The Art and Science of Everything

The more I think about the idea of household appliances that communicate how much has been done with them and by whom, the more I doubt that it is a viable approach to self-consciousness of gender relations.

A practical starting point I just thought of was doing fieldwork in homes to understand the dynamics of how household labor gets coordinated and allocated. A specific observation from my own life is that people can get out of housework by emphasizing their incompetence. (In my mom’s case, she sometimes emphasizes her importance by emphasizing my incompetence. ) So what’s the problem? Are the tools not usable or learnable? Does knowledge of applicance operations strike a blow to some’s masculinity? Could you make household appliances more like a game to motivate participation?

Overall, what are ways that household appliance design assumes a certain kind of commited, regular user or a user who learns how to use it through socialization rather than experience and experimentation?

From an email I sent someone, again, to hold on to it:
How communication technologies are used and appropriated to uphold, subvert, or make flexible traditionally gendered divisions of labor.

What are examples of this? Required background reading is Ruth Schwartz Cohen’s “More Work for Mother” where she describes how many labor saving devices actually just raised standards of, say, cleanliness and saved labor for the sorts of things that men used to do.

What has the history of these technologies getting developed? What kind of utopian narrative did the designers have in their heads? Where they male?

But how are labor “saving” — or displacing — devices different from communication technologies? Are there ways that technology is making invisible work visible? Or is it simply enabling women to manage more tasks, but still saddling them with kinwork?

Random research idea: One problem at contributes to girls’ not participating in programming kinds of creativity is that they often don’t have access to a social network that provides support and information to help them get started and keep going. While they boys are teaching each other video game cheats and network card installation, the few girls who may be interested are problem being left out. (This is exactly what happened to me, anyways.) What if there was some sort of programming/development environment where, say, one person would script something of interest and then have cool things they could do by getting others to respond with their own interoperable scripts? Maggie builds a MySpace mosaic patch and invites her friend Jen to script her own little piece to add to the mosaic. Jen instantly has one person who knows the environment better than she does, and a social and creative motivation for participating. It’s a pretty handwavy idea, but what if we build viral properties into programming to make it more powerful and more supportive of learning?