How do you understand the user’s agency (society, activity)? Through user groups and personas developed by research and interviewing. Personas are very important in the process of developing a design. Understanding the user group is just another layer in properly designing a product. Other things to consider may be cultural norms and statistics (numbers and charts). There is also the process of interviewing that should be considered. The process of figuring out what information you need is difficult but an essential step in understanding the user group and their needs and tendencies.
What extent does the designer have to be able to “design” meaning into a product and determine a user’s behavior? Through the example of the vibrator there was no meaning attached, other than that which was for curing medical hysteria in women. Society took the appliance and skewed it to have a different meaning. Does the designer have the responsibility to prevent that sort of manipulation of context? Depends on the designer and depends on the product. If the designer is all gung-ho about curing peoples with medical hysteria then that’s great for that time period. There are new discoveries and redefinitions of millions of things. The designer is not responsible for the evolving of the meaning of the product.
How do products get meaning? Products can get meaning through different means; through promotion, a slogan, marketing, or the design. I remember when everyone wore rubber bracelets. Pink represented the fight against breast cancer. White for the Global Call to Action Against Poverty. Yellow for Live Strong the fight against cancer. For the designer of the rubber bracelet I doubt that it was considered what would be represented but I do think that there was a clear intention of having the ability to accommodate a variety of meanings.
How can it be said that the designer controls or designs meaning onto a product? The designer was able to predetermine the ability to accommodate and transform meaning into this particular product. There was defiantly an investigation of the user group that they were targeting. The need for a visual statement was what was needed and society declared the actual meaning of the statement; the product just lent itself to be able to hold statements.
I think an artist can decide to design an object that could fall in the path of the cultural norm. This could create a fork in the road and split or branch off into a meaning attached to an object. Sales kicked up with William H. Hoover’s ten day free home trial, and eventually there were Hoover vacuum’s in nearly every middle class home. With the invention of the portable vacuum in 1907 by James Murray Spangler, the vacuum became a symbol representing housewives. Did the inventor of the vacuum invent it to be the symbol of housewives everywhere? I don’t think so, but later the designer of the vacuum must have taken that into account?
Now there is the Dyson vacuum that represents technological advancement and a design that would attract the technologically savvy male user group. This has opened up another channel in the design of home appliances. Could changing labels of society attribute to the development and acceptance of the product? Perhaps this is not the first appliance that was made to target a totally different user group. Now the Dyson is a symbol of sophisticated technology that anybody with a contemporary mind and style could own and use.
Does the designer have the power to effect or control how a person can or cannot act? Yes, in how the person can interact within the limitations of the product.
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