From the moment that a person is born they are labeled by their gender and put into a societally box with expectations and limitations. In recent years this century old tradition of labeling has been tested because technological advances and varied depictions of gender in the media. These to elements created what Tick refers to as a “gender revolution”. This article does a great job of going into great detail on how this gender revolution has influences the way in which designers create different spaces.
Tick believes that it is up to designers to promote acceptance and change particularly when it comes to gender. They have to do this my putting an end to the deeply rooted landscape of Modernism, which comes from a male perspective. The reason why the modernist landscape is so vast is because men dominated industries for centuries and women only recently came in adding splashes of a feminist perspective. Thankfully “the barriers and hierarchies have started to come down as women have become more prominent” (4).
This breaking of barriers is creating what Tick refers to as the feminine wave. Designers are catching on to this and are incorporating feminine touches in their work like textures, and daylight, examples of things that are softer and more “feminine”. Designers don’t only cater to women with soft aspects they include every one by blurring the lines of gender. They are doing this by designing things like women’s clothing that looks like military clothing which is typically associated to be something that men would wear. And making a makeup kits which we associate with women in a very mescaline tone for a male buyer.
With designers do things like this, along with other forms of media and new advances in technology great confusion on gender roles can be created. Questions like who should wear pants, or who can wear a dress? Do only girls wear their hair long and so on can and do arise. This confusion has brought with it great change where intuitions like colleges and big name companies are dropping traditional gender roles.
This drop of gender roles is particularly important for transgender individuals and others with varied sexual identities. There are many different sexual identities and the design of clothing, exterior spaces and ecstatically interior spaces should be accepting to all of them. Tick quotes Rothblatt who says “There are five billion people in the world and five billion unique sexual identities”, this statement is very true (7). Companies like google have recognized this and started to adopt genre-neutral or unisex bathrooms to help accommodate for these identities. These bathrooms make individuals feel not only comfortable but included.
Bathrooms are only a part of a much bigger scale of inclusion and accommodation that most happen in this post gender world that we live in today. The way in which we choose to design the space around us should be a reflection of the world that we live in today. All in all, the design should respect everyone’s needs and give induvial a place to express their own individuality.
Tick did a wonderful job at not explaining the shift in gender dynamics, by going in deep and explaining why these shift occur and where we can see them in the modern world.
Bibliography
Suzanne Tick. “ His & Hers: Designing for a Post-Gender Society” Metropolismag. Web. 16 February 2016.