Meaning/Usage

Not all products have meaning or uses. Meaning and usage is decided over time, through a dialog between a society and designers. A designer can try to create a product that has meaning or uses, but by no means can they control a society. Sometimes a product that was never intended to have meaning is assigned meaning by a society. The same is true with usage. Designers can try to design a product to be used in a certain way but there is no way to enforce this usage. Also, people will use a product however they want, and not consider how the product was intended to be used as any sort of limitation.

While thinking about products which exemplify the concept of the product as a dialog, I looked at the recent history of the safety razor. Since the design of Gillette’s first safety razor, the design of the razor has not changed much. A razor blade is attached to a perpendicular handle that is a straight rod about four inches long. This has been the standard from 1904 until a few years ago. It was designed for men to be able to shave their own faces instead of having to count on others for a clean shave.

Society adopted the image of a man who has shaved to be someone who is clean, put together and professional. This was a pre-existing notion starting with the straight razor and a shave at the barber shop, but none the less, the availability of the safety razor and convenience allowed more professional men to be able to buy into this image.

As time went on society began using the safety razor in different ways. The clearest example of this is that women began using razors to shave their legs when society was ready to allow them to show their legs in the 1940’s. This changed both the meaning, and the usage of the razor. The shaved face for men still kept the same meaning, but shaved legs meant that a woman was sexy and fashionable. The usage was changed as well, the same razor designed for a man’s face was now being used for women’s legs.

Women used the same razors as men for a number of years until the market for razors was realized and a designer made the first razor for women. This razor was almost identical to the men’s razors except it had been “feminized” by adding pink and making it smaller. But none the less, this marketing acknowledged the societies change in meaning.

Recently Gillette has looked at the way people in society use the razor, and what it means to them. Through this investigation they found that people constantly reposition their hand to hold on the razor depending where they are shaving, a usage that razors had not been designed to do. Using this information about how people used the razor they redesigned the razor to aid people in doing what they were already doing with it.

For men they created the Fusion which has a handle that is designed to be held in different places to aid in either gross motor control, or fine motor control. Also they added a “precision trimmer” to acknowledge that many men have some facial hair which they need to manage. The other important thing that Gillette acknowledged is that women shave differently than men. The handle for their Venus razor is much different than that of the Fusion, and instead of playing into the idea of “feminizing” something by making it smaller and more slender, they made the handle bigger to be easier to use with gross motor functions needed for shaving. They also designed the end of the razor to be easy to hold when trying to reach, which is something that men do not have to worry about when shaving.

Although the Fusion and Venus have been designed to be used in a very specific way, dictating how you hold it for what kind of shaving your doing, there is without a doubt, someone who is, or is going to use it differently. And as society changes, so will the way they use the product. In the future it may become necessary for men to shave their knuckles, which they will do with the existing razors, until a company comes back with a razor designed for men to use with both hands.