We learn to create and present aesthetically resolved design, but the role of the function is the underlying evaluation for the users to judge it as a good or a bad design. Industrial designer is not a doctor, a consultant, a mom, an engineer, or a problem solver, but all of their qualities in one. Although we didn’t go to medical school for ten years or have the experience of raising a child, we have to learn to know as much as we can about what they know when facing the problems they face. We constantly exchange problems and solutions with the world. And sometimes with a solution we offer them, the users are able to connect its functional qualities on their own to use it as a solution to another problem they face. This might also lead to yet another problem for us to solve. So, the role of a designer is to simply offer a design with a new solution eliminating as much alternative problems, however, the users ultimately determine their behavior with the design and rate its value by society.
Traditional gender roles have confined designers to freely recognize and solve problems. The male-dominant society was ignorant towards the quiet unheard voices of women’s needs. Thus its consequences led many women to medical diagnosis of female hysteria during the Victorian era. However, the perception of gender roles is changing and we are able to refer to a male-dominant society more and more as being traditional. The masculine gender role is becoming more malleable. New terms such as “sensitive new age guy” and metro sexual refers to men in today’s society as someone with traditional “female” emotions and grooming habits. According to sociology research, women’s gender roles have become less relevant to the traditional values since the start of industrialization. Although many Western cultures still assume women’s role is to stay home and maintain the “motherly figure”, the media also portrays a successful woman as being someone who follows a career and has independence.
The changing female role allowed women to start taking on many roles of what used to be reserved only for men. For example, men’s fashions have become more restrictive since the past eras, while women’s fashions have broadened. Lee Wright shares that high heels were once established fashion for elite men in 1700’s. However, as we know, by the 1950’s high heel has become a symbol of high fashion for women that "emphasizes the female form”. Women’s fashion now accepts and acquires various looks whether girly in flowery dress, tomboy in cargo pants, or dressed up in button-down shirt. While women are overtaking men’s fashion, men are pressured to look masculine to the extreme to distinguish themselves from women. Men, who still choose to dress in the now feminized male fashion, are no longer looked as a masculine, but considered androgyny or even homosexual.
American Apparel is a fashion representation of the changing gender roles in today’s society. Different from having separate men and women’s sections in normal apparel stores, all of their clothing and accessories are unisex. The fine line between men and women as well as their sexuality is tapering and our society is turning gender-blind. This greatly affects designers to define user groups for both male and female. It also adds a new role as designers to decide whether to follow the ways of the changing society or to introduce and redirect them to accepting new values.
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