Lawrence Baker 11-3-2011 Thesis Paper Outline Concept Statement (WHAT ARE YOU MAKING?

) Macho 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 all for the ultimate goal of getting a chuckle. 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 Macho Home Solutions, or MHS for short. It's both more direct and makes a sideways reference to HSN, the Home Shopping Network.

Impetus (WHY ARE YOU MAKING IT?)

While talking with a friend I mentioned a project I did in the spring of 2011 and this idea for my 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 Macho 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 (WHO ARE YOU MAKING THIS FOR AND WHERE-- WHO IS USUALLY BUT NOT ALWAYS MORE IMPORTANT) 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:

Design Questions (WHAT QUESTIONS WILL YOUR PROJECT ANSWER?)

Domains (THREE-FOUR AREAS OF STUDY YOU'VE RESEARCHED THAT INFORM YOUR PROJECT) 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. 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 different experts don't all agree on where to draw the line between earlier mechanical cleaning machines and actual From its early history with red vans, 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. The machine was called Puffing Billy. His was really the first

vacuum; most mechanical cleaning machines only swept or blew the dirt away. Hoover didn't invent his new kind of vacuum. Instead, he bought it from his brother-in-law who couldn't afford to manufacture it himself. A little known vacuum manufactured by Hoover was the Constellation which actually hovered using the exhaust. 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.

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.

Precedents (A CRITICAL LOOK AT SOME EXAMPLES THAT INSPIRED (POSITIVELY OR NEGATIVELY) YOUR PROJECT. SOME PEOPLE JUST MINGLE THESE WITH THEIR DOMAINS)

User Narratives, User Testing (WHO IS USING YOUR THING AND TESTING YOUR THING)

Methodology (HOW YOU BUILT THE THING)

Evaluation (HOW DID YOU DO?)

Research Sources. (WHERE DID YOU GET YOUR INFORMATION)