The gender of products

I have lately been doing concept creation on a steam iron and also discussed it also over the net at core 77. One important thing that came up, was the gender of the product. How does it show? Since I had taken my group of interest these young guys moving out of their home for the first time and buying their first iron, what would be the design language and feature combination they liked the most.

where does the fine line between a female product and male design go? My answer was on this one to go with the usability, add some nice features and create some "gadget-feel" to the iron, make it perhaps more interesting to the technology-oriented guy to operate. Also the styling should go with the flow of normal male products, from razors to premium cars and in this case take some from powertools. Perhaps these metal finishes and some rugged details could do the trick. If you wish to see more of the on-going design process, click here.



However, I think that creating a clearly gender oriented product is hard and supposedly in most cases the product would be accepted by both genders. The design acceptance is, after all, related to time and the overall aesthetic family that is depicted from many front end product families.