Gendered by Design

Abstract

Using fitness trackers to generate and collect quantifiable data is a widespread practice aimed at better understanding one’s health and body. The intentional design of fitness trackers as genderless or universal is predicated on masculinist design values and assumptions that do not result in “neutral” devices and systems. Instead, ignoring gender in the design of fitness tracking devices marks a dangerous ongoing inattention to the needs, desires, and experiences of women, as well as transgender and gender non-conforming persons. We utilize duoethnography, a methodology emphasizing personal narrative and dialogue, as a tool that promotes feminist reflexivity in the design and study of fitness tracking technologies. Using the Jawbone UP3 as our object of study, we present findings that illustrate the gendered physical and interface design features and discuss how these features reproduce narrow understandings of gender, health, and lived experiences.

Trans Embodiment, Fitness Wearables and the Queer Pleasures of Datafication

“…If we do not take the ‘body’ as a given, however, data’s externalized autonomy from bodies melts into air. (Big) Data – in their effort to count, measure, and monitor bodies – do not so much newly surveill or normalize bodies previously ‘safe’ from dataveillance or naked of technologies as entangle body-minds in yet another citational matrix, another technology of gender (Beauchamp, 2019; Cifor and Garcia, 2019; de Lauretis, 1987; Gieseking, 2018: 152; Sundén, 2015; see also Note 9). While critical discussions of data often cast fragmentation of selves into derivatives that further projects of normalization and control as new, generations of queer, racialized, disabled, and chronically ill people are familiar with redistributions or multiplications of the self that defy Cartesian dualism or binary conceptualizations of private and public, male and female.…”

Care-full data, care-less systems: making sense of self-care technologies for mental health with humanistic practitioners in the United Kingdom

“…The complex realities of mental distress do not lend themselves well to be easily advertised and implemented within an app, for example, potentially leading to an even more prescriptive approach to mental health and a loss of nuance in the process (Bhui and Bhugra, 2002;Carr et al, 2004;Thieme et al, 2016). As a result, SCTs can attempt to capture the richness of someone's everyday (mental) health experience without context, thus "flatten[ing]" someone's health experiences, as expressed by Cifor and Garcia (2020): Those who look after themselves are "good", and those who do not lack self-discipline and show weakness (Lupton, 2013). Such a healthist framing, as coined by Crawford (1980), conceptualizes health as a purely individualistic endeavor, that comes down to exercising the right amount of personal and moral responsibility; without reflecting on the actual reality of health as negotiated, experiential quality.…”

“…As a person-centered value, "genuineness" asks people to be as authentic to their true selves as possible, to bring themselves as they are, into that moment in time (see Section 2.3.1). If we seek to design pluralistic SCTs that approach mental health genuinely as an experiential part of everyday life, it is vital that designers engage with mental health, self-care, and technology as complicated, negotiated, and complex topics; to avoid a "flattened" presentation of mental health, as expressed by Cifor and Garcia (2020). Designers need to confront and reflect on why people turn to SCTs: Therefore, designing them requires a sense-making exercise of how SCTs fit within wider systems of (health)care, technology, and culture.…”