Sexy & sexist: Winnipeg takes design outside for the next 12-14 weeks.

Summer. Coveted, glorious, all-too-short-in-Manitoba summer.

Finally permitted by the elements to leave our homes, Winnipeg’s design community turns to that most earthy, dirty-hands milieu: landscape design. Also known as gardening.

Hitting Shelmerdine’s on May long is a gardening tradition, and I thought you’d like to see the level of hot design finds they’re stocking, including modern garden pieces by accessory gods Abbott and Torre & Taegus.

I was amused by the message inside the $250+ Pure by Elho planters, suggesting that while women may not be able to afford their premium price wares, surely their husbands could (Text: “She said I love this—He really adored her).

We’ve been seeing this message in retail since the days of Wilma & Betty brandishing their husbands credit cards & yelling “charge it!”, but I didn’t expect it imprinted in fibreglass in the year 2011. I have a job, Pure, and can afford my own damn gardenware. Nice design feature, though, and lovely typography ಠ_ಠ

Cool technology for girls, pervs.

We discovered Video Girl Barbie while Xmas shopping, and she hit CNN this morning. The FBI is concerned about the idea of videocameras in little girl’s bedrooms.

I can see why kids and cameras are not really a comfortable fit, but I was more

• impressed that a piece of technology was geared at girls becoming content creators
• happy to see video editing software as part of the package—a great opportunity for girls to experience learning interfaces, crafting ideas, storytelling, and using new hardware
• interested in the idea that digital natives are growing up with video as a normal part of their lives—making it, performing in it, and (of more ambiguous effect) instilling the notion of having “a public” from a young age
• excited that media literacy and communication skills are becoming fundamental in play.

With Zappos upping the bar for video in job applications, these are skills I’m happy to see normalized for girls.

And hey, I’ll be speaking at Girls in Gaming at Sisler High School next week about being a digital artist and giving the girls some feedback on their work I’ll see what they think of Barbie.

Hatsune Miku: the #singularity doesn’t bode well for actual women.

I blog because, basically, I’m an ambulance chaser for the #singularity. Technologically driven global culture has emerged just in time to ignite the biggest crucible of social upheaval since, you know, ever. And I can’t wait to see what happens.

Train wreck? Transcendent transformation into immortal, mostly-machine superbeings? Or just anxious, multitasking, marketing-soaked, rapidly evolving humans whose bodies rebel against “knowledge work” by seizing up with carpal tunnel (hopefully on camera)?

Posthuman forms like the effervescent, holographic Hatsune Miku—a vocaloid (vocal+android) who just happens to be a giant Japanese pop star—are starting to join us regular folks, at least at sold-out arenas. Prepare yourself for a glimpse of the future. The crowd & backup band at this performance are totally biological; the star of the show, not at all.

On the same day CBC’s Q featured the gravity-defying Miku, this video from Sociological Images began making the rounds. Warning, the part about the pillows is gross.

Is this, you know, the direction we want to go with humanity?

If we set the bar for female roles at “impossible exaggeration”, like “we” did in fashion and porn, we alienate real women.

al·ien·ate

/ˈeɪlyəˌneɪt, ˈeɪliə-/ –verb (used with object)
1.to make indifferent or hostile.
2. to turn away.

If that doesn’t sound like a problem to you…insert snark here. Q’s Jian Ghomeshi attempted to broach this subject with interviewee and futurist blogger Aaron Saenz, but Aaron only considered the sinister aspect of fabricated women from a “Will this result in a pop star work shortage?” perspective.

Had Miku been designed as a realistic woman, like Britney Spears*, she would no doubt still be an unattainable ideal for lots of girls, but infantilized anime schoolchildren are especially dismaying as a role model.

Miku is getting bona fide media coverage and playing festivals. But I’m not seeing a lot of comment-thread critique—and don’t get me wrong**, I have no qualms about humans interfacing with, being moved by, or paying good money to see an avatar (movies are digital representations of people too. It’s ok). It’s the kind of media idols we make that we need to think about.

The most important thing to ask about any technology is how it changes people…Different media designs stimulate different potentials in human nature. (Technology) can change how you conceive of yourself and the world.

(Lanier, 2010: 5, 6, 36)

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Crypton Future Media, Miku’s virtual dad/pimp, says she’s 16 years old and 92 pounds. Discuss.

Facebook’s forbidden feminist fruit.

Facebook has an advertising policy that I respect: don’t use pictures of hot women to sell your product, unless your product is hot women.

It decreases the sleaze factor of advertising while serving the audience by making ad graphics more relevant, and thus less painful (in the time-wasting sense) to click.

I have sort of an augmented reality vision now, where I see social media as a layer overtop of everything, even snacks.

Social Butterflies: Sacha Chua on women in social media

Last in a series of interviews with female Canadian social media stars! The premise, which you can read about here, investigates how women act towards each other in the quest to be head social butterfly.

Sacha Chua is a Torontonian technology-loving girl geek, by which I mean she’s an application developer at IBM, for Pete’s sake. She’s also an Enterprise 2.0 consultant, helping people understand and use online collaboration tools.

I tend to not think about gender much.

I almost reflexively check the gender balance at conferences (still pretty bad, but better than it was before, although there’s still a lack of women speakers), but I don’t consider gender when I’m helping people or linking to them, and I’ve never intentionally “held people down”.

No point in making things an ego contest. Life is more fun when you share!

Social Butterflies: Tara Hunt on women in social media

Next in a series of interviews with female Canadian social media stars! The premise, which you can read about here, investigates how women act towards each other in the quest to be head social butterfly.

Tara Hunt is a genuine Canadian social media superstar (& there is reason to believe she may have once lived, however briefly, in Winnipeg Brandon). Author of The Whuffie Factor, Tara’s actually one of the most freaking influence women in technology. Here’s a Slideshare on her contribution to social media theory, the idea of Whuffie, first postulated by another Canadian futurist superstar, Cory Doctorow.

Social Butterflies: Adele McAlear on women in social media

Next in a series of interviews with female Canadian social media stars! The premise, which you can read about here, investigates how women act towards each other in the quest to be head social butterfly.

Today we welcome Adele McAlear, a Montreal marketer who’s feminist street cred includes being the founding Executive Director of the Vancouver chapter of DigitalEve International, a non-profit organization for women in technology. She also contributes to Technically Women.

In almost 3 years of working in social media, I’ve had overwhelmingly good experiences with women being supportive and helping each other to get ahead. There have been one or two instances that were a little less than pleasant, but I’m willing to chalk those up to people just having a bad day. (Or perhaps I don’t want to bring down the whole gender for the rare instance where all was not smooth.)

For myself, I will help people, regardless of gender, whom I believe are genuine and who treat me with respect. I won’t  go out of my way to help people when I’m made to feel like I’m simply a stepping stone to get someone else. You know, the people who look through you to the next person up the food chain as they stare blankly with a false smile. But, I’ve had that feeling from both men and women, so I don’t think that it’s gender-specific.

I’ve found fewer instances of the “Old Boys” club in social media, but it’s still alive and kicking. I was trying to think of why more people of both genders follow men and I think it comes down to men being perceived as more influential in business. Like the concepts of fame begetting fame; of men making more money than women for the same job, of why women pay more at the dry cleaners.

That said, I have some great cheerleaders who are men. And I have some who are women. I think that my experiences in social media are really just a reflection of society at large.