Round table discussion

ELLEN LUPTON

I want people to come into the museum and see objects and images that relate to their own life and think about how they have lived with these objects, and how their experiences fit and don’t fit with media representations that tend to be normative and stereotypical and focus on a certain middle-class ideal of life. In Mechanical Brides we tried to create an atmosphere that invites people to think about their own experiences with machines, and sex, and money. The Mechanical Brides project is kind of a second chapter to The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste, an exhibition I organized with Abbot Miller at MIT List Visual Arts Center in 1992. It is an attempt to introduce people to the research that historians have done on women’s work and women’s economic conditions and how that research relates to the world of objects, the everyday world of commodities and things that we work with, and buy, and enjoy, and hate, and so forth. So I see these books as small archeologies of particular objects.

One of the things that I wanted to do in Mechanical Brides is to focus on the users of objects rather than the makers and to focus on their importance in completing the object. So it’s not a show about the fact that only men designed appliances in the 1950s. That’s a straw dog, because men in the twentieth century basically have designed almost everything. But at the same time women have had this huge but unrecognized role in homes and in offices and so forth, using objects, being the consumers of objects

ROUND Table

There are few women in the field, and therefore their perspective isn’t seen in product design. But I think that we’re probably seeing a shift in design from the self-centered “I’m going to design something and give it to the world” attitude to a more user-centered approach. So I think that whether you’re male or female, design is starting to come to the user

EL

I think market research, which has been rising for decades, is a place where, in fact, women consumers do contribute to the design process in a very controlled way. One thing about looking at design in the context of a museum is trying to get people not to focus on the designer as the only force in creating objects and controlling their use and so forth. Consumers have a role to play. The objects can’t dictate who uses them. The refrigerator of itself doesn’t determine who is the main person in the family responsible for stocking it and cleaning it and throwing away every gross thing that you find in its depths. But there are lots of people involved in this world of objects, not just designers. I think the move towards market research and so called user-centered design is, in a way, the feminization of design in the sense that it presents the idea that the people who use the objects have needs, and that those needs vary, and they need to be accommodated

RT

Don’t you think we can be told we need something in an advertisement, because they want to sell something, whether we need it or not? I wonder how much designers really have to do with that. I would think unless you’re a very well-known designer, those companies aren’t coming to you and saying “Design this, and do whatever you want…” I would think the companies are working in parameters and with restrictions, and thinking “This is what we want to sell the public, this is what we want you to design.”

EL

Yes, I mean domestic appliances. This is one thing that distinguishes industrial design from graphic design. You can really run a cottage industry as a graphic designer. I mean like all my books for example—it’s a situation where the designer has complete control over the product. But product design, because of the huge amounts of capital that go into making a mass-produced object, the designer is just one tiny link in deciding what gets made and how many and in what colors. The designer’s position is minor. And another point to be made is that one can revolutionize the process of work. For example, in the twentieth century massive changes in the way housekeeping is done—the introduction of the vacuum cleaner and the washing machine and automatic appliances, and so forth—changed completely the texture of the way that work is done. But at the same time the social frame in which it is done remains basically the same; it’s done by women and it’s done privately, within households. Everyone owns their own appliances. So on the one hand you have the revolution of the object and on the other, the complete conservation of the social frame in which the work is done. And major shifts, like changing that social frame, aren’t going to happen just with objects. Technology is not a force with its own mind that does work without people manipulating it and paying the bill So it’s really important in any kind of study of objects to remember that it’s the social frame that ultimately determines how things gets used

RT

As artists we are taught from day one that form is so important—the form, the design, the shape, the color, the texture of that thing, that’s what it’s about. It’s difficult, I think, for people in art, and probably in design too, to really come to terms with seeing products/objects more as part of a social network than as discrete things

EL

I am still fascinated with individual objects. A big part of the exhibition shows the evolution of the washing machine. I think they’re beautiful. Especially the older ones. The Maytag from 1939 with the white legs and the red logo is a beautiful machine. It’s not that I don’t think the form of things is interesting, or even that form has no power, but you just can’t think that all of the power resides in the object

RT

You did show a few contemporary ads, and I was wondering how much of the show was on history and how much on contemporary advertising. I think 99 percent of advertising is still doing what it did then, but that advertising is so slick now we don’t see what they’re doing. It’s not as obvious, but it’s still there

EL

Some things have gotten better. Advertising today is more diverse. There’s a lot of pressure to show people of color in advertising. You look at the traditional women’s magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and Women’s Day and those magazines, they’re much more diverse and much more culturally sophisticated than advertising in the sixties was, even though society was diverse then, too

RT

I do think there has been some change between men and women in certain circles. The fact was that certain people wouldn’t be in certain rooms fifty years ago. So there have been some changes and I think those changes are going to have demographic effects throughout the whole society. My perception of a relationship, and sharing, is different from my father’s

EL

There is change, but it’s not in the bag. Susan Faludi’s book Backlash documents how journalism in the eighties promoted the idea that women were suffering because of feminism, and that women were losing their fertility, and that they were “burning out.” The statistics were manipulated—by journalism, not advertising—by Time and Newsweek and the Harvard Business Review to get across the message that feminism a) had succeeded and equality had been achieved; and b) that women were hurting because of it

RT

In contemporary advertising, I can’t recall an ad where men are cooking in the kitchen, or cleaning the bathroom, etc

EL

Women teach their own daughters to expect certain things from life and you know, it’s not just men making women do the work. There is a wonderful book by Arlie Hochschild called The Second Shift, which studies this problem in the eighties. She went and lived with these families and studied who was doing the work. She’s strictly concerned with double-income families, and reading her book is heart wrenching. She really gets involved in the relationships between the parents and children and the games people play in a manipulative way to do the work and not do the work and it’s really wonderful and entertaining. It’s like a novel. But she finds even in families where the woman is bringing home a salary, she is still expected to do 90 percent of the cooking, and grocery shopping, and cleaning. Whatever gets done, she ends up doing it. One of the reasons for that is that women still are paid less in the marketplace, so when they get home with the woman’s $20,000 salary and the man’s $35,000 or whatever, her time is simply worth less. Literally, it’s worth less, so even though she worked the same eight hour day that he did, when she gets home her leisure has less economic value attached to it because she makes less money

RT

As a graphic designer, do you think screen icons and the way the whole computer interface works is male-centered, and if it’s becoming a whole new language that might be a generational concern? For example, my mother doesn’t interact with computers well. From cave paintings all the way through to making letterforms, I’m wondering if computers are actually a part of that evolution or if they’re a fracture, and all of a sudden we’re starting out with something new that most of the population, and the aging population, can’t understand

EL

Yes, I think it’s really going to revolutionize—I mean it already has—the way a design is done. I don’t think there is any sexual bias to those interfaces. I don’t think so. But, I think it is true that men are dominating that field. Everyone should want to do it. The computer enables you to write and design at the same time, which is really fun. It’s something, for example, that editors find perverse. I mean the way I’m doing the Mechanical Brides book is that I do the layout and then I write the text that fits. My editor at Cooper-Hewitt thinks that that’s a problem, because it’s putting design before a text, and that you should have your manuscript and your manuscript is everything that needs to be said, and then you force your design to accommodate it. I don’t have that feeling about a text being more important than format and margins and illustrations. Text is just one part of the reading experience, and the writing experience

RT

What about education, do you have ideas about teaching design? Mostly we still do a Bauhaus foundation in art schools

EL

I think design is a cultural discipline and that designers are cultural players, and that design involves the history of society and the structure of it and literary concerns and so forth. I feel that the focus on basic geometric form and figure-ground relationships and all of that, which becomes the first thing that students learn when they come to college-level design programs, tends to limit the way people think about design. I think you look at contemporary art/architecture and that these fields are increasingly involved with study and understanding of culture, and sexuality, and all kinds of issues like that