On good design and why Siri, Alexa and Cortana are all female
A few months back, one of my contacts on Linkedin (Tabita Luis from LingoKids) asked a very interesting question. Have you noticed that Siri, Alexa and Cortana all have female voices? This was a great question to formulate, almost as good as asking ‘what is the gender of angels?’
You might have noticed that virtual assistants, these obedient technological beings, have mostly female voices (or at least this is the type of voices that mainly made it to the first product releases). On the other hand, the world of GPS is kind of heavily populated by male voices. Maybe this is because of the stereotype that women cannot read maps (unconscious bias). Or perhaps, it is a reflection of the fact that these devices are mostly put together by a population of coders mainly composed by men? Female coders are becoming a rarity nowadays. Maybe when they had to choose a voice for Alexa at Amazon Lab126, they simply went for the sexy one.
No pun intended, but it is interesting how male AI is more commonly associated with science-fiction stories where technology becomes dominant, evil and even outside of our control. It is all about world domination when it comes to technological male devices. Well, it is either about world domination, or about GPS and toys like cars of course.
On the other hand, the other thing that happened around the same time, is that I was pleasantly surprised by a post by Nacho Padilla, the creative director of Madrid City Council (ex Maccann). Nacho has been working with Yinsen Studio, who have designed amazing posters lately, to publicise events and deploy public awareness campaigns.
This collaboration between Madrid City Council and the staff at Yinsen Studio (Maria Pradera and Lorena Sayavera, winners of the European Design Awards) has been noticed by people from all different backgrounds. I suspect their graphic design work will become part of the city’s history. Watch this space.
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Nacho posted a set of the graphics that will plaster the city to celebrate International Women’s day. I was slightly surprised by two things. Firstly, how many of my male peers enjoyed the work, and secondly, the posters revived the word ‘feminism’, a word itself that seems to have almost become a bad word lately. Maybe I will ask Alexa her opinions on this matter.
All this made me wonder if the tech world, with its culture of ‘bros’ and declining rate of women who code, is somehow missing the point. The technology world could further turbocharge its progress, if it encouraged a little bit of diversity, different viewpoints and allowed good ideas to flow.
Designers, either graphic, UX or product, are crucial to the development of products, services and ideas that engage and inspire. To me, they are the new rock stars. Steve Jobs already noticed how important designers were when he said ‘’We made all the buttons look so good on the screen that you wanted to lick them’’.
To all my designer friends and creative souls out there, you are the ones who lead and invent a new world. God bless organizations like IDEO, and all these design thinkers amongst us, especially when they dedicate their time to celebrate women’s rights.
Maribel Ayala is a Marketing Consultant with experience working for companies such as Barclays Bank, Barclaycard, GE, D&T Opticians and Christie’s Fine Arts. She specialises in Design Thinking and Performance Marketing.
