New Designers. Old Stereotypes.

"In a survey I undertook at the beginning of the course (…) ‘Design for An Aging Population’, I asked students to write down three words that describe an elderly person. Almost three quarters of their responses had negative associations revolving around words like weak, slow, and feeble. (...) But it was during the presentations of their ‘aging suits’ that I realized how ingrained ageism is within our society."
Glen Hougan



photograph by Helen Levitt via

Gender and the Residential Telephone

Abstract: Recent work on gender and technology debunks the claim that household technologies have "liberated" women from domestic work. The history of telephone use in North America suggests, however, that global conclusions about gender and consumer technologies may be misleading. Although marketed primarily as a business instrument and secondarily as an instrument to facilitate housework, the telephone was, in a sense, "appropriated" by women for social and personal ends. This paper explores the "affinity" of women for the telephone, how women in the half-century before World War II used the telephone, and why. It suggests that there is a class of technologies that women have exploited for their own, gender-linked, social and personal ends.



- Fischer, C. S. Gender and the Residential Telephone, 1890-1940: Technologies of Sociability. Sociological Forum, 3(2), 211-233.
- photograph by Helen Levitt via

You are not what you use.

"If we are what we use, then it seems the elderly people in today's society are cranky, stupid and tacky. Of course, looking at products made for the elderly really says more about what product designers and manufacturers think the elderly are."
Gretchen Anderson



photograph by Helen Levitt (1973) via