FLID tools
The purpose of this thesis is to establish an understanding of the different audience positions established in the design of hand tools and ads promoting hand tools in relation to gender. Furthermore in relation to this analysis establish a tool brand that seeks to establish agency and cater to a new audience which has in large part been “overlooked” by the current hand tool industry. I approach this via doing rhetorical criticism based on both feminist criticism and a constitutive understanding of rhetorical criticism.
My focus is to analyse the audience position and how this position is created by identification established by values and beliefs embedded in the actual artifact. This audience position is then related to the construction of gender.
What I end up finding is that tools are to some extent coded male and by addressing this bias with rhetoric it is possible to create a design and branding, that includes a broader audience, by rearticulating the values present in the actual tools. However I also argue that this rearticulation comes with a risk - that the product created doesn't seem trustworthy, and therefore loses its access to establishing agency, because the audience does not find the product credible in relation to already established discourse for tools. To qualify the main argument of this thesis I suggest doing qualitative interviews with representatives from the audience to get a better credible, and which they feel represents their values and beliefs. And by doing so even broaden women's access to agency.
Specialet blev bedømt til karakteren 12 og er skrevet af Solveig Kolstad i retorik på Aarhus Universitet.
