Inscribing Gender: A Duoethnographic Examination of Gendered Values and Practices in Fitness Tracker 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 and does not result in "neutral" artifacts. Instead,\ ignoring gender in the design of fitness tracking devices marks a dangerous ongoing inattention to the needs, desires, lives, and life chances of women, as well as transgender and gender nonconforming 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.

Materiality Matters in Computing Education: A Duoethnography of Two Digital Logic Educators

“…[59,75,81]), gender studies, and critical ethnic studies [33]; and has since grown in use in HCI research (for a review see [33]), allowing for generative views of sociotechnical systems and exposition of "the ways that contexts connect and even conflict" [41]. For examples, see [22,23,41,88].…”

Move, eat, sleep, repeat: Living by rhythm with proactive self-tracking technologies

“…Collaborative autoethnography is a qualitative research method that is simultaneously collaborative, autobiographical, and ethnographic (Chang et al, 2012). It relates closely to similar research practices such as duoethnography (e.g., Breault, 2016;Cifor & Garcia, 2019;Lund & Nabavi, 2008;Norris & Sawyer, 2012), collective autoethnography (Cann & DeMeulenaere, 2010), and co/autoethnography (Coia & Taylor, 2009). The common feature of all these approaches is that two or more people interrogate their own experiences and meaning-making practices together in an iterative mode in order to gain insight into a chosen topic or phenomenon.…”

“…After all, understanding and navigating the sociomaterial context of life is always a collaborative process. Cifor and Garcia (2019) have applied this method in their feminist study on activity trackers' unintended consequences. In contrast to most collaborative autoethnographic studies, and in line with Cifor and Garcia, we have not selected the self or identity categories as the primary site of research.…”

“…Common consumer-grade self-tracking gadgets track, for example, steps, heart rate, calorie consumption, and various biomarkers related to the quality of one's sleep (Lupton, 2016b;Schüll, 2016a). The popularity and growth of the self-tracking industry has been interpreted as a reflection of a "measuring mania", in which knowledge of one's body and health "is produced through seemingly objective, universal, and quantifiable representations" (Cifor & Garcia, 2019: 2132.…”

Electronic Design for Wearables Devices Addressed from a Gender Perspective: Cross-Influences and a Methodological Proposal

“…This problem does not only apply to the design of electronic devices, but sometimes tends to be invisible in science and technology, considered objective and neutral areas. Usually, when a device is designed as genderless, it promotes the masculinist ideal, forgetting about gendered issues and concerns [ 6 ]. Self-reflection and feminism are needed to improve science.…”