The 'Great Beauty' of Diversity: Smart Totems to Promote Gender Uniqueness

Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence, Sensors Technology, and, above all Internet-of-Things affect people's behavior in everyday life. Actually, technology in general, cannot yet be considered gender neutral: it is enough to consider that smartphones are primarily designed by males for the male hand size. Besides, neuroscience evidence has shown that the minds and behavior of men and women are deeply different. This gender uniqueness, if valued, may constitute opportunities for the whole society. Hence the need to consider it in the technology life cycle. This paper presents an Internet-of-Things solution represented by smart totems for advertisement and wayfinding services within advanced ICT-based shopping malls, that are conceived as a sentient space. To take into account the specificity of final users and to increase awareness of the gender uniqueness in the design of Internet-of-Things, a User-Centered Design methodology has been used. Scenarios and Personas have been created to consciously seek gender biases. This identification is then exploited to make Artificial Intelligence algorithms ecological, i.e., adapted to the real context of use, which is currently characterized by gender balance.