MADRID — Before women could think about how to get out of the kitchen, they first had to make the kitchen work for them.
For centuries, kitchens were designed with little or no consideration for the women, often servants or women considered to be lower class, who actually used them. Big tables in the middle of the room, instead of counters where food could be prepared, and close to bins and drawers where cooking tools and dry goods were kept. A stove that doubled as the home’s source of heat.
Enter Taylorism, the late 19th- and early 20-century management strategy of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who sought to make workplaces more efficient, and thus, more productive. And a couple of decades later, the vision was put to user use with The Frankfurt Kitchen, designed in 1926 by Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky.
It was a kitchen made for the people who used it — women — and had such now-obvious user-friendly features as wood cutting boards, wall-mounted, fold-down ironing board and a wooden swivel stool. The theme was showcased this summer at Madrid’s National Museum of Decorative Arts, where the Domestic Engineers and the Kitchen Revolution exhibit displayed what should be a design must: make things that actually work for the people who wear them, use them or operate them. No coincidence that it was women who were behind the design. Catharine Beecher and Christine Frederick envisioned kitchen layouts more suitable to the work done in a kitchen. Lillian Gilbreth gave us smart kitchen features like foot-pedal trash cans shelves inside refrigerator doors.
A century later, we’re still facing the same frustrating situation. Running shoes, apps, medical equipment, professional clothing – it’s all carefully, even exquisitely designed for a purpose. It’s just not necessarily designed for the actual human beings trying to achieve that purpose.
Often, that means the slight majority of the population who are female get the short (or more commonly, way too long or boxy) shrift, as items are designed for a man’s size, shape and professional expectations. Karen Korellis Reuther, a former creative director at Nike, now Design Critic in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and author of the book Man-Made: How We Designed a World That Leaves Women Out, and How We Can Make It Right, counts the ways.
There’s the merely insulting and expensive, the girly-looking pastel safety razors that cost more than the basic blues sold to make shavers. The “shrink it an pink it” approach can be quite uncomfortable as well, Reuther says, with athletic show companies making women’s running sneakers from a design suited to men’s (rectangular) feet instead of women’s (triangle-shaped) feet. But they have a pink stripe. You know – for girls.
Then there’s the uncomfortable- the uniforms for airport tarmac employees or chefs that were designed with a man’s physique in mind, or the pants for construction workers women must continuously adjust, since they tend to be too big at the waist if they clear the hips.
Imagine having to go to work every day, basically in a costume that was not designed for you. These women wear these insults every day.
Karen Korellis Reuther
Or, they have to work with them: Reuther talks about a neurosurgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital who has to stand on a stool to perform brain surgery because the tables, designed for taller, male surgeons, don’t go low enough, and wear goggles that fall off their faces because the default design is for bigger heads.
The non-inclusive design veers into the dangerous. In New York City, Reuther found, female firefighters have to tape their gloves on their wrists on their way to a fire, ot make sure they don’t fall off when they’re battling a blaze. or they have to pull up their ill-fitting pants when they’re climbing a ladder.
Outdated design can be deadly as well. Crash test dummies typically have been male-sized and shaped, meaning cars and their safety equipment is not made with women in mind (more women than men have drivers licenses, though men do drive more). The equality-minded were cheered when the U.S. Department of Transportation late last year unveiled a new, female crash test dummy, although size (four-foot eleven and 108 pounds) only applies to about five percent of women.
Such mismatches are maddening to Laura Ogle, Lead Design Strategist at the San Francisco-based experience and industrial design firm Whipsaw. Ogle has made it her mission to put the user first.
“When you talk to the person who is ultimately going to use your product, your service or whatever, if you want to be the thing they return to, if you want it to be a thing you feel compelled to use, then you should probably have some understanding of the person and the way they are going to use it,” Ogle said.
There has been progress, importantly, as designers realize the world is full of customers with different bodies and abilities. OXO founder Sam Farber, for example, noticed that his arthritic wife was having trouble holding certain kitchen tools. That led to the development of the company’s Good Grips line, which includes potato peelers and other tools that have non-slip, easy-to-grip features to accommodate users of all abilities, hand sizes and grip strength.
But even as laws such as the Equal Pay Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act have recognized that the country is not made up of people with similar physical features and abilities, design — which in theory should be more forward-looking than government — is sometimes behind the times. Part of that is who’s making the decisions — only 19 percent of industrial designers are female, and that number drops to 11 percent when we get to women in leadership positions, Reuther notes. Just 28 percent of registered architects are woemn, and 16 percent of mechanical engineers are female. Even there, design can exacerbate the problem. Do an AI search for jobs, and you’ll find that the technology delivers female faces for “women’s” jobs, with men depicted in higher-paying, professional positions. And when it comes to job-seekers, AI has instructed women and people of color to ask for less money in salary negotiations, research shows.
And for companies making a consumer or professional product, sometimes it;s just easier — and definitely cheaper — to default to the male user, designers say. That how female sports enthusiasts end up with running shoes that have too-tight toe boxes and hells that slip off the foot, notes Reuther, a former executive at both Nike and Reebok. Fixing it would require a doubling pr production and — at least at first — higher costs, she said.
I spent 25 years in sport footwear and apparel. I’m a capitalist, I get it. I just think we need to redefine capitalism. We need to redefine what the profit is, because if we continue, we’re going to continue to measure success on the rear view mirror, that’s what the business world does. And the lens is always male.
Karen Korellis Reuther
Another problem is that companies sometimes wait until late in the production process to bring in design, when it should be involved at the very beginning, said designer Kelly Jura, who does research on design and the user experience.
Designing for the business and designing for the user are not mutually exclusive. You really should be able to do both.
Kelly Jura
Jura, who is Chief Experience Officer at the media source website continues, “Design is much better when it’s earlier in the process. Very often, what will happen is, ‘can you make this look good,'” late in the process, “as opposed to, what is the problem we are trying to solve – and should we really be building it at all?” Jura said. And if they do build it, listen to the designers: one size does not fit all.
