Gender and Technology: A Case
Gender and Technology: A Case Study (Video feed) by Brenda Laurel: she describes ethnography as a design tool nicely as: "paying very close attention to the details in the lives of certain types of people as a strategy to design products".
Some tips on interviewing kids: interview them together with their one best friend. Advantages, they keep each other honest, and they talk a lot to each other. Focus groups with kids don't work.
They did lots of research on gender differences as it relate to designing games for girls, and came up with a hierarchy of colors and characteristics for what works for boys vs. girls. For example: pink overrides truckness. So a pink truck is still girlie, no boy wants it. Other finding: the hi-res polygon typical rendering of games is very boy-like, even if the thing that's being rendered is a pink pony, it still says "boys".
Other interesting bits: Brenda thinks there are some key biological differences between boys and girls: the biological differences are small but get enlarged by cultural narrative. (Differences like spatial awareness under time pressure (videogames anyone?)). Girls do well with Tetris, a pattern matching problem. How the problem is described matters on how well you perform: are you "helping your car down the street"?
Brenda also made some good points on ethics: use applicable ethics at the right point: when doing research, use research ethics. When developing products, use more political ethics. Don't use political ethics when doing research.
It's an interesting talk about gender issues for kids, but also about research practices - she shares lots of interesting findings. If you build websites for kids, listen to this!
Something I am thinking lately: websites aimed at very specific audiences are pretty powerful things. They serve these particular people so well that it's hard to steal the audience... Not that that had anything to do with the above post. Oh well...