What do you think?
Rate this book
Defined by Design: The Surprising Power of Hidden Gender, Age, and Body Bias in Everyday Products and Places
This wide-ranging overview of design in everyday life demonstrates how design shapes our lives in ways most of us would never imagine. The author, a leading expert in social and psychological issues in design, uncovers the gender, age, and body biases inherent in the designs of common products and living spaces that we all routinely use. From the schools our children attend and the buildings we work in to ill-fitting clothes and one-size-fits-all seating in public transportation, restaurants, and movie theaters, we are surrounded by an artificial environment that can affect our comfort, our self-image, and even our health.Anthony points out the flaws and disadvantages of certain fashions, children's toys, high-tech gadgets, packaging, public transportation, public restrooms, neighborhood layouts, classrooms, workplaces, hospitals, and more. In an increasingly diverse populace where many body types, age groups, and cultures interact, she argues that it's time our environments caught up. This fascinating book--full of aha moments--will teach readers to recognize the hidden biases in certain products and places and to work for more intelligent and healthy design in all areas of life.
320 pages, Paperback
Published March 14, 2017
19 people are currently reading
166 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 9, 2018
I was really excited when I saw this book, so much so that I stopped reading other things to get onto this. In part this is because this is what I wrote my PhD thesis on, well, sort of. In my thesis I looked at how school marketing materials from schools with a large proportion of boys, or kids from language backgrounds other than English or representing different socioeconomic groups had systematically different advertising strategies depending on the stereotypes we hold for these populations. Basically, the less female you are and the less white you are the more you are felt to be in need of externally imposed discipline. This was evident both in the text used in these materials and in the images the schools chose. So that, as a case in point, if more than about 55% of the kids at the school were boys, you never saw images of large groups of boys other than on the sport’s field, and the majority of images in these marketing materials would be of girls, and the images of boys in classrooms would tend to involve them sitting and working beside a girl – that is, the boy would be working, often furiously, even while the girl would be smiling at the camera. The message was relatively clear, the schools wanted to attract more girls, so their marketing materials needed to show that the boys had been constrained and pacified (docile, in its original meaning of being ‘ready to learn’). The images showed that girls would be welcomed and empowered, that order would be maintained, that girls would have other girls to engage with. Interestingly, the closer the gender balance in a school the more likely it also was that non-white, non-Asian kids would be shown in the marketing materials. My thesis quickly became a case study in intersectionality – the interplay of racial, gendered and classed stereotypes – and all of this became quite depressingly predictable very quickly.
This is what I was expecting this book to be about, except I thought it would be looking more broadly at society. After all, the title of the book would imply that is exactly what this would be about. However, this isn’t what the book is about – this is more a couple of occupational health and safety issues the author has noticed along the way that are clearly concerning, but in talking about these she barely considers any of the sociological reasons why these might exist or how such problems go to condition people into stereotypical gendered, ethnic, disabled (and so on) roles.
Now, I’m a bit obsessed with this stuff. I think how we define ‘normal’ goes a long way to oppress people who are not able to fit that mould – often in ways that literally shorten the lives of these ‘non-normal’ people. I also think it is rather clear that ‘normal’ doesn’t always equate to ‘average’. Women ought to know this better than anyone. As the author says, the ‘average’ woman in the US has a dress size of 14 (that is, half of all women have a dress size 14 or above) but you would hardly know that from clothing shops. You might think that capitalism, being what it is, would produce more clothes to fit the average woman, as a particularly good way to increase sales, but this does not seem to be the way things work in practice. That is, in practice the ideal woman trumps the average woman every time even when this effectively shames the majority of the population. I don’t believe this shaming is accidental, by the way – capitalism works by making those who purchase things dissatisfied with themselves. How better to achieve this than to create an impossible ‘ideal’ that only a tiny proportion of the population can ever live up to? The idea that the that average woman needs to find a place at the back of the store where clothes that fit her are kept plays interesting games with self-esteem and desire – two notions central to marketing.
The sections within the chapters here start with a quote from a random person, presumably felt by the author to be apposite to the discussion that is about to follow. For instance, the section on high heels starts:
“I don't understand why women have to wear heels. I feel that it's targeted for the opposite gender. Otherwise why wouldn't men wear high heels? It gives stature, but after three hours on my feet, I am ready to die.” (Female, Pacific Islander, age 32, 5´5˝, 135 lb.)”
There has been so much written about why women wear high heels – most of it involving the ‘disabling’ of them to the point where they can barely walk, never mind run away, as symbolic of attraction via disabling. As such, women wearing heels present a visual and physical disempowering of themselves in a society that enculturates women to be ‘in need of protection’ from when they were very young girls. What denotes ‘weaker sex’ better than being barely able to walk? That this is considered sexy – presumably by men and women – says much about how bizarre our society continues to be in relation to gendered stereotypes. That there are rewards for being in need of protection is also undeniable. That none of this is said in this book – but rather that we are treated to a long list of the proportions of women who end up in hospitals from falling while wearing these shoes or twisting ankles or damaging backs – I don’t know, it just all seems to miss the point. That is, like telling someone smoking is bad for them is never going to stop them smoking, particularly if you don’t consider what drew them to smoke in the first place.
The bit that was good about this book was the last chapter – which you could get away with just reading on its own and skipping the rest of the book. To be honest, unless you really do want to know about the exact proportions of children injured by falling from bunk-beds and which bits of them gets hurt, or the dangers of using a snow blower, or why packaging is particularly dangerous – most of what you are really likely to learn from this book is in the ‘call to action’ that is the last chapter. Amusingly enough, she even mentions Henri Lefebvre right at the end of this – although, I can’t help feeling that a bit more use of his ideas throughout the book would have been really worthwhile and made this book worthy of its title.
I’m going to end this with a couple of things I would have put into this book if I’d have been writing it – Things I’ve used in my teaching about how we are conditioned into being certain types of people and then made ‘normal’ by the environments we find ourselves in. So…
Get over cute – don’t allow the world to infantilise you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-aT...
How lines of flight are captured, even when we imagine we are too cool to be judged by standard criteria – this poem is used as the title of a book by bell hooks I can’t recommend too highly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaVfL...
How half of us are conditioned to be female and the violence this both perpetuates and justifies – Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising’s Image of Women. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnAY6...
How normalising male voices and actors starts in early childhood in picture books. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-22...
Shirley cards and the naturalising of white skin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d16LN...
Who would you trust to tell you how to cook a cake? The story of the 32 year old Betty Crocker and the use of olive skin so she could ‘match a wide range of ethnicities’. http://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-k...
How we follow gendered signs even when we can see they are meaningless https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a71h6...
The benefits of being white and female if you are going to steal a bike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge7i6...
Probably as good a discussion of how social class works to structure our experience of the world is told by Sennett in his Hidden Injuries of Class https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
One of the texts I used to structure my thesis was Jean Anyon’s work on the hidden curriculum at school. This link is to a short version of one of her papers on this looking at how five schools representing four social classes in the US supposed to be providing the same curriculum differed http://www1.udel.edu/educ/whitson/897...
And finally – the McCandless square or circle on the door trick or The things you didn’t even know were gendered. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
This is what I was expecting this book to be about, except I thought it would be looking more broadly at society. After all, the title of the book would imply that is exactly what this would be about. However, this isn’t what the book is about – this is more a couple of occupational health and safety issues the author has noticed along the way that are clearly concerning, but in talking about these she barely considers any of the sociological reasons why these might exist or how such problems go to condition people into stereotypical gendered, ethnic, disabled (and so on) roles.
Now, I’m a bit obsessed with this stuff. I think how we define ‘normal’ goes a long way to oppress people who are not able to fit that mould – often in ways that literally shorten the lives of these ‘non-normal’ people. I also think it is rather clear that ‘normal’ doesn’t always equate to ‘average’. Women ought to know this better than anyone. As the author says, the ‘average’ woman in the US has a dress size of 14 (that is, half of all women have a dress size 14 or above) but you would hardly know that from clothing shops. You might think that capitalism, being what it is, would produce more clothes to fit the average woman, as a particularly good way to increase sales, but this does not seem to be the way things work in practice. That is, in practice the ideal woman trumps the average woman every time even when this effectively shames the majority of the population. I don’t believe this shaming is accidental, by the way – capitalism works by making those who purchase things dissatisfied with themselves. How better to achieve this than to create an impossible ‘ideal’ that only a tiny proportion of the population can ever live up to? The idea that the that average woman needs to find a place at the back of the store where clothes that fit her are kept plays interesting games with self-esteem and desire – two notions central to marketing.
The sections within the chapters here start with a quote from a random person, presumably felt by the author to be apposite to the discussion that is about to follow. For instance, the section on high heels starts:
“I don't understand why women have to wear heels. I feel that it's targeted for the opposite gender. Otherwise why wouldn't men wear high heels? It gives stature, but after three hours on my feet, I am ready to die.” (Female, Pacific Islander, age 32, 5´5˝, 135 lb.)”
There has been so much written about why women wear high heels – most of it involving the ‘disabling’ of them to the point where they can barely walk, never mind run away, as symbolic of attraction via disabling. As such, women wearing heels present a visual and physical disempowering of themselves in a society that enculturates women to be ‘in need of protection’ from when they were very young girls. What denotes ‘weaker sex’ better than being barely able to walk? That this is considered sexy – presumably by men and women – says much about how bizarre our society continues to be in relation to gendered stereotypes. That there are rewards for being in need of protection is also undeniable. That none of this is said in this book – but rather that we are treated to a long list of the proportions of women who end up in hospitals from falling while wearing these shoes or twisting ankles or damaging backs – I don’t know, it just all seems to miss the point. That is, like telling someone smoking is bad for them is never going to stop them smoking, particularly if you don’t consider what drew them to smoke in the first place.
The bit that was good about this book was the last chapter – which you could get away with just reading on its own and skipping the rest of the book. To be honest, unless you really do want to know about the exact proportions of children injured by falling from bunk-beds and which bits of them gets hurt, or the dangers of using a snow blower, or why packaging is particularly dangerous – most of what you are really likely to learn from this book is in the ‘call to action’ that is the last chapter. Amusingly enough, she even mentions Henri Lefebvre right at the end of this – although, I can’t help feeling that a bit more use of his ideas throughout the book would have been really worthwhile and made this book worthy of its title.
I’m going to end this with a couple of things I would have put into this book if I’d have been writing it – Things I’ve used in my teaching about how we are conditioned into being certain types of people and then made ‘normal’ by the environments we find ourselves in. So…
Get over cute – don’t allow the world to infantilise you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-aT...
How lines of flight are captured, even when we imagine we are too cool to be judged by standard criteria – this poem is used as the title of a book by bell hooks I can’t recommend too highly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaVfL...
How half of us are conditioned to be female and the violence this both perpetuates and justifies – Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising’s Image of Women. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnAY6...
How normalising male voices and actors starts in early childhood in picture books. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-22...
Shirley cards and the naturalising of white skin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d16LN...
Who would you trust to tell you how to cook a cake? The story of the 32 year old Betty Crocker and the use of olive skin so she could ‘match a wide range of ethnicities’. http://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-k...
How we follow gendered signs even when we can see they are meaningless https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a71h6...
The benefits of being white and female if you are going to steal a bike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge7i6...
Probably as good a discussion of how social class works to structure our experience of the world is told by Sennett in his Hidden Injuries of Class https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
One of the texts I used to structure my thesis was Jean Anyon’s work on the hidden curriculum at school. This link is to a short version of one of her papers on this looking at how five schools representing four social classes in the US supposed to be providing the same curriculum differed http://www1.udel.edu/educ/whitson/897...
And finally – the McCandless square or circle on the door trick or The things you didn’t even know were gendered. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
put-aside
January 14, 2018An interesting list of design flaws that persist because they affect only one gender, the old or the young, or those with a certain body type. It's good but I was hoping for more synthesis or analysis of examples, and the lack of an overarching framework makes it easy to put down. Stopping at 17% for now.
August 9, 2018
Clothing - pockets or no? My pet peeve has very little page space in this book, but it -is- pretty close to the beginning.
Not such a news flash: The world is easier for right-handed people than for lefties. The world is easier for middle-sized people than for very tall or very short people. The line for bathrooms is a lot longer for women than for men. Elderly people can't always open 'baby-proof' items, and sometimes can't open every-day items, being stuck without until someone comes to help them out.
Cars - everyone knows that women have pocketbooks, where are we supposed to put them while driving? And high heels make it hard to control the pedals - and if the heels jam, zap there's a car accident.
Hard plastic clam-shells send people to the hospital when the knife cuts the person instead of opening the plastic package.
OK, the real news flash: 'bathroom lines for women' is not the only problem - sometimes the bathroom is further away. When men and women at a presidential debate have a 3 minute bathroom break, the men are back at the podium while the woman is still running along the corridors. "hahahah woman loses debate bec of the potty break" is not actually funny.
When the men's bathroom had a 15 minute wait & the women's bathroom had a 15 minute wait, the men were shocked and surprised and complained and got some of the women's bathrooms converted to men's bathrooms... for a resulting 5-10 & 25-30 min wait, respectively. Oh, that's totally fair.
Also, unisex bathrooms let everyone wait on the same line.
Not such a news flash: The world is easier for right-handed people than for lefties. The world is easier for middle-sized people than for very tall or very short people. The line for bathrooms is a lot longer for women than for men. Elderly people can't always open 'baby-proof' items, and sometimes can't open every-day items, being stuck without until someone comes to help them out.
Cars - everyone knows that women have pocketbooks, where are we supposed to put them while driving? And high heels make it hard to control the pedals - and if the heels jam, zap there's a car accident.
Hard plastic clam-shells send people to the hospital when the knife cuts the person instead of opening the plastic package.
OK, the real news flash: 'bathroom lines for women' is not the only problem - sometimes the bathroom is further away. When men and women at a presidential debate have a 3 minute bathroom break, the men are back at the podium while the woman is still running along the corridors. "hahahah woman loses debate bec of the potty break" is not actually funny.
When the men's bathroom had a 15 minute wait & the women's bathroom had a 15 minute wait, the men were shocked and surprised and complained and got some of the women's bathrooms converted to men's bathrooms... for a resulting 5-10 & 25-30 min wait, respectively. Oh, that's totally fair.
Also, unisex bathrooms let everyone wait on the same line.
March 13, 2019
This is basically a listicle (with some elaboration) of how the design of objects in our everyday life affect different people differently - for example, podium height. It's split up by topic area (fashion, children, architecture such as restrooms and classrooms). There's not much elaboration on each example.
The chapters are also rather formulaic - examples of when design has gone wrong, followed by an example of when a design has gone right. I can see this book as a discussion topic or reference text, but I'm not really interested in reading lists.
1.5/5 stars - to be fair, it's unarguable that the author knows her stuff. I'm not sure it warrants a book, though.
The chapters are also rather formulaic - examples of when design has gone wrong, followed by an example of when a design has gone right. I can see this book as a discussion topic or reference text, but I'm not really interested in reading lists.
1.5/5 stars - to be fair, it's unarguable that the author knows her stuff. I'm not sure it warrants a book, though.
June 19, 2025
The concept — how design in everything from fashion to big box stores to toilets disadvantages too many people — was a natural hook for me. The execution was a turn off and I skimmed much of it.
Anthony's book has a great chapter discussing restroom design and how it disadvantages women, and possible solutions. Otherwise it's just a long string of how things are badly designed: high heels are unsafe for women, football helmets don't protect from concussions, lots of things are out of reach if you're short (at 5' 2" this was very much a "Well, duuuuh" moment) ... I wanted something more systemic, with a deeper analysis and didn't get it.
Anthony's book has a great chapter discussing restroom design and how it disadvantages women, and possible solutions. Otherwise it's just a long string of how things are badly designed: high heels are unsafe for women, football helmets don't protect from concussions, lots of things are out of reach if you're short (at 5' 2" this was very much a "Well, duuuuh" moment) ... I wanted something more systemic, with a deeper analysis and didn't get it.
September 29, 2018
Not what I expected. It's a list, basically.
January 23, 2019
A big collection of referenced informations about how items unexpectedly killed people , or did something bad to their owner.
March 25, 2023
Incredibly interesting. Helped me think about my work for all of my projects
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews