Do designers create stereotypes and is it our responsibility to create all access products?
As a designer your number one goal is create a product that is going to be demanded. That may be by making the product easier to use, more appealing to the eye or more efficient to manufacture. In order to do this you look at trends and consider where the market is and where it is going in order to get ahead of the competition and create a product that is going to be demanded. As a result, as designers we create products that people are demanding and these tend to fall into a certain stereotype. In this way, if we are creating products that are flowing certain characteristics and as a result tend to be stereotyped towards what people want. If the market shows that girls buy more pink toys and boys buy more blue toys then designers are going to keep creating products for boys that have a blue theme and ones for girls that have a pink theme because they will be demanded more. Surely due to this designers do not create stereotypes but create products that follow stereotypes. There are a lot of products out there that were created without a gender in mind and so at the moment it is hard to see how they can be gendered. These products haven’t been created with a gender in mind but instead are created for the purposes of making a successful product that can be used by anyone. Surely if this was the starting point for all products surely no product will be gendered at all. A product which is gender neutral and is hard to argue being created to stereotypes is a hearing aid. It is a product that in itself if a very neutral and genderless product but social constructs allowed it to have different connotations depending on which gender used it. The heading aid started of as more of an ear trumpet (figure 4.1) in the late 1800s and it was a product that was very ostentations and obvious as it was. It was very subtle and had to be spoken directly into to be used. Kirkham says ‘Womens ears, unlike mens, served ornamental purposes’ he then goes on further to say ‘Women’s ears were also supposed to be more naturally acute, more musically refined; to wield an ear trumpet or sport a silver auricle was to confess to a loss of womanly character.’ (Kirkham, 1996. Pg 51) This shows that the stigma around women in the society is what created the stereotype around hearing aids and why they were seen as such a masculine product. Women were seen to be sensitive listeners and to use their ears sparingly. Using an ear trumpet would be seen as an “Elemental handicap to the social fluency of so necessary to womanhood.” (Kirkham, 1996. Pg 51). For a man using the ear trumpet It was mire acceptable in society as it was seen as a grace to ageing as it was more vital for men to be heard and to be able to hear in public. It was the same as the way that men took up eye glasses. It was seen as a tool for class, ageing and importance. The two both became a symbol of age and importance in society. As the hearing aid became more what we know it as now, it became more acceptable for women to use as it was more subtle and could be hidden a lot easier. In the new way they were moulded and much smaller it became something to have that you didn’t have to be ashamed of much like glasses. In the post war era of the 1920s, as women started to wear less layers, they started to lose pockets and spaces to put things and so invisibility became the desired thing of the time. They started to become more fashion accessories and Mrs R. H. Dent started to create hearing aids that were more ornamental and attractive objects that could be attached to clothing, hats or even be used as accessories. In the nineteenth century after hearing aids become pretty much the same for men and women, women were still expected to do more active and serious work to conceal the hearing aid. Deafness made women seem cross, paranoid and unpredictably responsive and it made men seem puzzled unintelligent and slow-acting so the hearing aid restored people to the gender roles far more effectively. The hearing aid is an object that was made as a gender neutral product and wasn’t created with a gender in mind or to any stereotype. It was an all access product made simply to aid people with hearing. Due to the social constructs of the time regarding a woman and mans role in society it got made into an object that had a lot of stereotypes around it. As a result the designer of the time didn’t create the stereotype but instead societies reaction to people of different genders using it is what made it a stereotyped product.