Gendered Interactions

Snapchat

by Snapchat, Inc.

Snapchat is a photo sharing app for Android and iPhone. The images you take can be sent to friends, for whom they are displayed for only the time you allow. Images are not accessible after they've been viewed.

There are 2 main interactions to this app: sending and receiving. Depending on which side you're on dictates certain aspects of the product - it's a medium for communicating, but also a product to consume content created by your friends. I'm marking this one in the middle for the few traits where this create/consume dynamic exists.

From the project page:

Snapchat is a new way to share moments with friends. Snap an ugly selfie or a video, add a caption, and send it to a friend (or maybe a few). They'll receive it, laugh, and then the snap disappears.

The allure of fleeting messages reminds us about the beauty of friendship - we don't need a reason to stay in touch.

6 femme traits 2 butch traits

Vine

by Vine Labs

Vine is an iPhone app that allows the recording of 6 second videos, which can be shared across various social networks.

From the app page:

Vine is the best way to see and share life in motion. Create short, beautiful, looping videos in a simple and fun way for your friends and family to see.

From the project page:

Posts on Vine are about abbreviation — the shortened form of something larger. They're little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life. They're quirky, and we think that's part of what makes them so special.

8 femme traits 2 butch traits

I Wish This Was

by Candy Chang

Inspired by empty store fronts, Candy Chang created stickers to allow local residents of a neighborhood in New Orleans to voice their desire for new services in their community. It began as a part of a gallery exhibit, and now has spread across the world.

From the project page:

I Wish This Was was inspired by vacant storefronts. There are many where Candy lives in New Orleans. There are also many people who need and want things. Who knows a place better than the people who live and work there? We know what businesses and services we need, and we know what would make our neighborhoods more ours. What if we could easily voice what we want, where we want it?

As an experiment, Candy created fill-in-the-blank stickers that say “I wish this was ____.” She placed boxes of free stickers in businesses around the city and posted grids of blank stickers and a permanent marker on vacant storefronts, so anyone walking by could fill one out. The stickers are vinyl and they can be easily removed without damaging property.

9 femme traits 2 butch traits

Moves

by ProtoGeo

Moves is an iPhone app that passively tracks your exercise throughout the day. The timeline based interface emphasizes clarity, and the data display allows you to read your data via values such as time spent, steps walked, distance covered.

From the project page:

Effortless

Moves automatically records any walking, cycling and running you do. The app is always on, so there’s no need to start and stop it. Just keep your phone in your pocket or your bag.

Storyline

Moves is an automatic diary of your life. Your daily storyline and maps show where, when and how much you move.

8 femme traits 2 butch traits

Exit Strategy

by Jonathan and Ashley Wegener

Exit Strategy NYC is a mobile app designed to help you navigate the MTA system. It includes exit information for each stop in the system, so that you can plan where to stand to get to your destination as quickly as possible. It also includes a variety of subway, bus, and neighborhood maps.

TW: I love this app, been using it since it first came out.

3 femme traits 7 butch traits

Sleep Time

by Azumio

Sleep Time is an app for iPhone + Android.

From the project page:

Sleep Time by Azumio is an alarm clock that monitors and analyzes your sleep cycles to wake you up in the lightest sleep phase, allowing you to wake feeling rested and relaxed. Utilizing the iPhones accelerometer, Sleep Time by Azumio, senses your subtle movements throughout the night and graphs your sleep cycles.

Everyone goes through a number of deep sleep and light sleep phases during the night. Depending on the phase you are in when you are woken, you either feel relaxed and rested or tired and irritable. Sleep Time by Azumio monitors your sleep phases and will alert you during a 30- minute window that you define at your lightest sleep cycle ensuring you feel great every morning.

5 femme traits 6 butch traits

Interaction Design Awards 2013

by IXDA

The Interaction Design Awards are a showcase of the discipline of Interaction Design. While looking through projects to post on this site, I found their categories interesting in the way they line up with traits I'm using to describe projects here.

So, I thought I'd categorize their categories. Seems like the awards skew femme, which may just be true of Interaction Design as a whole, but still represents a couple of butch characteristics.

21 Balancoires

by Daily tous les jours

From the project page:

An exercise in musical cooperation.

21 Balançoires is a giant collective instrument, a game where together we achieve better things than separately.

When in motion, each of the 21 swings in the series triggers different notes and, when used all together, the swings compose a musical piece in which certain melodies emerge only through cooperation.

This project won Best in Show at the 2013 IXDA awards. The video above highlights members of the jury discussing some of the ways the IXDA believes that this project best represents interaction design as it stands today. 

11 femme traits 0 butch traits

Paper

by FiftyThree

Paper by FiftyThree is a drawing application for the iPad. Recently, it won Best in Category: Expressing at the IXDA 2013 awards.

From their website:

Paper was designed from the ground up for touch and creating on the go. It keeps you in the flow with no fussy buttons, settings or other distractions. Paper works the way you think, like a familiar notebook or journal. Have all of your ideas with you in one place.'

10 femme traits 1 butch traits

Dark Sky

by The Dark Sky Company

Dark sky is a weather app for iPhone + iPad.

It features up-to-the minute weather information communicated via color-considered radar animations and simple messaging.

Full disclosure: I use this app nearly every day, its so precise [most days]!

3 femme traits 7 butch traits

Elastic Cities And Appocalypse

by Superflux

This concept was delivered to a panel at PICNIC 2010.

From the project description:

Beginning with the vision of a social media ‘Appocalypse’, Anab’s talk contrasted the technologically-intensive contours of Amsterdam with India’s elastic cities, leaving the ‘map-as-territory’ behind, to discover people, faces and stealth services.

Envisaging a hybrid of these two examples, where informal service providers blended into urban data nodes, channelling their entrepreneurial tendencies in messy, organic conditions, Anab ended by posing a future for Amsterdam as an ‘open generative city’, a ‘smart’ city where ‘people are the sensors’, – a city of post-efficient services, where soft infrastructure encouraged creativity, diversity, and exploration.

11 femme traits 0 butch traits

Yellow Chair Stories

by Superflux

Yellow Chair Stories was project created by Anad Jain in 2006, while attending the Royal College of Art.

The work was an experiment in service design which extended Jain’s home wireless network out onto the sidewalk in front of her home. Identifying the access point with a yellow chair, neighbors and passersby were invited to use the network. Over time, Jain began sharing files and beginning a location based network. The project garnered a world-wide response and was emulated in several cities.

From the project page:

Anab Jain explained in an interview with Regine, "The yellow chair project/service attempted to rediscover and invent informal meeting spaces for our evolving Wi-Fi landscape, inspired by the banyan tree and the tea stalls in India, which are active hubs for information exchange and transient encounters."

11 femme traits 0 butch traits

Botanicalls by Rob Faludi, Kate Hartman, and Kati London

Botanicalls gives a voice to our silent everyday companions: house plants. The device, which uses moisture sensors in a plant’s soil to trigger messages sent to its human caretaker over a wireless network, opens up a playful, yet useful, line of communication. The messages are either tweeted or read out by a recorded human voice via telephone, and the plants are polite enough to send both distress calls and notes of thanks. While Botanicalls enables one particular form of inter-species communication, its fresh use of sensor technology could be implemented more broadly.

- Talk to Me catalog description

7 femme traits 2 butch traits

Song of the Machine by Superflux

‘Song of the Machine’ is a short film and installation presented in 2011. The work explores the potential future of optogenetics, which combines genetic engineering + electronics to extend vision in those who may be visually impaired.rnrnThe film exposes ways this technology could be used in a day to day context, enhancing vision and exposing information that is inaccessible to the ‘normally’ sighted.

3 femme traits 6 butch traits

Nudgeables by Kate Hartman + OCAD Social Body Lab

Nudgeables are an evolving set of accessories that allow the wearer to nudge a companion from a short distance away. These devices are inspired by “signals” (scratch of the nose, a cough, “the look”) or backchannel exchanges (text messages sent across a room) that are used for discrete communication in broader social contexts.

10 femme traits 0 butch traits