Karen Korellis Reuther, design critic in advanced studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), has published Man-Made: How We Designed a World That Leaves Women Out, and How We Can Make It Right with Harper Business.
Drawing on more than four decades of experience as an industrial designer and leader at companies including Nike and Reebok, Reuther examines how products, spaces, and systems have often been designed around male bodies and experiences, leaving women to navigate environments that can be uncomfortable, exclusionary, or unsafe. The book argues for a more expansive approach to design that treats inclusion not as an add-on, but as a fundamental responsibility of the design process.
An adapted excerpt from Man-Made, titled “The Headspace Gap: The Mental Load of Living in a World Designed for Men,” was recently published in Ms. magazine. In the excerpt, Reuther describes the physical and cognitive adjustments women are often expected to make in spaces and systems not built with them in mind.
In a recent interview with the Harvard Gazette, Reuther points to a gender imbalance in the design field, highlighting that fewer than a quarter of practicing product designers, architects, and mechanical engineers are women. “There haven’t been enough female designers at the table,” she says. “We are living in a world designed by men, for men.”
Writing in Time magazine earlier this summer, Reuther argued that gender imbalances are evident throughout the built environment, finding expression in such fundamental conditions as the temperature settings on air conditioners.
At the GSD, Reuther teaches in the Master in Design Engineering program. She will speak about Man-Made on July 22 at Porter Square Books in Cambridge.
