Origins: The Male Gaze

Have you heard of the term ‘ The Male gaze’? If you have interest in art, culture, feminism, and photography, it’s likely that you have.

It first appeared in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, and soon became popular in feminist theory.

At its core, lies power: Men are represented with the power that they hold over their surroundings — the things that they can do to the people, pages and objects around them. Women are represented as objects, with respect to what can be done to them.

It leads to the prevailing depiction of the world from a masculine, heterosexual perspective (both the creator & the viewer). It’s criticised because it minimises the viewpoints and voices of diverse creators, and portrays women as sexual objects for the pleasure of heterosexual male audiences, and perpetuates the imbalance of power.

The Tourist’s Gaze

Similarly, Photographer Vamika jain in her project ‘I travel, therefore I am’ mentions the ‘Tourist’s Gaze’ — how tourists have an image of a particular place (aka tourist destination), probably from seeing photographs of other travellers. The tourists seek to recreate the same images, and perpetuate the cycle of aspiration-consumption-validation, all the while turning a place (where actual humans live, work, and seek growth) into a commodity, which exists solely for the consumption of the tourist. In this way — the tourist, often a major source of income for the place, wields power over the place and its people.

The Designer’s gaze

Lately I’ve been thinking about how designers also have a ‘gaze’ — a power they wield over ‘users’- the people being designed for. We do this in more than one way — by creating ‘others’, by being unaffected by our designs, and most importantly, by being in creation mode by default.

From our first encounter with the design process, we’re taught to observe with the intention to identify ‘problems’ that can be solved. This is the beginning of the designers gaze — looking at the world around us not with the intention to understand, but with the intention to solve.

Let’s even look at user research, the empathy-generating essential aspect of the design process. And as a UX researcher, I’m guilty of this myself, a hundred times over. Design research artefacts, like personas and research reports, in the name of generating empathy for the users, actually contribute to the ‘otherisation’ of the people being designed for. Consider the term ‘user’ itself — what empathy does it generate by distilling the context of a human being? We use the phrase ‘you are not your user’ and ‘the user behaviour is….’ and create ‘personas’ as if the user is some strange creature that is nothing like you — the designer.

Nearly always, the ‘opportunities’ identified are solved additively — via the creation of a new physical or digital product. Designers who are always coming up with new products are lauded for their creativity and productivity, but as a community, we fail to see beyond the first and second order consequences of our designs.

Thinking systemically, we know that most of our current problems are caused by the solutions we created for the problems we previously had.

Some very simplistic examples:

• Climate change is largely a result of the industrialisation & overconsumption of resources and overproduction of goods — which initially solved the inability to produce things quickly, inefficiently and for everyone.
• Food delivery apps make it easier for people to access food at any point of day — and mostly it is fast food, fried food etc — which give way to unhealthy lifestyles (eating junk at odd times).
• Easily available consumer goods in single-use plastic packaging leading to mountains of garbage in cities.
• Craftspeople being incentivised to sell more goods cheaply, leading to an overall reduction in quality of the goods, and a lack of incentive to push boundaries and create great pieces.

Thus, designers, more than other people, need to step back and understand the consequences of adding a new product to the ecosystem it will exist in. To visualise and speculate how the world will change in response to it. Designers don’t always have skin in the game, so most adverse effects of their own creations don’t really reach them. This makes it easier to become careless about what we’re making, and to take risks where things can go either way.

A design affects more than just the original problem — it affects the way people think and behave in the world. And as much as we may debate on the nuances of things, like the ability & need for exercising self-control, that people have agency in their lives, etc, etc. The truth remains:

the unintended consequences of our designs also have the same effect on the world as the intended consequences.

Maybe we all got into the design field because we loved it too much. Maybe we’re wired a certain way and can’t stop finding problems to solve. Maybe its all in good spirit because we love the world and its people. But maybe the solution isn’t always creating something new and contributing to the clutter. Maybe we need to stop creating and start eliminating. Maybe.

Do you share my thoughts about this? Do you disagree? Let’s start a conversation about this in the comments below — I’m looking forward to hearing from you :)