speaker series: Digital Media Design, Gender & Games

From the week of 11/5

Speaker: Yasmin Kafai

As technology ages a need for collective understanding arises. Computers and technology have become so widespread and such an integral part of society that it is no longer enough that only a few people know the ins and outs of technology. How is society supposed to go about educating the public and developing an overall wanting in the general public to learn how to use technology? The idea is to combine aesthetics, design and technology into a single entity. By creating this combination then I believe the fear of advanced technology and coding will disappear and people will want to learn about technology. Many companies have done already with their products in order to make them seem more accessible to the general public. Companies like apple, Google, and Microsoft are designing their newer products to be simple. Learning technologies need to start being designed this way. People don’t want to learn how to code if they are only building boring products and their coding environment is technical and hard to understand. Once technology and aesthetics are combined then the entire public will have the opportunity to become advanced with technology.
    Another question comes in this educating process. How do we bring women into computing and technology? This question is rooted deeply in a social aspect, which we as a society have pushed on ourselves for thousand of years and can’t seem to completely abolish. This social aspect of course is how women are thought of and treated. This idea is something that has been ingrained and will not go away with just equality in the work place. Women and men are thought to be different when referring to technical and artistic skills. Women have always been thought of as more artistic while men have been thought of technical. The idea that men can’t be artistic has slowly disappeared and is now completely gone, but somehow the idea that women can’t be technical won’t seem to go away. Slowly women are becoming more engaged in engineering and technical projects. The way to engage women and get them more interested in working technically is to not only combine aesthetics and art with technology just as I stated above, but also to stop the separation of the two genders completely in work, learning and stop stereotypes when the girls are young. The idea that girls shouldn’t play video games or design using Legos is absurd and the continuation of the idea that women should be left only to artistic jobs. Once we stop this early implantation of stereotyping ideas in the children than women can thrive in a technical community. They will want to be part of the community rather than not learning technology early because they think this isn’t right for them.