Table of Contents

Section Page

1. Introduction 1.1 Concept 1.2 Impetus 1.3 Users & Setting 2. Domains & Precedents 2.1 Precedents 2.2 Gender, Design, Advertising 3. Prototyping & Testing 3.1 Visual Prototyping 3.2 Physical Prototyping 4. Sources

1 1 4 7 9 9 13 17 17 20 25

1. Introduction
1.1 Concept

The purpose of this project is to create a company that develops and sells macho products so that men can participate in housekeeping without feeling emasculated. Thats how it's going to be presented anyway. The actual goal of this project is to entertain people with a mix of silly product design and over-the-top presentation. Originally this project was going to be called Unique Home Innovations. It started with just the rough concept of making people laugh by mocking absurd products and commercials. Inspired by infomercial and As Seen on TV ads, the original goal was just to make something silly. I made a few small products and mocked up several others, but as fun as they were, none of them functioned as much more than random comedy props.

I started expanding on this idea by doing research into commercials and advertising in general. I focused on infomercials but went as broad as looking at the history of catalogs and television advertising. A significant portion of the objects, tools, and amenities being advertised were for the home and of these products almost all the ads were targeted toward women. The exception to this being tools for the outdoors or indoor activities that went beyond general upkeep and care. After WWII, advertising seemed hellbent on selling appliances to homemakers. In other words they were targeting women. A few that I found which mentioned men, and seemed to be speaking to them, always followed the line of: Hey guys, your wife would love if you bought her this washing machine and dryer!

This was the beginning of my Big Idea. After looking into the history of television commercials it seemed like a good idea to also look at the history of commercial parodies. Mad Magazine, Saturday Night Live, and various comedians provided plenty of material to study. The Big Idea that was developing in my head around that time crystallized when I saw the Saturday Night Live commercial parody called Chess for Girls. In this commercial girls expressed irritation that chess was too difficult and boring. The comedy solution was a set of pink chess dolls that could have their hair braided, be dressed up and played with in a chess themed doll house and minivan. It was completely ridiculous, but the way the commercial was done was identical to how toys are actually marketed to young girls.

Thats what made it an effective parody; its over the top but you could almost imagine it being a real. Hyperbole and exaggeration are essential to comedy. When making fun of something, its common to take the idea to its most extreme to highlight inherent absurdities.

1.2 Impetus
I find television commercials for niche products, and sometimes even for big-name products to be very funny. There's a lot of ways to cover the subject when doing satire. Many comedians have done standup bits or written articles and books about them. For this project it wasn't enough to just make fun of commercials, it needed to actually engage in the process of making a brand, making the products, and then making the ads. That's how it will make fun of them.

I wanted to satirize a specific topic with this project. Without a theme it was likely to end up as just a bunch of random, silly objects which I dont have much interest in making right now. I want my jokes to have a uniting theme and this felt like a good fit. Some of the best comedy touches on very serious issues. Making a joke have deeper meaning doesn't automatically make it unfunny or preachy. The main goal of my project will always be to entertain, but I also have a real target for my satire and that will help shape my production and my presentation.

Masculine and feminine cultural identity aren't just reinforced through advertising targeted at women. As companies seek to expand their markets they try to find ways to sell products and services to men that were previously aimed exclusively at women.1 These ads usually reinforce the idea that men should be tough and aggressive in order to sell them products that aren't usually percieved that way. A good example of this is Alpha Nail. This is a brand of nail polish being marketed as the brand of nail paint for Alpha males and warriors. A section of their website is devoted to pick up artist advice about how peacocking with bright colors helps men get women and breed. Their celebrity endorsements include sports stars and rock stars to play up this image of the tough, cool, alpha male.

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/12/05/marketing-by-masculinizing-the-feminine/

Ad campaigns, like the one for Alpha Nail, which are designed to sell female products to men aren't helping. The intent may just be to market products to a non-traditional audience but the effect is still the reinforcement of stereotypes. Consider Dyson for a moment: They may be expanding the role of men in the home but the way they do it is by making the vacuum manlier. Isn't that what I'm doing? Yes and no. Dr. Pepper 10, Weight Watchers, Alpha Nail, and any other companies that are trying to market "female products" to men my making the products and ad campaigns manly are contributing to the problem just as much as when they marketed these products to women. They reinforce gender stereotypes. Dyson makes it ok for men to vacuum not by removing the stigma of being "girly" but by removing the "girliness" from the vacuum.

My silly products for men exaggerates this stereotyping to completely absurd levels. It's not about just reversing the product gendering aimed at women and doing it to men; it's about mocking product gendering entirely, because whether it's aimed at men or women it supports harmful stereotypes.

1.3 Users & Setting

To begin developing my brand and my products I had to think of my users. I'm making home good for men so I need to imagine how a marketing might imagine the average American male's interests. There exists in advertising a strong tendency to rely on assumed traits of demographics. I need to think like a lazy advertiser about what my consumer audience would want.

This audience is a broad stereotype of American masculinity. I define this stereotype as the idea that men should be tough, athletic, like sports, like guns, like cars, and have sex with as many women as he possible. These are traits which people assume others to have based on cultural assumptions of what a man is supposed to be, what a woman is supposed to be, what gays, lesbians, transgendered or any other gender group are supposed to be and to behave like.

The other user group Im going to call the meta audience, the audience that will be in on the joke. The actual audience will be my peers, professors, and museum-goers who will be seeing my thesis in a gallery setting. The products and the marketing material will all be addressed to the consumer audience as if it were the only audience. The way it addresses the meta audience is through contextual cues about the project: it's in a gallery setting, and it's just too over-the-top to be real.

Men who dont fit neatly into standard definitions of masculinity are ridiculed and marginalized. Ted Porter referred to it in his TEDWomen talk as the man box. 2 What that means is that a society places requirements on men living in a society with gender inequality. The treatment of women in a patriarchal society has a very observable, immediate negative effects in addition to long term and hard to quantify repercussions, but it also has a harmful effect on the men in that society. Men are required to act as manly as required by their communitys standard or risk derision and even physical violence if they are perceived as too girly. These attitudes are harmful to everyone in such a culture.

Porter, Tony. A Call to Men. Speech, TEDWomen from TED, Washington, December 9, 2010.

2. Domains & Precedents

2.1 Precedents
Originally, the only precedents I had were the silly products and commercials I wanted to make fun of. Early in the project, the focus was primarily on As Seen on TV, Skymall, and Solutions products. The scope then expanded into Ronco and infomercial companies. While looking at these precedents I produced a few early prototypes to get a feel for what I wanted my project to become and what direction I wanted to take it.

These prototypes played on a few reoccurring wants that I saw in many infomercial products: wanting to do things as easily and with as little effort as possible, wanting things cheap, and wanting things for such a specific niche you wonder who the market is supposed to be. The two ideas that got past the daydream stage were the SlamSwitch and Auto-Origami. Of the two only the Auto-Origami got a physical prototype; the SlamSwitch remained nothing but sketches.

After presenting those ideas I had a few more precedents provided by teachers and classmates. These actually helped me decide what I didnt want to do. The first of these precedents was Maywa Denki, which was suggested to me by a classmate after my first presentation. Maywa Denki is an, art unit produced by Nobumichi Tosa. It was named after the company his father used to run bygone days. This art group has a unique style that plays on the idea of commercial art: they wear costumes that look like workers jumpsuits, they call each of their works a product, and their performance are called product demonstrations. 3

The other major precedent I found at this stage of my research was a style of design also from Japan called Chindogu. Chindogu can be considered the art of the unuseless invention. The discipline was started by Kenji Kawakami to create devices that were neither completely useless nor truly practical. One of the interesting things about Chindogu is that it actually has a lot of rules about what can be considered Chindogu and what cant. It doesnt permit any sort of critical aspect and youre not even supposed to make them funny intentionally; they often just become funny because of their impracticality.4 I began to feel less like I wanted to just make wacky inventions of questionable
3 Maywa Denki - Company. Maywa Denki. http://www.maywadenki. com/english/00main_e_content.html (accessed October 23, 2011). 4 Kawakami, Kenji, Dan Papia, and Hugh Whittingstall. The big bento box of unuseless Japanese inventions: the art of chindogu. New York: W.W. Norton,

usefulness. I feel like Chindogu in particular made me less inclined to take that route because of how restrictive it was. Even though I didnt have to follow the rules of Chindogu when making my silly products, it was clear that the reason Chindogu works so well is that it's about more than making a funny product. In Chindogu's case, it uses a set of rules to provide structure for the practice. Around that time I decided I needed something to work around: and idea or concept that I could build on. So I decided to move away from the silly for silliness sake humor and do something that actually lampooned a particular subject or idea.

The next round of precedents included commercial parody skit from Saturday Night Live, MADtv, and Chappelles Show. While watching some of the SNL parodies and taking notes I saw that skit which struck a chord. Chess for Girls was terrible. I dont mean that it wasnt funny, it was very funny but it was also cringe-inducing. It was an almost perfect, warped, reproduction of the kind of TV commercial aimed at girls that I grew up seeing while watching cartoons.

I started looking online for precedents in gender studies and found a great website

called The Society Pages5 I also remembered a show at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum that my teacher mentioned at the start of the semester when discussing curation. The exhibit was called Mechanical Brides and it was put together by Ellen Lupton. The exhibition's book was a great source of general information on the subject of how product design and advertising relates to women and gender.

After that point I switched from looking at precedents to doing more targeted research. The precedents helped inform what I would be doing but at that point it was time to do more detailed research on the subjects to flesh out that idea. I knew what I wanted to create for my thesis but now I needed to support it with some of those fact things.

5 Sharp, Gwen. More Examples of Gendered Products for Kids Sociological Images. The Society Pages. http://thesocietypages.org/socim-ages/2011/05/19/more-examples-of-gendered-products-for-kids

2.2 Gender, Design, Advertising

The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man was a collection of short essays published in a book that could be read in any order. The essays include an advertisement or article at the beginning of each, which is then analyzed for both aesthetics and the implications behind it. A very important term which came from the book was the medium is the message. This means that the way we communicate information often contains its own meaning and that idea is very important to design in general and especially a project like this.

McLuhan was one of the earliest to examine the effects that advertising has on people beyond just convincing them to buy a product. He looked at how we were coerced into buying it. He examined the symbolism in them, the implications these ads had and what they said about our culture. He was more focused on the effect and meaning of ads in general and didn't devote much of it to how advertising specifically affected women.

The message behind products that specifically target men or women is often one that reinforces traditional views on femininity and masculinity. While some have gone beyond this and attempted to promote more freedom in how we choose to identify our genders, that's actually very rare. The messages sent by this advertising often start at a very young age. Pink is for girls and blue is for boys. This is often the earliest gender separation foisted on any of us. It continues well past then though, through every stage of our lives.

You only need to walk into a Toy-R-Us to see that there are very clearly defined boys and girls sections. Well yeah, that's how you know what section to go to if you have a boy or a girl! Any time a comment like this is made a loud you-got-the-question-wrong buzzer needs to go off. The very way the store is setup is sending a message to children and reinforcing it with their parents. What they choose to put in those sections is telling too. The boy's sections often have cars and toy guns, while the girl's sections have ponies, puppies, fashion, makeup, and even cooking and cleaning toys.

To better understand the effect of ads targeting women I needed a source that spoke specifically to the subject. Fortunately enough, exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum Ellen Lupton did called Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office, that ran from August of 1993 to January of 1994 had a book put out. Like the exhibit it was named after McLuhans book and used excerpts of his as well as other experts. The exhibition and its book examined the phenomenon of domestic appliances and office machines being marketed primarily toward women in the 20th century. I wasn't as interested in the office subject because it fell a bit outside what I was doing with this project but the move of women from homes to offices is a very interesting subject in itself. One of the most important concepts to understand when discussing house work is the idea that it was women's work. Wives were traditionally responsible in American culture for housework like cleaning, raising children, and cooking. In the last century, machines devised to assist in this sort of work have been designed and marketed heavily to women. 6 Having these devices aimed at women, which support doing womens work helps to reinforce gender roles in our culture.7

These devices often promised to be timer-savers that would grant women more leisure time. In actuality a rising standard of cleanliness forced women to continue to spend most of their time on chores. Any time these devices actually saved was just diverted to other chores and tasks at home. Of course these tasks all continued to be women's work.8

6 Lupton, Ellen. Mechanical brides: women and machines from home to office. New York: Cooper-Hewitt, National Museum of Design, Smithsonian Institution :, 1993. 7-8 7 Lutpon, Mechanical brides, 12 8 Lupton, Mechanical brides, 15

The introduction of women to the workplace and changes in media portrayal of traditionally female roles have not had as great an impact as we might like to think. A 1978 study concluded that although employed women were spending less time on housework that full-time homemakers, they were still doing the same proportion relative to men....9 A more recent study in 2011 showed that after their jobs many women still came home to a second shift of house work. 30 double earner couples were tracked around their homes by researchers who recorded their locations and activities every 10 min. For women, the most frequently pursued activities at home were housework, communication, and leisure; husbands spent the most time in leisure activities, followed by communication and housework. Spouses differed in their total time at home and their proportion of time devoted to leisure and housework activities, with wives observed more often in housework and husbands observed more often in leisure activities.10

9 Lupton, Mechanical brides, 18 10 Saxbe, Darby E.; Repetti, Rena L.; Graesch, Anthony P. Time spent in housework and leisure: Links with parents' physiological recovery from work.

3. Protoyping & Testing

3.1 Visual Prototyping
Creating collages and photo-mockups of potential products was an important part of this project. I consider it my visual prototyping process and it's both separate from but also informs my physical prototyping and construction. The two projects that I'm going to be physically prototyping started as visual prototypes in the first semester. Though my two main ideas came to me while doing research in the first semester, I needed more products to fill out my catalog and proposed product lines. I couldn't rely on random flashes of inspiration to make these so I needed a process to come up with many at once.

On February 8th I created two word banks in my notebook. One contained as many stereotypically female house chores, roles, and associated products as I could think of at the time. The other contained stereotypically male hobbies, tools, jobs, and accessories. The next day I started combining them freely until I came up with a considerable number of products that sounded promising. What I was looking for were things that sounded humorous, that I could imagine looking funny, and that had a strong contrast with eachother. I also picked product ideas that almost seemed to make sense a strange way. For example one of the products I came up with was a knitting needle that looked like a fishing rod and held the yarn in a reel. Fishing and knitting are incongruous but they both use some sort of string so they have this one point of overlap that gives the product that strange, "I can almost see how this works but it's still really odd," feeling.

I began sharing my ideas with other students and some of my teachers the next few

days. On February 11th I had a peer review with second and first years giving feedback on my project. I used this opportunity to share my new product ideas with people who weren't already familiar with my thesis. The overall response was positive though a few were better received than others. The hot rod vacuum image I'd been using for a few months now actually got the most lukewarm response. I think this is in part because it is the oldest product image I'm still using and doesn't have the same quality as the newer ones. I decided that I would need to either update it soon for other presentations or wait until I had one physically built and use actual photographs.

From February 13th through 16th I worked on Photoshopping the products I'd gotten good feedback on. These included the "Fishing Needles," the "Pickup Crib," the "Hockey Duster," the "Beer Can Baby Bottle," the "Hollow-Point Thimble," and the "Tire Cooking Pan." On Thursday the 16th I presented these images in Thesis Studio and got mixed feedback. There was no issue with the product ideas themselves but it was suggested that I start placing the objects into physical spaces instead of having them floating in a void. Scale was missing from some because of this and the scale of some of the products is important to their presentation. The crib that looks like a pickup truck was one that suffered for this because without anything else around it, it just looked like a full-size truck with a cage-like truck bed. Putting it into a baby's nursery would have improved the presentation of the product and how it was received.

That presentation marked the official end of my visual prototyping for class but I needed to continue developing these images for this paper's final form and advertising material that will supplement the physical products at the show. The process will be similar

to the visual prototyping process but needed to become less about testing the humor of these ideas and more about making ad quality photographs that can be used in the finished product. That entails making more of them, making them higher quality, and showing them being used.

3.2 Physical Prototyping

Before I began building any physical products I wanted to make certain I actually could build them and get an idea for how I might. The two products I initially came up with in the research and visual prototyping phases (Hot Rod Vacuum & Windexter Rifle) are what I decided to produce for display at show.

The Windexter Rifle needed only a few features to function: it had to use a bottle of windex as a tank, it needs to use a pump like a pump-action shotgun to build pressure, it needs to fire when the trigger is pulled, it should fire a burst of liquid and not a stream, it should look as much like a real gun as possible. I decided the easiest way to get the internal components for the gun was to find a squirt gun that already had them in a small enough form factor and transplant them. I got both a pump-action water gun for the parts and a BB gun for the exterior.

After examining the BB gun I realized I probably wouldn't be able to use it as a case for the squirt gun internals because it's exterior and interior were too continuous. Parts of

the frame extended into the gun and most of it was made of metal. The BB gun was too narrow and small for any decent sized squirt gun parts anyway so I set it aside.

Making a convincing looking shotgun wouldn't be too hard to do from scratch with plastic pipes and some power tools. The pipes could be cut to fit the internal parts and external aesthetic pieces. They can be dyed easily to look like the barrels of a gun and the section that the bottle will attach to as well as the pump handle could be made from hollow castings of the BB gun.

I began the construction of the first Windexter Rifle prototype on March 15. I laid out the BB gun on a large sheet of paper and traced its outline. Then I drew the details onto that. I placed the parts on this outline and began to measure all the dimensions. With these dimensions I could start drawing up plans and buy parts to construct it.

The Hot Rod Vacuum is just a vacuum with aesthetic flourishes that make it resemble a car. I had planned to just buy a small canister vacuum and modify its case to look like a car. After thinking about how the sort of process I would use while prototyping would need more than one case to experiment with I decided to go in a different direction: instead of

modifying a vacuum's case I would make a case that looked like a car and transplant the vacuum parts into that.

If I take an existing object like a large toy car and make a mold of it I can cast many copies of it to work with. Doing this means I don't have to worry about accidentally damaging a case that I would have trouble replacing and I can be more adventurous when experimenting on it. Once I know what sort of features I need the case to have I can modify the form of duplicate mold, cast it, and be ready for installation.

I've done some casting before with latex and plaster but not plastics, so over winter break I bought and read a book on the subject. After finishing the book I had a good idea what sort of materials I could try. Because both the object I'm making a mold of and the finished casting need to be hard plastic with possible undercuts, I settled on using silicone rubber to make the mold. On February 18th I bought a small package of silicone mold material from a craft store so I could test and get used to working with it.

I considered the potential problem of needing a part that I couldn't make a copy of or sculpt myself, so I went to the Academic Resource Center at the school to get some information on their 3D printers. The center has two types of 3D printers for different applications. They have a Makerbot printer that prints using ABS plastic which is good because that's a material with some give and I can easily cut or shape it further if I need to. The downside of this printer is that it can print nothing larger than 4 x 4 x 4 inches. The other printer was a ZCorp that prints with a powder that is bound together by the print head. It can print a much larger object of up to 10 x 14 x 8 inches maximum. This material

is very powdery and needs to be treated after printing is completed. The material is very durable after treatment but is heavy and has no flexibility.

If I wanted to use the 3D printers I needed to be able to create my parts as 3D models on the computer first. I've used 3D programs before, but only to create special effects for motion graphics or as graphic elements in designs, never for printing or product design. Fortunately there was a workshop at school that would show how to use the Rhino 3D program with a focus on making models for 3D printing.

On February the 12th I attended the workshop and am confident I can make simple objects in the program for printing. I also met students who would in the coming weeks be working on assembling a Makerbot in the Design + Technology lab for all of us to use. I decided to help them put it together to better understand how the printers worked. It would save me time in the long run too, because once assembled and running I would be able to print without leaving the D+T lab. I would only need the ARC for larger parts or possibly 3D scanning.

The product assembly goes smoothly. The rifle is easiest to assemble as all the working parts are pre-made. The first working prototype uses a clear plastic pipe so that the inner workings can be seen more easily and troubleshoot done with less difficulty. It lacks all the cosmetic polish the final has (no handle for the pump, pieces are held in place

by wire) but it was a useful step in the construction process.

Getting the internal systems working wasn't the hardest part. The wait time to get something made on the laser cutter made it impossible to make the external parts I would need. I decided to make the outer portion of the rifle using an existing form. I found a plastic toy-rifle that made shooting sounds when you pulled the trigger and removed all of it's internal mechanisms and supports except for the trigger assembly. I then placed the pump system into the gutted toy-rifle and re-sized the tubing and a few of the pieces to fit better. A bit of epoxy held the immobile parts where they needed to be and the case was snapped back together, ready for action.

4. Sources
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Duffy, Jonathan. Google calls in the language police. BBC News - Home. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3006486.stm (accessed November 16, 2011).

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Kawakami, Kenji, Dan Papia, and Hugh Whittingstall. The big bento box of unuseless Japanese inventions: the art of chindogu. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.

Levy, Joel. Really useful: the origins of everyday things. Willowdale, Ont.: Firefly Books, 2002

Lupton, Ellen. Mechanical brides: women and machines from home to office. New York: Cooper-Hewitt, National Museum of Design, Smithsonian Institution :, 1993.

Maywa Denki - Company. Maywa Denki. http://www.maywadenki.com/english/00main_e_content.html (accessed October 23, 2011).

McGaffey, Ives. 1860. Improved Sweeping-Machine. United States. 91145, Filed June 8, 1860. Issued Jun 8, 1869.

Porter, Tony. A Call to Men. Speech, TEDWomen from TED, Washington, December 9, 2010.

Saturday Night Live - Chess For Girls - Video - http://www.nbc.com. TV Network for Primetime, Daytime and Late Night Television Shows - NBC Official Site. http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/chess-for-girls/1357683 (accessed September 26, 2011).

Saxbe, Darby E.; Repetti, Rena L.; Graesch, Anthony P. Time spent in housework and leisure: Links with parents' physiological recovery from work. Journal of Family Psychology, Vol 25(2), Apr 2011, 271-281. Database: PsycARTICLES

Spangler, James. 1911. Suction Carpet-Sweeper. United States. 1073301, Filed July 24, 1911. Issued September 16, 1913.

Sharp, Gwen. Mmarketing by Masculizing the Feminine The Society Pages. http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/12/05/marketing-by-masculinizing-thefeminine/(accessed December 7, 2011).

Sharp, Gwen. More Examples of Gendered Products for Kids The Society Pages. http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/05/19/more-examples-of-gendered-productsfor-kids/ (accessed October 26, 2011).

Wohleber , Curt. The Vacuum Cleaner. Invention & Technology Magazine, Spring 2006.