The World Not Designed for Women That Could Be

If you hadn’t noticed, the world around you isn’t designed for women. Even if you had noticed like I have, I bet you hadn’t noticed it to the extent Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, does. Man, it’s shocking!

Despite how incredible the bias is, it’s nothing compared to the ignorance and unwillingness to change it, like with car seat dummies in crash testing. They use a scaled down 50 percentile male and puts it in the passenger seat! That’s where they even try rather than just stick to the 50 percentile male. What? Women don’t drive? Or maybe aren’t stupid so they couldn’t make a dummy of one to be fair, or risk being offensive in doing so? Yes, that must be the reason [sarcasm, if you can’t detect it].

So many more eye opening examples are in the 99 Percent Invisible podcast below, including some really obscure ones you’d have trouble grasping, like how snow plowing patterns are designed for male driving. But still not enough for me as I’m going to have to get the book to learn more, being a designer of many things myself. I’m sure I’ve designed numerous things unknowingly biased towards me, but I’ve also learned to correct my ways such as giving women pockets in some garments I have designed for them… and equal sized pockets to men at that rather than ones 40% smaller that the fashion industry gives them!

A REVOLUTIONARY Bike Design!

Just watch the videos below. The design is nothing short of revolutionary, and not just for looks or function, but effectiveness and efficiency! I haven’t seen as good a combination of beautiful design and amazing effectiveness in a long, long time!

The video is about 6 months old at the time of this posting, but my avid cycling friends haven’t even seen this so it’s missing some key audiences, obviously!

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How to Design Visually Appealing AI Robots to People

There are enough artificial intelligence (AI) robots being designed these days that within a few years, you’ll probably not be far from one at many times in your lives, especially if you live in a city. Some of these robots elicit a positive reaction from people. Others, not so much. Some of this is due to what they do, but a lot of it is due to what they look like. Yes, we’re humans. We judge a lot of things, or form a lot of our judgement of things, including people, unfortunately, by their looks. We also seem to feel threatened in getting replaced by robots if they were too much like us. So what can one do to create a more visually appealing robot? Here are some thoughts.

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Modern Tennis Racquets Painted Like Wood?

I play tennis and I had a thought this morning. Modern racquets are a nice glimpse of successes of material science. Everything from the strings to frame to grip. They’re also painted to look advanced and “cool” as well. But there’s plenty of it out there, and a lot border on ghastliness!

Why doesn’t someone make a modern racquet and paint it as if it were wooden?

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