Monday, November 3, 2008

Product and its meanings.

While designers desire to create innovative solutions that would affect the way consumers perceive the existing products. Designers do not have control on the meaning a product could take. In such transitory society the original intent of a product cannot be permanent. However, a product can reflect the moral codes and their enforcing behavior from a specific time in history.

In the two cases observed in class, the history of vibrator and the history of high heels, their meaning changed according to the way gender role was seen on society along history. These two products symbolized in different time submission and empowerment. In these opposite definitions, how much of its original intent is kept? It seems that a product is full of contradictions that one can never predict. Products with a specific target on mind might in many cases make assumptions or stereotype gender. This is shown when they misunderstand their target. For instance, the first home appliances were intended to release woman from the physical labor of housekeeping, giving them more freedom. However, they in some extent ended up imprisoning woman to the role of modern wife. Further, in today’s society is easy to see home appliances crossing gender. The Dyson’s vacuum is an example of a product released with female target in mind that turned out be more popular among male users. The unexpected behavior can be a sign of changing on gender roles.

A self cannot control how a product would be perceived in society even less what “image” it will produce. The body corset first used among aristocracy in the 16th Century was worn to aid woman to fit to a certain body image. Today, corsets still is accepted as means of achieving a body image, but connected to expression of sexuality. In that case, is it a symbol of sexual freedom or submission to an image? It can be interpreted either way according to the users. A product is never objective but exposed to one’s interpretation.

In that sense, a modern concept in the design field is the emotional products. They bring up responses based not on the meaning of a product but from users past experience that they emotionally relate to when they see the objects. By creating products that are somehow asexual, I wonder if it would be easier to keep their original meaning. By not trying to aesthetically fit to one group, the product would free itself from living up to a meaning that can never be fully defined.

Society creates the image, one cannot act independent to a construction of meaning but it’s a collective act. The meaning to a product it is structurally created given the time and circumstances. The product does not have a particular meaning but it can embody different meaning according to social ethics. And, perhaps, that’s the excitement in innovative designs, the unknown.

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