Ever since Phil Torrone showed me how to use a bluetooth dongle to take control of my Roomba – a little round vacuum cleaner robot — I’ve been following the growth of Roomba hacking. Roomba manufacturer iRobot released its specs earlier this year, thus making it clear that people weren’t breaking some obscure copyright law by taking their vacuum cleaners apart and turning them into fighting machines (or whatever). In fact, the relatively simple controls on the Roomba make it an excellent device for beginners to get into robot hacking.
Now there’s a book devoted to Roomba hacking, which is great for those of us who still enjoy the form factor of this venerable but vanishing print medium.
What’s interesting to is the way Roomba hacking has turned what was once a “woman’s thing” — the vacuum cleaner — into something that has very little gendered subtext. Sure, hacking is associated with boy’s play. But hacking a vacuum cleaner? Not so much.
Robotics is also a less male-dominated area than computer science, and one of our era’s most famous roboticists is Cynthia Breazeal. Now if only we could create the perfect artificial womb, we could all get together and hack childbirth too.
Not sure I agree that a hacked vacuum cleaner has “very little gendered subtext” – instead, I might argue that gendering of objects can be more complicated than just male-oriented or female-oriented. So vacuuming is a task done more often by women than men. Who does the hacking of Roombas, or other domestic objects? Who sets the Roomba going after being hacked? Is the hacked Roomba cooler than the unhacked Roomba? Is hacking a Roomba an act of gender resistance by either women or men? How are the reasons for hacking a Roomba gendered?
It’s cool to see this anyway. Certainly problematizes lots of ideas about gendered domestic technology…