WorkShop 3

Thinking about Sex

Dan Formosa.

Presenters:
Dan Formosa - Smart Design, New , New York, USA
Agnete Enga - Smart Design, New , New York, USA
Erica Eden - Smart Design, New , New York, USA

Daniel Formosa, Ph.D. is a founder of Smart Design. He has developed innovative approaches to understand people and the power of design, stemming from an interest in both physical and perceptual issues. Dan has received numerous design awards and his work has been selected for national and international exhibits.

weblinks:
www.smartdesignworldwide.com

This workshop combines two inter-related areas of critical importance to design in the 2000’s – emotion and sex. Since their inception the fields of product design and engineering have evolved from a predominately male point of view. The processes and thought patterns that have been put in place, and constitute much of our working behavior, are essentially male oriented. Yet we all agree that women think differently. It’s little wonder that entire product categories in the 2000’s fail to connect with women. Consumer electronics stands as a good example, with most consumer electronics stores exhibiting an overwhelming overload of testosterone that can make females avoid them like a disease. Yet females are either responsible for purchasing or influencing the purchase of 80% of products sold.

Since the 1980s Smart Design has been incorporating quantitative methods, adapted from the field of cognitive psychology, to uncover design’s influence on perception and emotion. In a system we term Emotional Mapping, we uncover how perceptional and emotional reactions are elicited by various design elements. We also examine how perceptions and emotional responses differ according to factors such as age, geographic location — and sex.

In this workshop we will combine two areas of expertise within Smart Design, Emotional Mapping and The Femme Den — a movement to change the way we approach design, from the inside out, to accommodate the needs and desires of females and males. Our goal will be to create awareness of these basic differences, and to rethink individual methods of design to better address them.

Importantly, we’ll conduct the workshop in a way that’s allows for quite a lot of interaction, allowing participants to meet and work with designers and other attendees from various fields, while we all, as a group, think about sex.