Gendered User-Representations
Els W. M. Rommes · 2000
To explain why there were so few female users of the first digital city (DDS) in the Netherlands, a close analysis of the design-process and the re-design of a new interface is made. Policy-makers, financiers, and designers made the design-choices. Each group created their own, often unconscious, representations of which the users of DDS would be. These user-representations influenced the choices policy-makers and designers made and the amount of influence users received in the process. Because the policy-makers and the designers of DDS were masculine groups, a new interface was developed with more masculine connotations. The study of the often complicated and contradictory processes in which user-representations are created and which become dominant during the design-process, may be a useful way of finding ways in which more female-friendly designs of ICT can be developed. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.