As part of my internship with Adaptive Path, I am writing an essay for the essay section of their website. I’m still formulating what it is I’m writing about, and a colleague recommended I look at design-emotion.com.
The first thing I noticed when viewing the site is a list photos, designers who have been interviewed about design and emotion. All of the designers are men.
Given generalizations of women being more emotional than men, I found this amusing.
Why are they all men? Is it a lack of women in design? A lack of women designers being appreciated? Men being more interested in emotional design than women? The site curator being male?
Comments
5 responses to “Men are more emotional (designers)?”
Hi Jamin!
Wow! I never thought of it that way. Perhaps you have a point when you say that there are perhaps (generally speaking) more men in (leading/ executive positions) in design, that I am male myself (never realized I wasn’t emancipated at all ;-)) , and looking at the reactions I get by email: most of them were sent by men (are men more interested in emotional design?).
Looking forward to reading your essay :)
Hi Jamin. I was trying to track down people who worked on the Honors College website at Pitt (because UMC doesn’t put their employees’ contact info online) and came across your name, so I googled you to see what you’ve been up to since you left and came across this post & wanted to comment.
Since I’m a psychologist, I come at this from a different perspective: individuals’ personalities influence the careers they go into, and there are gender differences when it comes to how personality affects job choice. For example, men who want to be architects are interested in the field primarily because of the design elements/aesthetics in architecture, while women are interested it because of the analytical aspects of building something (figuring out the loads on walls, etc.). Of course, male and female architects are able to do both; it’s just that men and women have different passions within the field.
Extending this idea to web design, is it possible that men are attracted to the field primarily because of the aesthetics of the design (the emotional aspects), while women are attracted to it because they enjoy writing the code (the logical, less emotional aspects)?
David, I was speaking about design in general in its broadest sense, not web design in particular.
That’s an interesting hypothesis, though: men being drawn to design for the emotional aspects.
I never actually considered if men and women were drawn to design for different reasons. Something to ponder.
[…] in context with an essay I’m writing for Adaptive Path (originally I said it would be about emotion, but I changed it). I’m not going to say what my current topic is because I’m not sure. […]
I continued this discussion on Adaptive Path’s blog.