Why Men Like Straight Lines and Women Like Polka Dots by Gloria Moss

Author:Gloria Moss [Moss, Gloria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-84694-708-7
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2014-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

Telecommunications

How many of us could live without telephones? Mobile phones took a while to move away from black and chrome; but in Finland, Nokia’s chief designer, Frank Nuovo, was inspired by the need for product designers to meet customer expectations. In doing this, he may have taken his cue from Jorma Ollila, the head of Nokia, who focused the company on the role mobiles played in people’s lives and ease of use, an approach that is all the more remarkable for occurring at a time when rivals like Motorola and Ericsson were concentrating on engineering products that concentrated on technical wizardry.

The results? By 1998, Nokia owned a quarter of the mobile phone market and, by 2000, it was making one in three mobile phones worldwide; by 2007, its share of the market in handsets had increased to 38 per cent, nearly three times that of its nearest rival, Motorola. It was when it failed to maintain its technological edge that its handsets division was taken over by Microsoft in September 2013. How it is faring is open to debate but the Nokia Lumia 1020, launched in the same month, is a good guide. Marketed with the promise of being “reinvented around you”, the handset is divided (like earlier models) into black-framed boxes, has a yellow case and prides itself on the superb quality of its camera. An advert showing a football game playing out on the handset carried the words “41 megapixels puts you pitch-side” and the combined effect is to call into question the gender neutrality of the “you” around whom the product is reinvented. All the signs are that this is male even though unconscious bias on the part of the designers may shield them from this fact.

This is by no means an isolated case. In Britain at the end of the 1980s, the telephone utility British Telecom adopted as its logo the red and blue pan player, and up until 2003 you would see it on everything from vans, to stationery, to product information and telephone directories. It was the work of a well-known, London-based, corporate image consultancy and the designer there, when interviewed, described the brief as being “to design a pan figure that was neither markedly male nor female but hermaphrodite.” He looked up. “You can see this in the finished figure I think.”

The pan player he had designed showed a muscular figure of a youngish male and it was difficult to relate what he had said to this rather masculine figure. To check whether this impression was shared by other people, I asked 37 subjects to describe whether the figure appeared to them to be male, female or hermaphrodite as specified in the designer’s brief. What this survey revealed was that a tiny 13% considered the figure to be hermaphrodite and massive 74% considered it to be male with the remaining 13% undecided. Clearly, the designer’s best intentions of producing a sex-neutral figure had not worked in practice and he had ended up, predictably, designing someone of the same gender as himself.

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