October 14, 2025 | 4 minute read
A review of Gendered by Design: A Duoethnographic Study of Personal Fitness Tracking Systems
I've finished my second class assignment for Social Computing, which is another Analytic Review (Critical Analysis?). I tried to ground my editorializing in critical framing. Here's my none-critical framing: what a silly, polemic way for the authors to treat such an important topic. Their paper should have been a blog post, not a scholarly article.
A review of Gendered by Design: A Duoethnographic Study of Personal Fitness Tracking Systems
By Marika Cifor and Patricia Garcia
Published in: ACM Transactions on Social Computing (Volume: 2, Issue: 4, December 2019)
DOI: 10.1145/3364685
In this text, Cifor and Garcia investigate how technology that could be designed and marketed as gender-neutral may actually reproduce gender assumptions of its makers, which reflects larger, problematic and systemic assumptions in technological society.
The authors examine the Jawbone UP3 fitness tracker through a six-month self-study, a method they call duoethnography. In this study, both researchers wore the Jawbone device, recorded diary entries, and reflected on their experiences. They claim that even with a potential aspiration toward genderlessness, the Jawbone reveals masculine qualities through industrial design, interface design, and content design, and this then negatively shapes how users understand their bodies. The authors show that aesthetic, brand and ergonomic choices like color, and size, and UI choices such as binary gender options, encode bias in the Jawbone device and reinforce existing and problematic norms.
The paper’s literature review and grounding as related to gender is extraordinarily thorough. The review of feminist and gender-studies literature is deep, current, and responsibly cited. For example, the authors describe that they “draw on feminist theory and critical data studies to interrogate how the design of self-tracking technologies shapes and is shaped by gendered power relations,” and then cite texts from Bardzell, Butler, and Rode in support of their arguments. But the same academic grounding hasn’t been offered to the study of design itself. The authors view design as a moral activity, but never consider the context of how products decisions are actually made in industry. There is no discussion or reference to the large body of both scholarly work and popular discussion related to market tradeoffs, innovation, production methods, or costing, such as those offered by Clay Christensen on innovation and disruption in The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997),Christensen, Clayton M. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 1997 Roger Martin on design thinking in business strategy in Playing to Win (2013),Martin, Roger. Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2013. and Eric Ries on lean product decision making in The Lean Startup (2011).Ries, Eric. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. New York: Crown Publishing, 2011. The designer in the text is a sole, blamable decision maker, and while user-experience designers do have some influence in how design decisions are made, it’s incorrect and naïve to think that design is the primary force in designing how a product fits, displays, and interprets a body. This view ignores issues of branding, market differentiation, production constraints, and autocratic decision making from executives.
The method the researchers use is at least partially at fault for this gap. Duoethnography, in this case, is casual reflection presented as meaningful data. Forty-eight diary prompts were written by the authors, and then answered by the same authors. The answers were based solely on the authors’ opinions. They were then coded into categories selected by the authors, with titles such as “Genderless Universal User” or “Women’s Health.” The result is opinion framed as empirical discovery. Positionality is described, but is used as a rationalization of a lack of investigative rigor.
Their closing call for designers to conduct “deep interrogation” of gendered values reinforces the lack of knowledge the authors have about design in practice. The paper treats design as an ethical activity, but it is (for better or worse) primarily a capitalist activity. If people are called upon to reflect on the impact of design choices, this call should be made to everyone in the creation of the product (including product managers, engineers, middle-manager, marketing experts, and ultimately, executives), to those shaping the sale of the product, such as advertisers, and—with a company like Jawbone—to the investors and purchasers. This is, of course, a broad enough group as to be meaningless, and this is the problem with ascribing gender in a simplistic fashion to a single piece of design.
The authors are correct in stating that consumer fitness devices driven by data then change behavior of users, often in ways that have little to do with fitness, and often in ways that are emotionally or physically unhealthy. The paper illustrates how small design elements, such as color or default settings, reinforce cultural norms. Gendered by Design succeeds as a conceptual provocation. But the paper cannot be considered meaningful, rigorous empirical research. Its insights about the politics of designed artifacts are sound, but with lack of research into design itself, they are simply opinions.