaginary people are drawn from our everyday lives and usually have a gender, perhaps a shape, size, age and ethnicity. Thus we embed imagined, gendered others into our designs, inadvertently reproducing cultural norms because they seem so “natural.” And so in a chain of reification and reproduction, products are wired in subtle ways that reflect and reinforce existing cultural assumptions.

The lens of feminist HCI in the context of sustainable interaction design
Shaowen Bardzell, Eli Blevis
One might identify feminism’s central tenets as commitments to agency, fulfillment, identity, equality, empowerment, and social justice. I think these commitments make feminism a natural ally to interaction design. As computers increasingly become a part of everyday life, feminism is poised to help us understand how gender identities and relations shape both the use and design of interactive technologies – and how things could be otherwise, through design.

MyMeal: an interactive user-tailored meal visualization tool for teenagers with eating disorders
Desmond Balance, Jodie Jenkinson
Since patients with eating disorders (EDs) have demonstrably abnormal perceptions of the size of food, a meal-visualization tool could help patients with EDs feel more comfortable about portions by helping them understand what appropriate food portions look like in the context of a balanced meal.

On design thinking, business, the arts, STEM …
Jon Kolko, Richard Anderson
Why [is it] only now [...] that the language related to the intellectual and intangible aspects of design is beginning to catch on?

“A student of design, Medhi has developed text-free user interfaces (UIs) to allow any illiterate or semi-literate person on first contact with a computer, to immediately know how to proceed with minimal or no assistance.

As Medhi points out, in text-based conventional information architecture found in mobile phones and PCs, there are a number of usability challenges that semi literate people face. By using a combination of voice, video and graphics in an innovative way, Medhi has overcome this challenge.

Medhi discovered the kind of barriers that illiterate populations face in using technology through an ethnographic design process involving more than 400 women from low-income, low-literate communities across India, the Philippines, and South Africa.”

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Mobile phone ownership in low and middle-income countries has skyrocketed in the past several years. But a woman is still 21% less likely to own a mobile phone than a man. Closing this gender gap would bring the benefits of mobile phones to an additional 300 million women. By extending the benefits of mobile phone ownership to more women, a host of social and economic goals can be advanced.

The Women & Mobile report is the first comprehensive view of women and mobile phones in the developing world. This report, sponsored by the GSMA Development Fund and Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, explores the commercial and social opportunity for closing the mobile gender gap. The report builds off of a survey conducted with women on three continents to show their mobile phone ownership, usage, barriers to adoption and preferences. The report shows how mobile phone ownership can improve access to educational, health, business and employment opportunities and help women lead more secure, connected and productive lives. It also includes ten case studies highlighting the strategies and tactics that both mobile network operators and non-profit organizations across the globe are implementing to increase the usage and impact of mobile phones around the world.

The study report was launched at the 2010 Mobile World Congress by Rob Conway, CEO of the GSM Association (GSMA), Cherie Blair, Founder of the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women and Brooke Partridge, CEO of Vital Wave Consulting.

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But, asks MobileActive in its ongoing series on Mobile Myths and Realities: Deconstructing Mobile, what is the real story behind these benefits? And who really gains from them?

In her contribution to the series, Anne-Ryan Heatwole looks at “how women are or are not benefitting from the ubiquity of mobile telephony”.

“Mobile technology has the ability to change the way we communicate, but its effects are not evenly distributed. In societies that are divided by social and gender roles, women, especially rural women, are often left out. Gender disparity in society is often echoed in mobile usage; while technology allows some women greater social and economic freedom, in other cases, it simply upholds previously held social constructs. In the areas of social interactions, education, and economics, mobile phones have a distinctly gendered impact on its users. An examination of research and case studies that focus on women and mobile technology reveals that although access to mobile telephones has many benefits for female users, it not a solution to female poverty or gender inequality.”

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“The Femme Den started as an underground collective of international women searching for answers in a world that was not designed for us. We’ve now grown to a leading team of design researchers, industrial designers, and engineers who are paving the way for a deeper understanding around design and gender.

Armed with our unique toolkit of know-how and fresh design methods, we create products that make a positive impact on people’s lives, particularly women’s. We bring our knowledge to life in the products we design–from the kitchen to the ski slopes to the emergency room.”

A series of articles on Fast Company provide more background on their work:

Forget “shrink it and pink it”: the Femme Den unleashed
by Kate Rockwood – From Issue 139 | October 2009
Boobs. The Femme Den talks about them easily and often — and about the challenges they present to designers. Backpack makers don’t seem to have a clue what to do about boobs. Ditto designers of unisex hospital scrubs, famous for their gaping V-necks. “One surgeon told me there wasn’t a woman at the hospital whose boobs he hadn’t seen,” says Femme Den member Whitney Hopkins.

Femme Den’s five tenets of designing for women
by Kate Rockwood – From Issue 139 | October 2009
1. EMPHASIZE BENEFITS OVER FEATURES: Rather than touting feature sets and specs (how fast or big or slick something is), make the product’s benefits clear. Who can it connect her to? How does it make her life easier? How will it save …

Design in action
by Kate Rockwood – From Issue 139 | October 2009
The Femme Den points to an array of products that smartly and subtly consider women in their design.

Examining design values: warm, cold, or just right
by Erica Eden – Sep 25, 2009
How products can hit a sweet spot between traditionally female (Warm) and male (Cold) values.

Designing for gender, when one or both parties reap the rewards
by Yvonne Lin – Sep 24, 2009
The most successful products are designed for one sex but embraced by both.

How companies can woo women with design
by Agnete Enga – Sep 23, 2009
When shopping, men tend to go linear and deep, researching a product in detail and then going in for the kill. Women go wide, gathering information that goes beyond herself and her personal needs.


Hunter vs. gatherer: gender differences on the mind
by Whitney Hopkins – Sep 23, 2009
Most of us are only aware of obvious physical or behavioral attributes that differ between genders. But our differences run deeper–to the way we think, the way we act, and to our primitive desires.

Why designers need to talk about sex
by Femme Den – Sep 22, 2009
It’s about time the design industry got serious about gender differences.

Introducing the Femme Den: going beyond “shrink it and pink it”
by Linda Tischler – Sep 21, 2009
The Femme Den aims to go far beyond the traditional “shrink it and pink it” strategy that manufacturers often employ when targeting the female market.

Sex and electronics – Part 1: women and smart design
by Linda Tischler – Jan 13, 2009
In the wake of CES, a pair of women designers offer some suggestions on how consumer electronics manufacturers could boost their market share by taking gender differences into account.

Sex and electronics – Part 2: Femme Den’s favorite gadgets from CES
by Linda Tischler – Jan 13, 2009
Here are the gadgets they loved at CES… and the ones they want to send back to the locker room.

Nobel Laureates Amartya Sen and Michael Spence joined Information and Communication Technology (ICT) experts Yochai Benkler and Clotilde Fonseca in a public discussion of the role of communication and ICTs in human development, growth and poverty reduction. Michael Best moderated the discussion. What has changed, been learned, not been learned, needs to be learned, needs to be done most urgently?

Global Voices participated in the event as a media partner, and Ethan Zuckerman and Jen Brea have been twittering and live-blogging the event.

- Part 1: Notes from the Harvard Forum on ICT4D
- Part 2: Mobiles, Markets and making culture
- Part 3: ICT and gender
- Part 4: Are we settling for too late?
- Part 5: ICT4D and, and, and…
- Part 6: What do we need to know?
- Part 7: Focus and health

According to Jonathan, the paper focuses specifically on two questions: what happens when the first and only means of accessing the internet is via one’s mobile? What are the implications for M4D and ICTD?

Abstract

This study reports results of an ethnographic action research study, exploring mobile-centric internet use. Over the course of 13 weeks, eight women, each a member of a livelihoods collective in urban Cape Town, South Africa, received training to make use of the data (internet) features on the phones they already owned. None of the women had previous exposure to PCs or the internet. Activities focused on social networking, entertainment, information search, and, in particular, job searches. Results of the exercise reveal both the promise of, and barriers to, mobile internet use by a potentially large community of first-time, mobile-centric users. Discussion focuses on the importance of self-expression and identity management in the refinement of online and offline presences, and considers these forces relative to issues of gender and socioeconomic status.

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“According to Gesche Joost [...], cell phone manufacturers do need to distinguish between the specific needs of men, women, young and elderly people.

Her research has shown that women in particular put emphasis on privacy and look for cell phones that allow them to get contacted by a certain group of people (family, friends, etc.) but by nobody else. Another feature is micro communication. Joost claims that her work has shown that especially young girls want services like Twitter to be installed on their cell phones. A third factor asked for (especially by women with families) is the possibility to organize multiple tasks at the same time just by using the cell phone.”

Luckily a much more detailed synopsis of the actual research itself is also available, in English even:

Woman’s Phone
Exploration of female needs towards information and communication technology (ICT) based on a participatory design process; development of new services and products for female customers in ICT.
Project Partners: IxDS Berlin, T-Mobile International, Product Design Center DTAG, EAF (Europäische Akademie für Frauen in Politik und Wirtschaft)

Summary

In light of emerging forms of software, interfaces, cultures of uses, and media practices associated with mobile media, this collection investigates the various ways in which mobile media is developing in different cultural, linguistic, social, and national settings. We consider the promises and politics of mobile media and its role in the dynamic social and gender relations configured in the boundaries between public and private spheres. In turn, the contributors revise the cultural and technological politics of mobiles. The collection is genuinely interdisciplinary, as well as international in its range, with contributors and studies from China, Japan, Korea, Italy, Norway, France, Belgium, Britain, and Australia.

Table of Contents

Part I: Reprising Mobile Theory
1. “The Question of Mobile Media”- Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth
2. “Intimate Connections: The Impact of the Mobile Phone on Work Life Boundaries” – Judy Wajcman, Michael Bittman and Jude Brown
3. “Gender and the Mobile Phone” – Leopoldina Fortunati

Part II: Youth, Families, and the Politics of Generations
4. “Children’s Broadening Use of Mobile Phones” – Leslie Haddon and Jane Vincent
5. “Mobile Communication and Teen Emancipation” – Rich Ling
6. “Mobile Media and the Transformation of Family” – Misa Matsuda
7. “Purikura as a Social Management Tool” – Daisuke Okabe, Mizuko Ito, Aico Shimizu and Jan Chipchase

Part III: Mobiles in the Field of Media
8. “Mobile Media on Low-Cost Handsets: The Resiliency of Text Messaging among Small Enterprises in India (and Beyond)” – Jonathan Donner
9. “Innovations at the Edge: The Impact of Mobile Technologies on the Character of the Internet” – Harmeet Sawnhey
10. “Media Contents in Mobiles: Comparing Video, Audio and Text” – Virpi Oksman
11. “New Economics for the New Media” – Stuart Cunningham and Jason Potts
12. “Domesticating New Media: A Discussion on Locating Mobile Media” – Larissa Hjorth

Part IV: Renewing Media Forms
13. “Back to the Future: The Past and Present of Mobile TV” – Gabriele Balbi and Benedetta Prario
14. “Net_Dérive: Conceiving and Producing a Locative Media Artwork” – Atau Tanaka and Petra Gemeinboeck
15. “Mobile News in Chinese Newspaper Groups: A Case Study of Yunnan Daily Press Group” – Liu Cheng and Axel Bruns
16. “Re-inventing Newspapers in a Digital Era: The Mobile E-Paper” – Wendy Van den Broeck, Bram Lievens and Jo Pierson

Part V: Mobile Imaginings
17. “Face to Face: Avatars and Mobile Identities” – Kathy Cleland
18. “Re-imagining Urban Space: Mobility, Connectivity, and a Sense of Place” – Dong-Hoo Lee
19. “These Foolish Things: On Intimacy and Insignificance in Mobile Media” – Kate Crawford
20. “Mobility, Memory and Identity” – Nicola Green

Chapter summary

Chapter 8. “Mobile Media on Low-Cost Handsets: The Resiliency of Text Messaging among Small Enterprises in India (and Beyond)” – Jonathan Donner
This chapter begins by describing the limited use of most mobile functions—except for voice calls and SMS/text messages—among small and informal business owners in urban India. It draws on this illustration to suggest that forms of mobile media based on low cost, ubiquitous SMS features have the potential to be accessible, relevant, and popular among many users in the developing world. Further examples of SMS-based mobile media applications illustrate an important distinction between these systems. While some applications stand alone, others function as bridges to or hybrids of other media forms, particularly the internet. Over the next few years, these hybrid forms will play an important role in offering flexible, powerful information resources to a sizable proportion of the world’s population.
(via Jonathan Donner)

Also note chapter 7.

Recent technological developments have made it possible to apply experience design also in the field of highly interactive product design, an area where involvement of non-trivial technology traditionally made it impossible to implement quick design cycles. With the availability of modular sensor and actuator kits, designers are able to quickly build interactive prototypes and realize more design cycles. In this paper we present a design process that includes experience design for the design of interactive products. The design process was developed for a master level course in product design. In addition, we discuss several cases from this course, applying the process to designing engaging interactive urban playgrounds.

One of the authors, Walter Aprile (pictured), was a former Interaction-Ivrea faculty member at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.

via InfoDesign

Younghee was interviewed by the Canadian Woman.ca site for an article that set out to understand what it means to design for women, and concludes that it really is about design for all.

“You can’t really generalize what women want, because you always have to consider the trade-offs. If I do need and like the functions, I will probably overlook the size issues. Choosing a phone is a lot like choosing a boyfriend. You cannot look at just one aspect of the product—he may be handsome, but he may have a personality problem. A mobile phone is something that you wake up with and go to sleep with.” [...]

Even though they may ultimately use products the same way as men, starting off with womens’ inspirations for product design may be more helpful in creating a device that works equally well in a number of environments. Factors such as ease of use, while important to both sexes, can become more refined through the crucible of a woman’s dual roles in society, as she balances both work and home life, and needs her technology to function equally well in both situations. “When it comes to inspiring a design solution, what women think is a very interesting place to start with,” said Jung. “If it’s good for women, it’s good for men, too.”

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She talks about mobile adoption, user-centric design, women and mobiles, how Millennium Villages is using mobiles to improve health outcomes, and what she sees as the next big projects in mobile health.

I think some of the best developments are when you have your endusers involved in the design process. We have a computer science doctoral student working on the development of CommCare in the Millennium village in Uganda. So he’s just spent the last few works following community health workers around the village, watching what they do in the household; watching what they do in the facilities, and how long it takes that individual to get from one place to another. [...]

I think you have a much better chance of developing an application that will be meaningful for the end user. [...]

What was nice about the study in Egypt, I just looked at “how are people using mobile phones in general without any external support.” Often times you can find patterns of use that you can just standardize or strengthen. Or develop the access to the information that they would need; the automated systems for some of the things they were already doing.

There are different ways of approaching it strategically, so that you’re not starting from scratch. There are a lot of really good projects out there. They are small, and they are pilots. But it’s a good starting point to look at what already exists before coming out and starting something new.

Read full interview