ABSTRACT
In any study of designed images, artifacts, spaces, or environments, the existence of cultural stereotypes and the ways in which they come into being need to be taken into account. They inform both the values embedded into them at the designing stage, and their meanings in the context of mediation, consumption, and use. The relationships that existed in the past between design, gender, and identity, and the stereotypes that emanated from them have implications, therefore, for the study of design in the present and future. This chapter offers an example of such a relationship; specifi cally, the strong association that existed between feminine culture and identity, and the middle-class domestic interior as it emerged in the western industrialized world in the nineteenth century. Arguably, the stereotype that resulted from that association-that is, the feminization of the home, and of its visual, material, and spatial culture-needs to be taken into account in analyses of the design of the contemporary domestic interior.
