Representações de masculinidades e feminilidades no design de produtos: um estudo de caso no setor de eletrodomésticos

Abstract

This research has as object of study the development process of industrial products of WX Company, a foreign multinational in the home appliance sector with branches in the south and southeast of Brazil. In this sense, it seeks to highlight the ways in which gender representations and self-representations constitute and affect its organizational and productive structure, specifically, in relation to the division of labor, its design procedures and, consequently, the results of the projects in front of its target audience. The focus on such a company is justified by its appliance development process: it targets, its products, primarily, to the female audience; aligns with a design perspective that supposedly centers its practices on the characteristics and needs of its users; has consolidated marketing, design and engineering sectors understood as fundamental for the creation of its products; has a serial production process with a large scale of production and distribution; has an organizational structure composed of sectors and specialized and hierarchical areas. In this context, my analysis turns to the working relationships and design procedures of the marketing, design and engineering sectors, responsible, respectively, for market research related to the target audience, design, project management and production of home appliances. I adhere to an interdisciplinary perspective, establishing a dialogue with the Social Studies of Science and Technology, Gender Studies and Cultural Studies, aiming to characterize the organizational and productive structure of the WX Company, as well as its design procedures, as gender technologies that constitute and are made up of gender stereotypes fundamentally implicated in the directions and results of their projects. I characterize this research as a case study affiliated to the principles and procedures of oral history. Thus, I privilege the performance of narrative interviews for data collection. As a result, I try to highlight the sociotechnical nature of the construction of the genre, providing a critical reflection on the historicity of design practices and, therefore, on their potential for maintenance, updating, but also sociocultural transformation.