[p2p-research] If Women Had Designed Facebook & comments

[Michel Bauwens]

 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<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/using-protocollary-power-for-insuring-diversity-the-gender-friendly-design-of-the-lilypad-arduino/2010/10/03>
>
>    [image: photo of Michel Bauwens]
>    Michel Bauwens
>    3rd 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<http://hlt.media.mit.edu/publications/buechley_DIS_10.pdf>and Benjamin’s commentary
>    here <http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20101001-00>.
>
>    *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.” *
>
>
>
>  Topic: If Women Had Designed Facebook & comments<http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/t/64d6cbc7f4c022ac>
>
>    "Paul D. Fernhout" <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> Oct 04 06:57PM -0400
>    ^<https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&view=js&name=main,tlist&ver=PLpFW8mo6ZU.en.&am=!Y-v-bx6-hLCxhZ4C2vD2RvIM-1v6I_hAKFo_CVzYW0-VuN1lOtqu&fri=780bf9b62624c96fb0d6213310bb23ea#12b7c3983b7b654c_digest_top>
>
>    Something mentioned on the Diaspora discussion list to keep in mind
>    while
>    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? ..."
>
>
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