If Women Had Designed Facebook & comments
Paul D. Fernhout
designing open manufacturing software: :-)
"If Women Had Designed Facebook" by CV Harquail
http://authenticorganizations.com/harquail/2010/09/30/if-women-had-designed-facebook/
"Everything ever designed reflects the worldview, the values, and the
priorities of the people who designed it. Technology, and software in
particular, reflects the implicit values of the people who design it. If
designers value speed over warmth, economy over richness, or squares over
circles, the software reflects these values. ... So, we should be concerned
about how the implicit values, social arrangements, and social solutions
that are literally built into the Facebook software itself continue to
influence how we interact across that platform. ... What kind of online
community would we create for ourselves, if we started with a different set
of values? ..."
Even as I completely agree with what I quoted, personally, I think trying to
call this purely a male/female thing is problematical (even if may be some
truth to it), since you could ask how Margaret Thatcher would design
software? :-) And I've heard "NOW" has its share of internal politics. And
"Sting" sounds pretty emotional at times. :-) I've seen comments about how
men tend to be more emotional in decision making, oddly enough. :-) Women
just tend to excel (and be trained in) social networking of a certain sort.
But it may all average out:
http://virgil.azwestern.edu/~dag/lol/EmotionWomen.html
"Although both sexes experience emotions similarly,
they differ in which emotions they are encouraged to express."
CV Harquail links to this as well, which I think is more of the explanation:
http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=1699
"Those of you who know me as a software engineer have no doubt heard me talk
repeatedly about if you look at computer science as a social science it�s
clear that there are a lot of consequences to the lack of diversity in the
discipline. One of them is a lot of the design space just isn�t getting
explored. Most software today is designed and developed by teams and
companies (or open-source projects) where the power is with white guys whose
cognitive style is analytical and reductionist. ..."
Although again, there are a lot of white guys who are not mainly analytical,
but there are filtering processes that may reduce the likelihood they have
Computer Science degrees (or are working in big organizations). Related:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
See also the comments by my wife on social networking software:
http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/01/water-water-everywhere-nor-any-drop-to.html
http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/08/steal-these-ideas.html
Anyway, one can certainly wonder though how these issue effects the kind of
open manufacturing software that gets written, or the projects that are done
as open manufacturing. One of the things I found surprising about the FabLab
project was when they said how drawn artists of all sorts were to the
technology. So, Open Manufacturing can be more inclusive in that sense in
the long term.
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.
Michel Bauwens
Using Protocollary Power for Insuring Diversity: the gender-friendly design of the LilyPad Arduino
Michel Bauwens3rd October 2010
“LilyPad is a microcontroller platform that Leah created a few years back and that is specifically designed to be more useful than other microcontroller platforms (like normal Arduino) in the context of crafting practices like textiles or painting. Leah’s design goal with LilyPad was to create a sewable microcontroller that could be useful for making things that were qualitatively different from what most people made with microcontrollers and that, she hoped, would be of interest to women and girls.”
Background: in distributed networks, where power is not obviously concentrated in the center of a command and control hierarchy, the power lies in the design and architecture of the platform, which consciously or unconsciously creates tresholds that are easier to cross by some than others. In this particular context, free software and open hardware communities, are, despite their egalitarian and meritocratic ethos, often biased towards a male culture. The LilyPad Arduino has been intentionally designed as a ‘new clubhouse’ that would be female-friendly, and according to a recent paper, have done so succesfully.
Some excerpts from the comments on, and the paper itself.
The authors are Leah Buechley and Benjamin Mako Hill. The paper is here and Benjamin’s commentary here.
1. From Benjamin Mako Hill’s comment:
“Our paper tries to measure the breadth of LilyPad’s appeal and the degree to which it accomplished her goals. We used sales data from SparkFun (the largest retail source for both Arduino and LilyPad in the US) and a crowd-sourced dataset of high-visibility microcontroller projects. Our goal was to get a better sense of who it is that is using the two platforms and how these groups and their projects differ.
We found evidence to support the suggestion that LilyPad is disproportionally appealing to women, as compared to Arduino (we estimated that about 9% of Arduino purchasers were female while 35% of LilyPad purchasers were). We found evidence that suggests that a very large proportion of people making high-visibility projects using LilyPad are female as compared to Arduino (65% for LilyPad, versus 2% for Arduino).
Digging deeper, qualitative evidence suggests a reason. LilyPad users aren’t just different. The projects they are making are different too. Although LilyPad and Arduino are the same chips and the same code, we suggest that LilyPad’s design, and the way the platform is framed, leads to different types of projects that appeal to different types of people. For example, Arduino seems likely to find its way into an interaction design project or a fighting robot. LilyPad seems more likely to find its way into a smart and responsive textile. Very often, different types of people want to make these projects.
Leah and I believe that there’s a more general lesson to be learned about designing technologies for communities underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) — and for women in particular.
The dominant metaphor in the discussion on women in computer science is Margolis and Fisher’s idea of “unlocking the clubhouse.” The phrase provides a good description of the path that most projects aimed at broadening participation of women in computing projects seem to take. The metaphor is based around the idea that computing culture is a boys’ club that is unfriendly to women. The solution is finding ways to make this club more accessible to those locked outside.”
2. From Leah Buechley and Benjamin Mako Hill’s paper:
“Our experience suggests a different approach, one we call Building New Clubhouses. Instead of trying to fit people into existing engineering cultures, it may be more constructive to try to spark and support new cultures, to build new clubhouses. Our experiences have led us to believe that the problem is not so much that communities are prejudiced or exclusive but that they’re limited in breadth–both intellectually and culturally. Some of the most revealing research in diversity in STEM found that women and other minorities don’t join STEM communities not because they are intimidated or unqualified but rather because they’re simply uninterested in these disciplines.
One of our current research goals is thus to question traditional disciplinary boundaries and to expand disciplines to make room for more diverse interests and passions. To show, for example, that it is possible to build complex, innovative, technological artifacts that are colorful, soft, and beautiful. We want to provide alternative pathways to the rich intellectual possibilities of computation and engineering. We hope that our research shows that disciplines can grow both technically and culturally when we re-envision and re-contextualize them. When we build new clubhouses, new, surprising, and valuable things happen. As our findings on shared LilyPad projects seem to support, a new female-dominated electrical engineering/computer science community may emerge.”
"Paul D. Fernhout" <pdfer...@kurtz-fernhout.com> Oct 04 06:57PM -0400 ^
Paul D. Fernhout
> this is related to paul's item on gendered design;
> http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/using-protocollary-power-for-insuring-diversity-the-gender-friendly-design-of-the-lilypad-arduino/2010/10/03
>
>> Using Protocollary Power for Insuring Diversity: the gender-friendly
>> design of the LilyPad Arduino
>> Background: in distributed networks, where power is not obviously
>> concentrated in the center of a command and control hierarchy, the power
>> lies in the design and architecture of the platform, which consciously or
>> unconsciously creates tresholds that are easier to cross by some than
>> others. In this particular context, free software and open hardware
>> communities, are, despite their egalitarian and meritocratic ethos, often
>> biased towards a male culture. The LilyPad Arduino has been intentionally
>> to a recent paper, have done so succesfully.
Interesting. :-)
By the way, just for some more context on who may benefit most in general
from an advanced technological society: :-)
"The End of Men - Magazine - The Atlantic"
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/
"Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first
time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men
who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years,
women�s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if
equality isn�t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is
simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal
now under way� and its vast cultural consequences. ..."