The trailblazing Femme Den is a design coterie within the Smart Design consultancy that addresses the ‘gender-ation gap.’ Finally taking the ‘uni’ out of sex, they decree a gender difference edict that is cause for top down relief.
Engendering smart design can begin with physical difference: the basic biological titbits that unequivocally set the sexes apart. Physical shape, dimension differentials... It segues into emotions and experience, cultural overlays and undertones, the blurring of lines in societally assigned roles
Mars and Venus are also telescoped but in addition to a whole galaxy of previously under-explored worlds. Even cognitive psychology and the sciences have a look in – brain patterning, wiring processing centres, grey and white matter distinctions. And then there’s life stage and touch points of experience.
At the end of a long crusade it’s really about satisfying and exceeding generations of unmet needs. Even though traditional roles have changed over a century, much of the design and products required to perform them have not. Women have simply adapted to surgical scrubs that don’t fit, overly engineered devices that confound rather than complement, utensils crafted for giant mitts but intended for daily kitchen use.
The Femme Den, a trailblazing group of design innovators under the Smart Design World Wide aegis, seeks to defrock the prevailing isms and redress the balance through smart design solutions. The fact that the four founding members are industrial designers, engineers and all women adds a deeper, meta-understanding to each design challenge.
Neither polite enquiry nor radical faction, it’s a genuine post-chromosomal campaign to “save good women from bad design.” And in doing so, catalyses design capability all round, improving and including the universal experience from X to Y with intelligence and tact.
It began five years ago when Nike approached Smart Design with a conundrum. The sales of their sports watches were waning with no hard evidence to determine why. Bringing the female POV to the table yielded substantial results. They discovered a lost market in the sporting woman who had previously purchased the watch for its features but whose wrist could not support the size and awkward dimensions. A considered redesign improved both functionality and aesthetic and sales of the Nike Imara Strive soared.
This set the Smarts thinking. What else were they missing setting the threshold at gender-weighted design? Comprising Smart Designers Erica Eden, Agnete Enga, Yvonne Lin and Gina Reimann (who has since been replaced by Whitney Hopkins), with the backing of Smart Design co-founder Dan Formosa, who told them to dispense with the old ways and rethink everything afresh, the pioneering Femme Den was officially convened.
Since then, the gender-army’s explorations have become the groundwork for serious, sought after investigation into the real and perceived differences in gender and the implications for product design, user experience and finally, competitive advantage in the marketplace: fit combat attire for the female 14 percent of the US Army corps, handy pruning shears for the OXO Good Grips range, neat USBs in the Pico Cricket line, backpacks that keep abreast of the chest. Flagging a less-is-more standard, the Femme’s fought for, and won, simplifying the user interface on the Flip cam-corder for Pure Digital Technologies. With a mere seven buttons on the panel to guide its cutting edge capabilities, women (and men) loved its compact functionality and bought 1.8 million units in just 18 months.
Their brief has no bounds and is not bound by traditional process. Any product in any category is under investigation advancing the realpolitik of “sex and sensibility” for real results. The value statement is not about a specific gynocentrism, gender blending, bending or even deliberately neutralising product design. The Femme Den demonstrates the hidden benefits for men in designing with women as the filter: unanimous application crosses the gender divide. The fine balance is to ultimately create good design that speaks to both men and women without saying the F word. Neither alienating the men for whom it could benefit nor specifying female friendliness - universal design should not have to explain itself. Say the Femmes: “Our end game is to bridge the gap between assumptions and realities about women to explore the underdeveloped opportunity for good design.”
Women, they say, want to be considered not targeted, or singled out. And yet, this increasingly valuable customer is difficult to pin down. She may be the head of a household of one, four or more. She’s programming the DVR, assembling the flatpack, running a business and raising the kids, and shopping for phones, computers, power tools, plasma screens and cars - the hardcore hardware that used to be a man’s domain, as well as moisturiser, shampoo and shoes, and considering a range of people in her purchasing power and purview. If as a business, you welcome her custom, but “shrink and pink” your existing wares to woo her, you’ve got the wrong gal. You’ve missed the ‘touch’ point completely.
Women connect where due diligence has been done on her life stage, a more holistic approach employed and ‘warmer,’ not cold nor token tepid values have been considered. She wants a relationship with her brand, built on respect and communication. A product that speaks to her not sings its own praises in a bass baritone. Consumer Electronics, you’re on notice.
The message for businesses large and small is that when someone is considering your specific needs in the conception of a product and in positioning its identity, the power of design is especially transformative. And brings discrete advantages. “Women represent the world’s third largest economy, and buy or influence 80 percent of all purchases of goods and services. The women’s market is a huge business opportunity,” says Erica Eden, Senior Industrial Designer, Smart Design and with ‘fellow’ Smart industrial designer Agnete Enga, a founding member of Femme Den.
Simply put, a woman of means means business. Now based in Smart Design’s Barcelona office, Agnete Enga (and honorary Denizen “Femme Dan” Formosa) spoke with Lani Steinberg about what women want and why business should think good design to please her.
The Femme Den discussion could potentially start a very volatile conversation at all levels from the boardroom down. How do you initiate the dialogue?
I think it’s a very sensitive topic to talk about in many ways because it is emotional. Everyone has an opinion on gender and has personal experiences and stories to tell. So, it’s definitely not an easy thing to discuss. The way we like to [broach the conversation] in approaching companies is that it’s about adding value and building on current practices and philosophies within design: giving companies a competitive edge in really understanding how to design for women. So, very often we’re talking about it in terms of adding value or mapping it but also in communicating an essential foundation in understanding the similarities and the differences in women. I’ll often show them scientific studies, for example, and I use that as a foundation, which is usually a way of getting people on board. But you need a certain set-up for people to really understand and be open-minded.
If you didn’t have the ‘irrefutable’ science at hand to support the other demonstrable data would it be a more difficult overture to make?
Yes. I think so. I tried very recently to address that, actually. I removed that part of the presentation, made it very brief and to the point and it was much harder to get people to understand. We also do certain exercises to demonstrate difference, such as handholding - men tend to hold hands from the front whilst women will hold hands from the back. Similarly, women will hold a book carrying it in front of her and then drop it down [almost protectively]. These are differences that we can’t really explain: it could be differences in muscle strength, or it could be issues of dominance; cultural differences… They are subtle but important elements to consider when you are designing. When you present physical examples like these, it makes it easier for people think: ‘Oh, yes, that’s right. I do that too. I never thought about that,’ and then, they get curious.
As a designer and a female, had you given much consideration to those elements in your process before you had this specific charge to design for gender difference?
When we started the Femme Den, we were all industrial designers used to working in the traditional ways as designers. It wasn’t until a client came to us who expressly wanted to work with women and asked us very specifically to form a female point of view that we started to think in these new ways. So, I think that exposure to that initial project and its process just triggered our curiosity to dig a little deeper and to look at other products and services out in the market that were affecting women’s values, that were connecting with them or not. There’s so much information out there that’s so intriguing: we keep finding things to explore and also discovering things in ourselves that we want to try out that prompts more research, things we read about, scientific studies. It’s a really fascinating area.
FEMALE INTUITION
The Femme Den talks about women wanting ‘intuitive design,’ but do women always know what they want from a product or a service especially if they’ve not been asked to articulate it on a design level before?
No, women don’t necessarily know what they want. What we talk about in design is that people report certain things about how they use a product but seeing how people interact with the products and where they struggle with them is really where the clues are. Women don’t always know where or how they are struggling with [the product] in that way. They know what they don’t like but they don’t necessarily have options to choose from. The problem also is that women are very used to adapting to what is already on the market. And they do this unconsciously. They don’t really think about it.
In your discussions with different women in diverse samples, is there a product or service that every woman universally agrees, or you have determined from their information, really needs to be addressed by design?
I think there is a need in every category of product. A specific example would be the consumer electronics industry in general, because they haven’t really been able to connect with women at all. There are some that are starting to get certain things right but there is a long way to go. There is such a great need there because women are really busy: they have very specific priorities. They don’t want to spend a lot of time and energy figuring out the products. Now, this also depends on if she is a young woman, or a woman who has kids: a Mom doesn’t have as much time to dedicate to investigating a new product. So when we talk about intuitive design, it’s really about functionality - the product has to work well, but the touch points of her life cycle are really important. Understanding the stage of life she is at, what that woman’s challenges are and really designing towards that is something that hasn’t really been addressed much in this way so there is a big opportunity in helping women with the practical part of their lives, in simplifying their lives.
There are so many fields that are historically male dominated and therefore the tools that accompany the process and execution of these professions are stuck in the origins of the field. Femme Den talks about ‘gendered medicine,’ for example. How many occupations really need to look at the basic tools-of-the-trade?
It’s a very wide open question and a very broad field [of enquiry]. We talk a lot about certain products that are specifically for women like birth control, feminine hygiene, products related to beauty and body care, and others are for both men and women. But even in the categories specific to women’s needs, there are a lot of oversights and missed opportunities to connect with women emotionally and also to just create a better product for her beyond that. Much of the time, a female point of view has not been incorporated, to really understand what women care about. And how you need to approach them, how you need talk to them even in product categories seen to be specific to their needs.
When we look at the iPhone, for example, a product that is incredibly popular with women, is this a case of a woman being able to choose how it works for her: to customise applications for her specific needs where the fundamental design is a gender neutral ‘blank slate?’
Yes. I think it’s a very smart product. A lot of companies hold the belief that women don’t really care about performance or technology and that’s not true at all. Women really care about the best possible performance and quality. Many companies will focus on the colourways, the looks, or maybe even ‘dumb down’ the products by stripping out functionality to make it ‘simpler’ for women. When they start talking to women like that, they come undone. So the iPhone, for example, is a product that is really technically advanced and complex, but it’s so easy to use. It almost works in line with your brain: you don’t have the need for a complicated set-up; you don’t have to read a manual to figure it out. It works very intuitively and intuitive is very important for women. And as you said, it’s a blank slate. You don’t have everything crammed into it, you’re free to essentially create your own product, you can choose the features and benefits that you are looking for in your products and can leave out all the rest. Some companies will add every possible feature they can to a product thinking more features will sell but more features doesn’t necessarily add anything [to your specific experience]. It could be what you take away that makes it work for you.
Women don’t like superfluousness: so the phone that enables her to connect with her loved ones, share information, video and images easily works for her. The iPhone goes beyond being a simple phone, it’s very much a lifestyle product and I think that’s what’s appealing to women.
How does a touch point translate to the total consumer/provider interaction for a woman?
When we talk about really thinking about every touch point of the experience, it’s not only about the physical product itself, it’s also about how a brand is talking to her through advertising and communications, the online experiences, the store environment – does she like the atmosphere? How is she addressed/spoken to and how do you follow-up with her after she has purchased the product? So, she is looking for a relationship with the brand on a very different level and that’s why it’s important to connect with all those different points and understand them. Apple does a very good job in that sense – the store environments are comfortable, the people working them are very knowledgeable and they’re there to help you, so you don’t feel like you’re being talked down to, and they’re also there to advise you then, and afterwards, if there are any issues for you with the product you are buying.
Do you think you could have had this conversation 20 or 30 years ago?
It would have been a much more difficult discussion to have before. There are a lot of statistics out there right now showing that women are influencing the majority of purchases and that data didn’t exist twenty or thirty years ago so there wasn’t so much of a focus on needing to understand women and connect with them. Many companies think they do, when they actually don’t. But in general, when we talk about having this group within Smart Design, this initiative of focusing on women and connecting with the female market most companies are alert to the fact that they have to meet women’s expectations, understand, and even exceed them.
THE PATH LESS TRAVELLED
You mentioned that many companies think they are appealing to women when in fact they’re not. Do you find you have to clarify the distinction between a token ‘female-friendliness,’ the hyper-feminized ‘shrink it and pink it’ mentality that Femme Den rejects, and a product designed specifically for a woman’s needs?
That’s when we talk about the difference between the ‘visible’ versus the ‘transparent’ approach – the distinction between a product that is designed only for women as opposed to designing one that is going to be used by both men and women. ‘Female friendly’ should mean that you are including her needs and his needs in the same product. And that’s an approach we are going to see more of in the future because basically, men and women are mostly using the same products. And whilst women don’t want to be singled out as having very specific needs requiring their own specific products in terms of cars and phones, it has to go beyond that. I think in general, when we talk about the transparent approach, many companies relax because perhaps they originally thought they needed one product for women and one product for men. When you understand ‘transparency,’ it’s more about finding a common ground.
So when a company with an established identity realises it can capitalise on the female market without perceivably compromising their core attributes or having to risk creating a sub-brand, are they more responsive?
Yes. However, it depends so much on the type of product it is. For example, we were working on a project with a brand that was trying to reach women with a product that is specifically for women. But I would have thought initially if they were going to try to redefine themselves, they could not do it with that brand. Whenever we start a new project, we have to think about these things in a different way and when you move further into the [individual] process, you’re more able to answer those questions. Every situation is different.
So whilst accommodating both specific and universal needs, a transparent design approach also has to avoid a perceived gender bias either way.
I suppose an example of what makes [Femme Den] different from other ‘girl groups’ in the past, would be in comparison to the Volvo project a few years ago. Volvo did a concept car that was entirely designed and engineered by women throughout the entire process. They came up with a really beautiful looking car. Some of the features included matching textiles, materials and finishes in the interiors, dust-repellent paints, certain colours for the bodywork, you could open the hood of the car easily without having to go to the mechanic, it could parallel park for you… It had a lot of those ‘different’ features some of the design elements were really exceptional [in their own right] and then they declared that it was designed expressly for women.
I read some blogs about it afterwards and women were really quite upset because it told them that women can’t drive. If they had released it to market and not said or targeted anything specifically in this way, women might well have liked it. But because it directly declared: ‘This is for Women and these are the Features,’ females rejected it. So there is something about the subtlety of how you talk to women because it is very easy to go down the wrong path.
It sounds like it was speaking to women’s perceived weaknesses and not strengths. You have a lot of fabulous qualities, women but we’ve identified these flaws and we’re going to service them for you.
Agnete: Exactly.
Dan Formosa: The design for females and the differences in gender does get an automatic knee jerk retaliation and negative reaction from both males and females: ‘Oh, you’re going to dumb it down for females.’ Or women who get upset because they don’t want to be thought of categorically as ‘females.’ And I think that has to do with some past practices in separating males and females and not basing the distinctions on real reasons. Or not making it inclusive in the sense that males and females may think differently. Yet every design discussion you attend, somebody mentions Apple and without stating it bluntly, Apple does a great job in being gender neutral. They won’t tell you that or reveal their secrets but when you do analyse some of the things that are super successful out there in the market place; they demonstrate a very clear understanding of gender differences. They also tend to follow, like the Femme Den does, the idea that females are actually the most stringent filter. So, if you design for a male, you may not catch females, but if you design for a female, you may well catch many more males.
WHAT IT FEELS LIKE FOR A GIRL
How much influence does the lingering idea of stereotyping, particularly through years of media, TV, certain advertising, even video games… have on the discussion? We haven’t really replaced them with new archetypes because women are actually very hard to pin down regardless of her life stage. Even though she might be ‘married with children,’ she’s likely not a ‘soccer mom.’
Ah, yes. The ‘soccer mom…’ When we started Femme Den, we heard about the ‘soccer mom’ so many different times and we were very upset about it because we were thinking, ‘they’re smart, they’re thinkers, women do all these different things in the world,’ but it seemed that the soccer mom was the only handy focus for companies. In reality, women’s lives are very complex. They’re also very diverse so you can’t really pin them down and say: ‘this is women.’ Through our projects, we’ve had the opportunity to take some of the ideas that we have, put them into reality and see how they work.
We came to realise that it all really depends on a woman’s life stages. With a woman in her early twenties, for example, she has more time on her hands to focus on herself, to spend time on technologies and like products immersing herself in the experiences. But a woman in her late thirties with kids perhaps has almost no spare time to spend on herself so she will have less opportunity to explore certain products and services. We realise that her life is very complex, and if we can understand all the different elements that comprise it, it will become easier for others to understand it too.
So, talking about stereotypes is difficult, because we kind of have to touch on stereotypes in our own way a little bit, to get the point across and communicate that we are different from the old points of reference. To demonstrate ‘this is how women are,’ and ‘this how men are,’ we’re inclined to talk about the tendencies we see between the genders, which softens it a little. We also tend to talk about certain personal experiences – people that we’ve met, spoke with or observed, and that’s hard to argue against, it shows that it is something quite real.
Let’s talk about Femme Den’s Five Tenets of Designing for Women: benefits over features, body structure, narrative of the total experience, identifying the spot on the spectrum and life stages, and how you came about evolving them.
We originally developed them from different sources. We were reading a lot, trying out various products and talking to women, mostly to our friends, in the beginning. We also had discussions within our own group: about situations we might find ourselves in, and how we felt about them… there were lots of different considerations that influenced the way we thought about putting those points together. They were the very first foundation and even though we have looked to evolve them over time, they are still valid and largely the foundation we use as starting points for putting our projects together four years later. And, as the projects themselves accrue and develop, we have been able to create other tools and figure out additional important elements to add to the original tenets, and this has given more depth to each of the guidelines, helping to inform what they really mean. But as a foundation, the original [Five Tenets] still work really, really well.
How is the group dynamic different working, for the most part, expressly with other women designers on projects specifically for women especially given that you’ve all worked in the broader design landscape previously and still do?
It’s been a really positive. It was kind of liberating to be able to say exactly what I feel about things. I think that’s one thing that I realised before was that some things I felt very strongly about, others didn’t feel strongly towards. We can share opinions and experiences about projects that we feel strongly for that in another discussion might not have been seen to be important.
The dynamics between us are very different too in that we don’t have a ‘leader.’ We were asked specifically to pick a leader initially [for practical purposes] because clients may not have known who to ask for to answer specific questions; who to go to, how to interact with us, or might have needed to ‘see’ the leadership, and we refused. We have a very collaborative way of working; a more networked method instead of a hierarchy, which is something that we didn’t realise until later on.
It works really well for our group but it’s also probably because of our personalities; we mesh really well, and if we didn’t have that, it wouldn’t work. We had the opportunity to experiment a little bit with our set-up, our structure and also how we handle projects.
So the bottom line is that it’s not all about gender, it’s a matter of the personalities you put together too. You need that synergy.
You have statistics of females in design school represented as much as 50 percent but in industrial design practice that drops to around 20 percent. What sort of design education or workplace environment is most conducive to keeping females in design practice especially in the areas of product/industrial design?
I often go to design schools and lecture, or give presentations and talk to students, and there are a lot of women in industrial design courses. But the reality is that there are not a lot of women actually working as industrial designers when they graduate. We’re not really sure where they’re going; our speculation is that a lot of them are moving into research so instead of developing design, they may be in the front part of the process, researching, understanding people and how they work. I had this conversation with a male friend of mine, a designer working in another company, and he noted that all their researchers were women. So maybe there’s some anecdotal truth to that – they tend to go down that path instead of traditional design. I think that what’s good about Smart is the process, the crossover of roles. As a designer, you are also part of the project research as well as the design and development stage whereas in other companies you can be more segmented. You are a design researcher and then you pass that off to the designer who does the job and then they pass that off… And working in that way, certain things are lost in translation.
Is the current lingering recession having an impact on both companies budgeting for female directed design innovation and for families, in which women often oversee the spend and are necessarily buying less?
I think women are definitely being tighter with their spending – they’re certainly not spending as much money as they were prior to the economic crisis. Given that, I think it’s also an opportunity for companies to use this time to build a relationship with them so that when she is ready to spend money again, she will come to them. And that goes to our discussion of considering all the various touch points of her experience. So, if she is not buying, perhaps it is about providing her with the information she’s looking for. For example, there are companies who might sell diapers on line, but their web sites also offer all sorts of information and advice about lifestyle, baby development and play and health care. They’re providing much more than product: surprising and delighting her with their level of care and doing more than she expected from them. If a company can do that and build a relationship with her in other ways, she will come back and buy from them when the time is right again.
Do you have a dream design job that you’d like to tackle?
Agnete: We have so many great projects coming in right now that span a diversity of industries and services: a really good depth which is very exciting. Personally, what I would really to work on is something focusing on women in the Third World. There is a lot of need there and in general we focus most of our energy on 10 percent of the world’s population. There is a lot of opportunity to do good work for the Third World so that is a dream project of mine. What it would be, I’m not sure but it would be very interesting. Possibly related to women’s health, birthing conditions – there are a lot of opportunities in the medical sector, addressing and providing for what is needed in those situations.
Dan: We were having recent conversations about maternal and infant mortality rates and they are shocking in some countries and if you look at the facilities, equipment and the tools they have to assist in giving birth, they are pretty crude. That’s a topic that we are just now beginning to investigate. Do you give them something, or do you coach them to develop things locally, which may be a better solution in the long run - not come in with a design, but with an approach? If you educate through skills in this way, there’s also the potential for evolving a local business model to keep those tools or supplies going.
What will you be discussing at the AGIdeas conference in Melbourne?
We’re working on the presentation now and we will be looking in depth at the full experience: all the different touch points of that experience and understanding what companies have to emphasise in designing products for females and building relationships with them: women want a relationship with a brand. What are the different types of relationships and what are the ways they can connect with her emotionally? We have a lot of ‘learnings’ from projects we have done that are not only about the physical differences but also the emotional subtleties that are really hard to grasp and understand.
Is it women who have to ask these questions of other women in design research situations? In your experience, are females as likely to open up to a team of males querying the nuances of their emotional responses?
It very much depends on what the project is. I think in some situations, women are not as open to sharing certain information with guys as they would be with females. So, we talk about a ‘secret window,’ certain situations in which women will say, ‘Ok, I’ll share this with you but I don’t feel comfortable telling it to the larger group.’ A woman might anticipate that another woman has had a similar experience and is more open to sharing it with her on a personal level. She might feel that another woman is more likely to understand.
More
Agnete Enga and Dan Formosa will be speaking at the agIdeas 2010 International Design Forum 27 -29 April 2010.
Related Links
Femme Den — www.femmeden.com
Smart Design — www.smartdesignworldwide.com
agIdeas — www.agideas.net
7 April 2010