Lawrence Baker 11-3-2011 Thesis Paper Outline Concept Statement

Men's Home Solutions is all about creating vacuum cleaners and domestic devices for men. Macho vacuum cleaners, tough sewing machines and manly steam irons will allow men participate in housecleaning without making them feel emasculated. That's what I'm going to be presenting anyway. The actual goal of this project is to entertain people with a mix of silly product design and over-thetop presentation while also making a commentary on gender in product design and marketing. Originally my project, which I was calling Unique Home Innovations, started with just the rough concept of making people laugh by mocking absurd products and commercials. Inspired by the As Seen on TV ads and infomercials the original goal was just to make something funny. I only had that nebulous idea when starting my research but I lacked a solid concept of what I wanted to satirize and how. I made a few small things and mocked up several others but they were just silly and lacked anything to set them apart from simple comedy props. During my research on television marketing I found the perfect thing to satirize. I rediscovered something that has always bothered me about targeted marketing toward girls and women: make it pink and cover it with flowers and hearts. The tendency of companies to sell their products to women by making things pink and pretty is perfect comedy fodder. Saturday Night Live made fun of this by doing a commercial parody called

Chess for Girls where girls expressed irritation that chess was too difficult and called it a boy's game. The comedy solution was a set of pink chess dolls that could have their hair braided and be dressed up and played with in a chess themed doll house. It's ridiculous but not that far off from how toys are often marketed to girls. That's what makes it effective parody: it's over the top but you could almost imagine it being a real product. Hyperbole and exaggeration are key tools in comedy; when making fun of something, it's common to take the idea to its most extreme to highlight the inherent absurdity. This is what Saturday Night Live did when it went to the extreme in making something like chess as girly as possible. I'm interested in playing with the opposite extreme: Instead of taking unisex or traditionally masculine products and making them as stereotypically feminine as possible, I'm going to take traditionally female products and make them as stereotypically macho as I can. Making fully functional appliances from scratch isn't a realistic goal for this project though. Instead I'll be making mods somewhat like how companies put out parts for people to modify their cars, but instead of aftermarket car parts it will be after market appliance kits. I changed the name of the project too: Instead of calling the project Unique Home Innovations I'm going to be calling it Men's Home Solutions, or MHS for short. It's both more direct and makes a sideways reference to HSN, the Home Shopping Network.

Impetus

While talking with a friend I mentioned a project I did in the spring of 2011 and my idea for this thesis project. That project I did in the spring was a proposal to make Battery Park more appealing. It was a series of activities and aesthetic touches that would make the park more attractive in the winter, as well as a revamp of their approach to online community interaction. The idea I'm exploring for my thesis is to create products inspired by infomercials and their often absurd forms and presentation. These projects seem very different but I realized that the park project wasn't just about creating community involvement, it was meant to make the park more entertaining to people during the winter. My Men's Home Solutions project is about making people laugh at my silly inventions and the commercials for them. Thinking back to older projects I realize this held true for all of them. One of my first projects was a group project using a camera mounted to a computer running a program that was used to film skateboarders. The skateboarders had lights attached to their boards and the computer captured the movement of the light, shifted colors and created a video of the trails they made as they did their tricks. It resulted in a very cool looking video and it was fun to watch. I find television commercials for niche products, and sometimes even for big-name products to be very funny. From talking to people and looking at what other entertainers have done to mock them, I know that it's fertile comedy ground. Lots of comedians have done standup bits about them or written about them. I don't want to only make fun of them; I want to actually engage in the

process of making these products while making fun of them. If my product is believable but doesn't seem to be anything else than I haven't added any commentary or humor; I just made a product for a TV commercial. If I get too heavy-handed with my commentary and put all my cards out on the table it won't be funny, because the best way to ruin a joke is to explain it. I also want to mock the stereotyping often done when marketing to women. I never intended to tackle anything like sexism or stereotyping, but I realize without a real issue to work with I would just be engaged in random silliness, which I don't have much interest in doing. Some of the best comedy touches on very serious issues and making something deeper doesn't make it overly serious or preachy. The main goal of my project is entertainment but now I have a real target for my satire. I know this is the right direction because it ties back into my research on the history of television advertising. Most products advertised in the early days of television, and in catalogs before that, were time-saving home goods for housewives. Vacuum cleaners, appliances, detergents and kitchen utensils were all marketed toward women. These home good ads were the foundation of not just the absurd products hocked on infomercials but for almost all modern commercials.

User + Setting I actually have two user groups, not one. One user group is what I'm calling the hypothetical audience, which is the male consumers who want to not feel emasculated doing housecleaning. These are the hyper-exaggerated stereotypes my products are being designed to meet the needs of. They also need to be marketed to, so considering this hypothetical audience will inform how I present the products and what form the commercial will take. The other user group I'm going to call the actual audience, the audience that will be in on the joke. The actual audience will be my peers, professors, and museum-goers who will be seeing the products in a gallery setting along with the commercial. This audience will not be overtly targeted by the material itself. The products and the marketing material will all be addressed to the hypothetical audience as if it were the only audience. The way it addresses the actual audience is through contextual cues about the project. Because it is in this gallery setting, because it is very over-the-top, and because it will contain subtle references to the research. To design for the hypothetical audience I should first define it. It is a broad stereotype of American masculinity. A man should be tough, be athletic, like sports, like guns, like cars and machines, and have sex with as many women as he can. Before I continue, I feel I should explain further why this particular stereotype is being involved. While the underlying goal of the project is to entertain, the concept which drives the project and directs how I pursue this goal is to mock the way that many manufacturers and advertisers stereotype women. Though much of the material I'm referencing regarding this stereotyping is older

there still exists strong tendencies to rely on assumed traits. These traits which people assume others to have based on their cultural knowledge of what a woman is supposed to be, on what a man is supposed to be, on what gays, lesbians, transgendered or any other group is supposed to be and behave like. This male stereotype can be seen in popular media all the time. Men who don't fit neatly into standard definitions of masculinity are ridiculed and marginalized. Ted Porter referred to it in his TED talk as "the man box." What that means is that a society places requirements on men living in a society with extreme gender inequality.
1

The treatment of women in a patriarchal society has

a very immediate and apparent affect on them, in addition to long term and hard to quantify repercussions, but it also has a harmful effect on the men in that society.

Domain 1 For the Macho Home Solutions project I needed to choose a product which fulfills certain criteria: It needed to be something that has had television commercials advertising it; it needed to be something that is traditionally marketed to women; it needed to be a device which makes use electricity or mechanical action; it needed to be something that I can disassemble and redesign in less than a year. There are many options that match those criteria but the best choice is the vacuum cleaner. Of all the home appliances the vacuum cleaner is probably the most iconic. Vacuum cleaners are an appliance with a strange history. Most vacuum innovations came from the late 19th century and the early to mid 20th century. This was a period of frantic invention and many races for the patent office. 2 As a result, the history of the first vacuum cleaners is a muddled, but interesting, history. Even just saying what the first vacuum cleaner was is a challenge because people don't all agree on where to draw the line between earlier mechanical cleaning machines and machines that used actual vacuum action. From its early history with red carts, horses, handkerchiefs, and royalty, to modern vacuum robots and bag-less cyclones on balls, there have been plenty of quirky innovators and inventions. The history of how they work is no less interesting than the characters behind the machines.

Hubert Cecil Booth is considered to be the inventor of the first powered vacuum cleaner. He worked as a civil engineer at Maudslay Sons & Field in

London.3 After seeing a demonstration of a machine which blew air to move dust and debris he came up with a machine based on the idea that it would be better to suck up the dirt instead.
4

The machine was called Puffing Billy" and was a large device, so big it required horses to pull it. The machines were gas powered and could not be brought into the homes themselves. Because of this he sold cleaning services rather than the vacuums themselves. His company was called the "British Vacuum Cleaning Company" and the carts which housed the machines were a characteristic bright red, with uniformed workers who would man the device. They would manage the long tubes of the machine which had to be pulled in through windows to suck up the dirt inside.
6

Booth tried to enter the household vacuum years later with a vacuum called the "Goblin" but by that time he was competing against an American vacuum cleaner company called Hoover. Though Booth wasn't able to make much of a dent in home vacuums as Hoover models dominated that market in Britain, he was able to do well making huge cleaning systems industrial facilities. His company still exists today as "BVC" which is a part of the Quirepace Ltd.
7

Hoover is a company that dominated its industry so well for a time, and became so synonymous with the machines, that in Britain the act of vacuuming can also be called "hoovering."8 The man the company is named after never invented the device it became so well known for though. The vacuum that would make the company was actually developed by a Janitor named James Murray Spangler from Ohio. The carpet sweeper he used in his work irritated his asthma

and being something of an inventor, he decided he would make something to suck up the dirt instead. Using mostly parts from his home, including a pillowcase he borrowed from his wife, he built a simple vacuum that solved his asthma problem. One of the most important features of his machine which set it apart from all other was the inclusion of a rotation brush that loosened dirt from carpeting. Though he obtained a patent for his invention and created a company to manufacture and sell them he lacked the funds to capitalize on his creation.
9

One of the vacuums he created was given to his cousin who showed it to her husband, William Henry Hoover. Hoover owned a leather goods company that made horse collars and harnesses. He saw that his current business was in danger because of increasing automobile ownership and so he bought Spangler's patent. Even after making several improvements to the device, sales were still sluggish until Hoover came up with the idea to both have door-to-door salesmen demonstrate the machines and offering "ten-day, home trials." Though Hoover's company dominated the home vacuum market for sometime it wasn't without the occasional blunder. One was the creation of an odd, impractical vacuum that would become a fairly harmless, even collectable, gaffe by the company. The other blunder, however, was so major that it forced the company to sell its British division to Candy, an Italian manufacturer in order to stay afloat. In 1952 Hoover released the Constellation, a spherical canister vacuum that, unlike other canister vacuums, lacked wheels or rails on which to move. The Constellation instead functioned like a hovercraft

Dyson and his bagless, cyclonic vacuum were rejected many times by manufacturers who didn't want to lose money by making disposable bags obsolete. Unable to sell in the UK he sold his vacuum in Japan. Later he would revisit an older idea of his and make the vacuums move along on a ball rather than wheels. The vacuum is instead propelled by its own exhaust, which is expelled out the bottom of the sphere. The device then floats on a thin cushion of air like a hovercraft. The venture which cost Hoover dearly was the Hoover free flights promotion.

Domain 2 Mechanical Brides sound like some sort of science-fiction robot wives, but it's actually a term which was coined and written about my Marshal McLuhan. The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man was a collection of short essays published in a book that could be read in any order. The essays include an advertisement or article at the beginning of each, which is then analyzed for both aesthetics and the implications behind it. Ellen Lupton did an exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum called Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office that ran from August of 1993 to January of 1994. The exhibition examined the phenomenon of domestic appliances and office machines being marketed primarily toward women in the 20th century and the effect that had.

The sexual division of labor is a central feature of the modern home and office.

Certain tasks accomplished with certain tools have become associated with women's work while others have traditionally been assigned to men. Mechanical devices, from the washing machine to the typewriter, are designed to perform work; the work they do is cultural as well as utilitarian, helping to define the differences between woman and man. (Page 7)

Precedents Originally the only precedents I had were the silly products and commercials I wanted to make fun of. Early on the focus was primarily on As Seen on TV, Skymall, and Solutions products. This then expanded quickly into Ronco and other infomercial companies. While looking at these I produced a few early prototypes to get a feel for what I wanted my project to become. These prototypes played on few things that I saw in many infomercial products: wanting to do things as easily and with as little effort as possible, wanting things cheap, and wanting things that had extremely niche functionality. The two ideas that got past the daydream stage were the SlamSwitch and Automatic-Origami. Of the two only the Automatic-Origami got a physical prototype; the SlamSwitch remained nothing but sketches. After presenting these I had a few more precedents actually given to me by others. These actually became helpful in helping me decide what I didn't want to do. The first of these precedents was Maywa Denki, which was suggested to me by a classmate after seeing my first ideas. Maywa Denki is an, art unit produced by Nobumichi Tosa. It was named after the company his father used to run bygone days. This art group has a unique style that plays on the idea of commercial art: they wear costumes that look like worker's jumpsuits, they call each of their works a product, and their performance are called product demonstrations.

Prototyping & Testing

The joke needs to be strong. Before I ever touch a vacuum and screwdriver I need to make sure the joke works. The first stage of prototyping is visual. Making pictures of the finished products and getting people's reactions to them. The most common reaction I got was that I need to push it further and be more ridiculous. With every iteration I keep getting that response which tells me I'm still being too reserved and cautious. The other aspect of my project which I'm just beginning to prototype and test is the marketing and presentation of the products. Because I'm mocking not just products but how they're marketed this is as essential to my project as the products I make. It may even be more essential because I'm finding with every presentation I make that the presentation of my material is they key to it's humor.

Before I even begin working on the physical prototypes of my products there are a few concerning design issues that occur to me. Most of the potential issues are likely to be in the production phase of the project. Most of the working prototypes will need to be made using plastic and metal parts. The electrical components in the vacuums are easy to modify but the altered exterior for each themed vacuum will need to be constructed from scratch. I've never worked with thermoplastics before and have only a limited amount of experience with mechanical engineering. More than my limited experience with the materials, my lack of space is what really worries me. Working with large pieces of plastic requires space and

ventilation that I don't have in the city. I live in a small apartment with three other people and very little ventilation. The school doesn't supply space for projects like this either, because I'm not in the fine arts department so there's no space assigned for me to work in. I'll need space to store all the materials, room to use the tools, ventilation so that the fumes don't pose a hazard and it needs to be somewhere near where I live.

Research Sources. 1. http://www.ted.com/talks/tony_porter_a_call_to_men.html 2. "Improved-Sweeping Machine". United States Patent and Trademark Office. 3. Institution of Civil Engineers. "OBITUARY HUBERT CECIL BOOTH. 1871-1955". . ICE Proceedings, Volume 4, Issue 4, pages 631 632. Thomas Telford Publishing 4. Curt Wohleber (Spring 2006). "The Vacuum Cleaner". Invention & Technology Magazine. American Heritage Publishing. Retrieved 2010-12-08. 6. Levy, Joel. Really useful: the origins of everyday things. Firefly Books. 7. http://www.bvc.co.uk/history.html 8. Possible Generification of Hoover trademark by Elizabeth Ward 9. Spangler, U.S. Patent 1,073,301, "Suction Carpet Sweeper"