My main question is: ‘Which role did gender play in the design and use of DDS’ (De Digitale Stad). DDS is a digital city, which means an information- and communication-space based on Internet, using ‘city’ as a metaphor to make it ‘easier to understand’. DDS started in Amsterdam and was the first digital city in Holland, thus many digital cities (there are at least thousand of them, probably more) in the Netherlands and Europe were modeled after DDS.

I look at the design- and use-context of DDS on three levels: structural, symbolic and identity-level (as Sandra Harding described them). So I study the relationship between design-choices, aspects of the design-process (organisational structure, identity of the designers, goals and metaphors) and its consequences on the use.

What I try to do in my thesis is that I try to find out how the design-process and the design-methodology of ICT influences the interface and how the interface affects who uses it. I also look in the other direction: how do users influence the design and the design-process. I try to find an explanation for the low number of female users of DDS (and Internet) by looking at the technology and its design.

I Introduction and theory. An introduction in my theoretical framework (based on Science and Technology Studies (script-approach), womens studies, and user-research) and an introduction in DDS, a short overview of the history of DDS and how it can be seen in connection with other digital cities/virtual communities and the Internet.

II Gender in the design of a digital city. (about the design of the first interface: DDS 1.0). This has been published in ‘information, communication and society’ and in the book ‘virtual gender’. In short: DDS started off as an idealistic organization intended to introduce internet to ‘everybody’. Because of the design-context, contingencies and the user-representations techniques the designers used, a masculine design of the interface resulted. The concept of the ‘I-methodology’ is used: designers design ICT according to their own preferences.

III Gendered user-representations in the design of a digital city (about the design of the second interface DDS 2.0). Has been published in the book ‘Women, Work and Computerization’. In this chapter I discuss the role of user-representations on the design of an interface. In my thesis I will add to this a discussion about the role of public terminals in the democratisation of this kind of technology.

IV The commercialization of DDS (about the design of the third interface DDS 3.0)

In this chapter I look at how the commercialisation of DDS influenced the organisation, the design-process and the resulting design of DDS 3.0.

V Users as Designers of DDS. (a comparison of the influence of users on the design of DDS 1.0 and DDS 3.0). This chapter will be published in the book ‘How Users Matter’ by Oudshoorn and Pinch. I discuss the different roles users had in the design-process (moderators, information-provider, graphical designers) and how these roles and influences changed during the ‘maturing’ of the organisation of DDS. How did the boundaries between users and designers sollidify and what role did the technology of DDS play in this process?

VI Creating spaces for women on DDS. (about the creation of the womens square in DDS 3.0) This chapter is being refereed by The European Journal of Womens Studies. In this chapter I discuss why the female designers of DDS did not create spaces for women in the design. And why another group of women (from a women’s group) did manage to create these spaces, but how they got into problems with doing this because at the time they did this the interface had already become obdurate.

VII ‘De-scribing’ a Digital City (about exclusion processes in DDS)

I have held ten interviews with people who have never used DDS before and analysed how they tried to make sense of the interface (user-interface research). In this chapter, I will also discuss the use of the metaphor ‘city’ in DDS 3.0, because for first-time users the ‘city’-metaphor and the way it has come to be represented by the designers was a major obstacle in using DDS. This will hopefully be presented and published in October during the Kyoto meeting on digital cities.

VIII Users of DDS

In dit hoofdstuk laat ik op basis van twintig interviews en user-interface analyses zien welke rol DDS speelt in de levens van mensen met hele verschillende (leeftijd, sekse, culturele achtergrond, opleiding) achtergronden. Op welke verschillende manieren gebruiken mensen DDS, in hoeverre worden ze geholpen/gehinderd door het script en welke machtsbronnen hebben ze om het ontwerp van DDS aan te passen of hun levens aan DDS aan te passen.

Door mijn proefschrift heen komen stel ik verschillende gebruikers voor, met foto’s van hoe ze met DDS bezig zijn in hun huiselijke omgeving. Dit gedeelte van het onderzoek analyseer ik met hulp van de ‘domesticatie-theorie’ (Silverstone) en laat o.a. zien uit wat voor verschillende werelden ontwerpers en gebruikers komen.