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Jacques Derrida criticized our tendency to make a privileged one out of grouped binary concepts, and our imagination that behind every problem lies somewhere a good and neat solution.
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My thesis project is about investigating gendered design.
At the end of the day, gender is just a binary determinism based method to categorize our identity. When we are designing something, building those persona files, and studying the behavior of our potential users, we are actually categorizing people as well. We are putting them into different little groups and making assumptions that each category will be into what style, or they will need what functions under what situations, solving what problems, so on and so on.
Planned obsolescence, styling and restyling, color, material and finish. They all offer us a huge variety of objects, services, and systems to enrich ourselves and to develop the complexity of our identities. They are part of why we are different yet unique at the same time. But this marketing strategy that is precisely defining a “user group” while analyzing what would appeal to this specific group, in terms of not only aesthetic; but function, interaction, and even concept; also does a splendid job of dividing us into gradually solidified categories. For capitalists, we are not unique individuals, we are personas, with analizable behavior, tastes, and lifestyles. We are usable datas, part of the diagram contributing to the ultimate economic development in order to collect the treasure into the hands of the few most wealthiest people on Earth.
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BETWEEN
BEYOND
RANDOM
PROBABLE
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I try to seek alternative logic that is not based on binary determinism through literature and theories about western philosophy and quantum physics, looking at between, beyond, random and probable. I think the commonality between physics and philosophy is that they both try to explore universal truth. What is time? What is human? Why do we exist?
My research of gender could be more easily extracted to a metaphor like that of nebula. It is a more intricate model than two points, a line, or a spectrum due to its randomness, but I found it successfully explained most of the qualities of gender concept fairly well.
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The construction of freedom involves not less but more alienation; alienation is the labour of freedom’s construction. Nothing should be accepted as fixed, permanent, or “given”-neither material conditions nor social forms.
----Laboria Cuboniks, The Xenofeminist Manifesto: a Politics for Alienation.
The more I learn about industrial design, the more frequently I question my own purpose for what it is I do. I always tell people that I don’t want to design for problem-solving. Because problem-solving implies that we are privileging one possible outcome over every single outcome. We are preferring success, neat, fast, shortcut, high technology, easier beautiful life over failure, complicated, slow, outdated and difficult, which we are trying so hard to get rid of, when we are doing problem solving. And I am so tired of being expected to be this futuristic wizard, designing a key to solve problems.
I don’t want to just make that “key”, I wish to have a conversation with the person on the other end of my work, I want that person to be a part of the process of making his/her/their own “key”. I want the conversation between me, and the audience of my work, to have an open dialogue where I take pride in my process but I don’t hold a privilege in my own perspective. We are respectful towards each other.
