GCI MAG: Designing Inclusively: a How-to →

When an individual or company designs for a target market, by definition this implies that there are people they are not designing for. Those who are left out/lie outside the designer’s interest are known as “edge cases.”

In reality, these “edge cases” are real-world people—an elderly single woman or a teenager with a physical limitation—whose needs can provide you with a goldmine of insights that could help your company be more inclusive and profitable by reaching more customers. But only if you’re willing to broaden your perspective.

ELLE: The 14 Best Vibrators For Every Situation →

Buying a vibrator isn’t an easy feat. After all, everyone’s experience with pleasure is completely different, and the descriptions on labels for these devices can sometimes be confusing. Kate Balestrieri, licensed psychologist and founder of the Modern Intimacy (a platform that discusses the intersection between mental health and sexuality), suggests keeping an open mind when trying to find the right device for you. “Some things may send you over the moon in terms of pleasure, while others may fall flat—and that’s okay,” she says. She goes on to say that each device offers a different weight, texture, size, and movement that provokes stimulation each person feels differently. Her best advice: "Stay curious."

Along with Balestrieri, we tapped multiple experts for their recommendations for the best vibrators for different situations. Read on and find the vibe that works for you.

CORE77: Industrial Design: Why Is It Still a Man's World?

In this open letter, designer Ti Chang asks the important question: where are all the women in industrial design?

A few hours into my first day at work as an industrial designer, I was shocked to discover there was no women's restroom. I was the first woman on a team with 12 men, designing bicycles. I laughed it off at first because it felt too absurd. That week, they converted an unused closet, which became my bathroom. Although this happened in 2004, this kind of injustice and inattention to women is still pervasive. Throughout my career I have often found myself the only woman on a manufacturing floor, the token female in a room full of men. I have often been talked over, not taken seriously, sexually harassed, advised to not continue down the industrial design path and instead become a researcher. During a manufacturer visit, I've even had a business meeting in Italy where the supplier refused to even speak directly to me and would only address my male product manager.

WALLPAPER: Sculptural sex toys made by womxn for womxn

New retailer ILOH empowers us to take control of our sexual wellbeing through intelligently designed products

New London-based digital retailer ILOH is on a mission to destigmatize female pleasure with its edit of intimate wellness products.

‘It’s about feeling confident and shame free using products that not only feel right but look great,’ says founder Jemma Sawyer, who set up the company in 2020, to provide an online platform that is fun, safe, and guiltless. An entrepreneur with years of experience in fashion and communications, Sawyer set out to explore the intersection of femtech and female design.

Designer Ti Chang’s ‘Crave’ necklace doubles as a vibrator

COCKTALES DIRTY DISCUSSIONS: Ep. 210 "Craving An Orgasm!" ft. Ti Chang Co-Founder Crave

This week we're joined by Co-Founder of Crave Ti Chang, the woman developing super sleek toys you won't be embarrassed by.

IN THE LUUPE: Virtual Photoshoots in the Time of Social Distance →

The constant demand for visual content in our time of social distancing has pushed these photographers to work in new and unconventional ways.

For many photographers, work came to a halt at the beginning of the pandemic. Unable to physically be in the same room as their subjects, they shifted their approach, producing and taking pictures remotely. With limited ways to get new content, publications and even bands are requesting photo shoots via FaceTime and Zoom.

The following photographers have inspired us over the past few months using a range of technology and methods including apps and FaceTime’s photo feature.

Their work includes brand photography, feature stories for The New York Times and The Guardian, and thoughtful personal projects meditating on social distance.

DESIGN MILK: Making Space for the Tools of Pleasure →

This week’s DMTV Milkshake guest is Ti Chang, co-founder and VP of design of San Francisco’s design-centric sex toy company Crave. When Crave’s Duet vibrator debuted in 2011, Chang’s work at the intersection of wellness and technology was a revolutionary presence in both sectors. Her sleek vibrators were high-end, elegant, and discreet at a time when her competition was definitively mid-market; their success pointed investors to the market potential in the woefully underexplored area of women’s sexual pleasure. Crave’s new Duet Pro is the perfect example of that intersection, a chic vibrator that comes with 16 preprogrammed “vibes” – vibrational settings that can also be remixed from scratch via the MyVibes app.

INK MAGAZINE: Embrace Your Pleasure →

For decades, sex toys have been designed to shock and titilate consumers, often mimicking male sex organs and coated in cheap, shiny black vinyl. Only in recent years have toys been created with a sophisticated woman in mind, and Ti Chang was just the designer to bring forth a new class of pleasure products. “I approach our products from the point of view of a woman and that of a trained industrial designer,” shares Chang, the founder of Crave. “This means I care deeply about the experience of a product, physically and emotionally, for a user. How does a woman feel when she sees the product? Does she feel excited or delighted because it’s beautiful? Or does she have to hide the toy in an underwear drawer in fear of someone seeing it?”

SCREENSHOT: Duet Pro is the new customisable sex toy you can assemble at home →

“I think as a designer, you look at things in a different way,” she says. “You know how things could be and should be. You look at the language of an object and you can see the care and the integrity that goes into it. When I looked at the landscape of sex toys, I realised this is really not thought about. Our industry, our culture doesn’t think that women’s pleasure is worthy of serious design and engineering considerations.”

DESIGN MILK: Crave Allows You to Personalize Your Pleasure →

Topics that revolve around words like sex, vibrators and pleasure used to have a heavy stigma attached to them but thankfully these days, people have become more open to the conversation. Rather than blush in shame or embarrassment, we can choose to be uninhibited by our desires, make these conversations a norm, and own our pleasure proudly instead. That’s what Crave wants to do and their latest launch, the Crave Duet Pro coupled with a unique, hands-on Build-A-Vibe experience, can help you do just that.

INPUT: Crave will help you build your own programmable vibrator at home →

The Crave "Build-A-Vibe Airstream lab" at CES allowed people to work with a Crave technician to create a customized version of its Duet vibrator. Now it's taking that same idea to people's own homes by shipping Build-A-Vibe kits to people and allowing them to work with a technician remotely to put it together much like they would in person.

If you thought building puzzles or Lego sets were going to be the pinnacle of your lockdown creation achievements, think again. Now you have the opportunity to create a genuine joy-giving device while also chalking it up as both a lockdown project and an exercise in self-care.

CORE77: Winner Personal Accessory Award Core77 Design Awards 2020 →

Vesper Touch & Tease Rings

Vesper Touch and Tease Rings are finger vibrators designed for both public and private experiences. In private the rings are external clitoral finger vibes for use on the tip of one's finger. While in public, the rings make a bold personal and fashion statement on self-love and pleasure. Designed as a conversation piece, wearers of vibrator jewelry have reported feeling empowered to openly embrace/talking about their innate desire for pleasure, without shame or stigma. Vesper Touch and Tease rings are equally compelling fashion jewelry as well as discreet vibrators.

HONOREE

Ti Chang

• CLIENT

  Crave

• CATEGORY

  Personal Accessory

HUFFPOST: 5 Guys Created An Algorithm To 'Validate The Female Orgasm'. It Went As Well As You'd Expect →

“So far there is no evidence and proof of female orgasm," say the entrepreneurs. Women disagree.

If a woman tells you she has had an orgasm, you shouldn’t trust her. Instead, you should hook her up to an algorithm to see if she’s a big old faker.

This seems to be the not-so-subtle suggestion from a group of five men working in sex tech, who claim to have developed an algorithm that can “validate an authentic female orgasm”.

The tech, designed by a company called Relida Limited, will supposedly help sex toy creators make better sex toys by monitoring a woman’s heartbeat.

The theory, they say, is that an accelerated heartbeat can show that a woman has truly orgasmed – never mind the fact an accelerated heartbeat could signify a number of things, including fear or stress.

According to the designers, “so far there is no evidence and proof of female orgasm” and “there is no reliable way to be sure if a woman has an orgasm”. Asking us, apparently, does not count.

Stu Nugent, a brand manager for the pleasure brand Lelo, was pitched the algorithm, and shared images of the presentation on Twitter. Nugent says he’s used to receiving unsolicited pitches weekly through LinkedIn, but says: “I have never received anything as egregious as this.”

“I was stunned,” he tells HuffPost UK. “I had to do some background to make sure it wasn’t a prank, and having discovered it to be absolutely, unashamedly real, I would have much rather it had been fake.”

In Nugent’s opinion, the pitch has “no redeeming features”.

“Why is ‘female orgasm’ written in a different font, like it was copied and pasted from Wikipedia?” he asks. “Why did they make up the statistic that ’26-74%’ of women have faked an orgasm? Why are there snails [on the presentation]? Why, and I feel I can’t stress this enough, are there snails?”

Nugent says he’s offended by the attitude these pitchers have towards women’s orgasms, but wants to hand the mic over to women to explain why the pitch is so wrong (good man).

Ti Chang, co-founder of sex tech company Crave, described the “male-dacity” of the pitch as “insulting”.

“The premise of their startup is to determine if a woman has actually had an orgasm, because they don’t believe women know their own bodies well enough to determine if they have had an orgasm,” Chang tells HuffPost UK. “They also don’t believe there is scientific proof of the female orgasm. I feel like I’m talking to a flat-earther.”

Chang would like to ask the algorithm designers why they are “trying to fix something that is not broken”.

“A common downfall of many startups is to create solutions for problems that don’t exist,” she adds. “Women don’t need this kind of male saviorism, we’re orgasming just fine without you. Lastly, only boys would reduce a woman’s pleasure to an orgasm.”

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: The Dilemma of Desire': Film Review | SXSW 2020 →

Maria Finitzo’s documentary 'The Dilemma of Desire' uncovers the world of female pleasure and desire.

Producer-director Maria Finitzo’s feature documentary The Dilemma of Desire was robbed, like so many other works, by the coronavirus pandemic of its moment in the spotlight when its premiere at SXSW was cancelled in March. That fate seems extra cruel given that the movie is all about celebrating female sexual pleasure and especially the much-misunderstood clitoris in defiance of patriarchal efforts to silence, stifle and suppress female desire.

So it’s cheering to see this empowering, sex-positive work managing to find some kind of online life in these strange times. Sure, it would probably be even more fun to see the film with a paying audience, whooping it up and asking cheeky questions at post-screening Q&As. But maybe shy, embarrassment-prone viewers will feel more comfortable accessing this frank but essentially feel-good work from the comfort of their locked-down homes.

Well-versed in the ways of humanist, character-centric documentary filmmaking with a strong social-issues flavor (5 Girls, With No Direction Home, In the Game), Finitzo braids together the stories of several women here with deft assistance from editor Liz Kaar. First up on camera, showing how an early edition of the storied medical textbook of Gray’s Anatomy barely even uses the word “clitoris” outside the index, scientist Stacey Dutton deplores how little the medical world engages with this unique organ, the only body part that serves only one purpose: providing sexual pleasure.

Dutton endeavors to help her students understand the little-known physical structure of the clitoris, which only peeks a bit of itself outside the body and looks in total like an upturned four-petalled flower in silhouette. This discussion leads naturally into a conversation with New York City-based conceptual artist Sophia Wallace, who celebrates clitorises in many media, especially sculpture and printing, and whose slogan-skewed “Cliteracy Project” aims to educate and inform with catchy maxims, phrases, interdictions and words to the wise, such as “The hole is not the whole.”

Further out west, gender studies professor Lisa Diamond is seen leading a seminar at a university in Utah, where the class gingerly discusses childhood sexuality and queer identity, among other topics. In San Francisco, industrial designer Ti Chang speaks eloquently about the quest to rethink vibrator design as she fashions desirable, costume jewelry-like objects from metal and silicone material, some with bespoke engraving.

Viewers’ mileage will inevitably vary, but personally, I found the segments about Chang and Wallace’s work the most interesting and absorbing because the two of them are engaged with creating tangible stuff made to be either decorative, didactic and/or utilitarian.

VOGUE: A New Frontier for Self-Love—And Sex Toys—in the Time of COVID-19 →

“As a society, whenever we decide we’re interested in an experience, we use design and engineering to improve on that experience,” says Ti Chang, a Royal College of Art-trained industrial designer and the co-founder of Crave. Wearing one of Crave’s Vesper necklaces isn’t just about having a handy vibrator, she continues. “It’s a way of telling yourself, and the world, I desire—and that’s OK.” A welcome thought, for lonely days.

CNN: How innovative design is reshaping the sex tech industry →

There's long been a dearth of innovative design in the sex tech industry: In the words of Lora Haddock DiCarlo, founder of CES-award winning sex toy company Lora DiCarlo, the field's output throughout 20th century amounted to little more than "the vibrator, over and over again. The same thing in different shades of pink."

Over the past decade, however, a new wave of startups has emerged, creating products that look and operate very differently to the sex toys of old. Companies like Unbound and Dame Products have revamped the sex toy aesthetic, offering sleek, modern designs alongside more familiar phallic options.

Several of Crave's products are designed to be worn as conversation-starting jewelry, while Lora DiCarlo's have replaced vibration with something more akin to human motion, mimicking the touch of a finger or tongue. Some companies, like Tabú, don't center on products at all, instead offering digital resources to teach consumers about sex and wellness.

However, while these products may be new, sex tech is anything but. Unbound CEO Polly Rodriguez, who defined it as "any technology that enhances, aids or supports human sexuality," explained: "It's been around since human beings were around -- the oldest dildo is 30,000 years old."

HYPEBAE: How to Own Your Pleasure →

Getting to know your body can be incredibly empowering.

Ladies, the cards are stacked against one of our most fundamental human rights: our right to experience sexual pleasure.

Pleasure, especially women’s pleasure, is a stigmatized topic. Example A: In 2019, CES — the world’s largest tech trade show — rescinded an innovation award given to a vibrator company, claiming the winning product “profane” and “immoral.” The Consumer Technology Association, the show and award’s organizer, later gave it back with an apology, and finally allowed women’s sex tech products to officially exhibit on the show floor for the first time in 2020.

Many tech companies still have an archaic attitude towards women’s pleasure, deeming it “inappropriate.” Some wouldn’t allow a doctor to promote her own book, The Vagina Bible, because it has the anatomically-correct word “vagina” in the title. The advertising policies of social media platforms prevent us at Crave from marketing our female pleasure products to new audiences, and yet Viagra is granted these permissions.

Given these attitudes, can you blame women for feeling guilt and shame for wanting pleasure? Can you blame women for not knowing about their own anatomy or pleasure spots when the full anatomy of the clitoris was not even fully documented until 1998?

I don’t blame them, but I do know that in 2020, it’s time women start owning their pleasure.

Over the last 10 years of building a modern sex toy company for women, I’ve learned that there is no right or wrong way to do this. Your preference, interest or curiosity may be different than that of your friends and lovers, but that does not mean it is any less valid or important.

Pleasure is a personal journey that starts with yourself and it will likely change over time. It taps into your curiosities, your desires and your comfort zone, but you have to first give yourself permission and the space to explore your pleasure. My friend and certified intimacy educator Shan Boodram agrees. “I think people can give themselves permission to explore their pleasure by being okay with where they currently are and starting there,” she says.

“I often find that sexual repression and the sexual pressure to ‘open up’ often boil down to the same end result: people feeling like there is something wrong with their sexuality. In truth, where you are is where you’re meant to be, so feel good about that space and challenge yourself to take small risks to expand outside of your comfort zone.”