Few devices are as crucial to people’s everyday lives as their household appliances. Electrical engineer Erika Cruz says it’s her mission to make sure they operate smoothly.

Cruz helps design washing machines and dryers for Whirlpool, the multinational appliance manufacturer.

Erika Cruz

Employer:

Whirlpool

Occupation:

Associate electrical engineer

Education:

Bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering, Industrial University of Santander, in Bucaramanga, Colombia

As a member of the electromechanical components team at Whirlpool’s research and engineering center in Benton Harbor, Mich., she oversees the development of timers, lid locks, humidity sensors, and other components.

More engineering goes into the machines than is obvious. Because the appliances are sold around the world, she says, they must comply with different technical and safety standards and environmental conditions. And reliability is key.

“If the washer’s door lock gets stuck and your clothes are inside, your whole day is going to be a mess,” she says.

While appliances can be taken for granted, Cruz loves that her work contributes in its own small way to the quality of life of so many.

“I love knowing that every time I’m working on a new design, the lives of millions of people will be improved by using it,” she says.

From Industrial Design to Electrical Engineering

Cruz grew up in Bucaramanga, Colombia, where her father worked as an electrical engineer, designing control systems for poultry processing plants. Her childhood home was full of electronics, and Cruz says her father taught her about technology. He paid her to organize his resistors, for example, and asked her to create short videos for work presentations about items he was designing. He also took Cruz and her sister along with him to the processing plants.

“We would go and see how the big machines worked,” she says. “It was very impressive because of their complexity and impact. That’s how I got interested in technology.”

In 2010, Cruz enrolled in Colombia’s Industrial University of Santander, in Bucaramanga, to study industrial design. But she quickly became disenchanted with the course’s focus on designing objects like fancy tables and ergonomic chairs.

“I wanted to design huge machines like my father did,” she says.

A teacher suggested that she study mechanical engineering instead. But her father was concerned about discrimination she might face in that career.

“He told me it would be difficult to get a job in the industry because mechanical engineers work with heavy machinery, and they saw women as being fragile,” Cruz says.

Her father thought electrical engineers would be more receptive to women, so she switched fields.

“I am very glad I ended up studying electronics because you can apply it to so many different fields,” Cruz says. She received a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering in 2019.

The Road to America

While at university, Cruz signed up for a program that allowed Colombian students to work summer jobs in the United States. She held a variety of summer positions in Galveston, Texas, from 2017 to 2019, including cashier, housekeeper, and hostess.

She met her future husband in 2018, an American working at the same amusement park as she did. When she returned the following summer, they started dating, and that September they married. Since she had already received her degree, he was eager for her to move to the states permanently, but she made the difficult decision to return to Colombia.

“With the language barrier and my lack of engineering experience, I knew if I stayed in the United States, I would have to continue working jobs like housekeeping forever,” she says. “So I told my husband he had to wait for me because I was going back home to get some engineering experience.”

“I love knowing that every time I’m working on a new design, the lives of millions of people will be improved by using it.”

Cruz applied for engineering jobs in neighboring Brazil, which had more opportunities than Colombia did. In 2021, she joined Whirlpool as an electrical engineer at its R&D site in Joinville, Brazil. There, she introduced into mass production sensors and actuators provided by new suppliers.

Meanwhile, she applied for a U.S. Green Card, which would allow her to work and live permanently in the country. She received it six months after starting her job. Cruz asked her manager about transferring to one of Whirlpool’s U.S. facilities, not expecting to have any luck. Her manager set up a phone call with the manager of the components team at the company’s Benton Harbor site to discuss the request. Cruz didn’t realize that the call was actually a job interview. She was offered a position there as an electrical engineer and moved to Michigan later that year.

Designing Appliances Is Complex

Designing a new washing machine or dryer is a complex process, Cruz says. First, feedback from customers about desirable features is used to develop a high-level design. Then the product design work is divided among small teams of engineers, each responsible for a given subsystem, including hardware, software, materials, and components.

Part of Cruz’s job is to test components from different suppliers to make sure they meet safety, reliability, and performance requirements. She also writes the documentation that explains to other engineers about the components’ function and design.

Cruz then helps select the groups of components to be used in a particular application—combining, say, three temperature sensors with two humidity sensors in an optimized location to create a system that finds the best time to stop the dryer.

Building a Supportive Environment

Cruz loves her job, but her father’s fears about her entering a male-dominated field weren’t unfounded. Discrimination was worse in Colombia, she says, where she regularly experienced inappropriate comments and behavior from university classmates and teachers.

Even in the United States, she points out, “As a female engineer, you have to actually show you are able to do your job, because occasionally at the beginning of a project men are not convinced.”

In both Brazil and Michigan, Cruz says, she’s been fortunate to often end up on teams with a majority of women, who created a supportive environment. That support was particularly important when she had her first child and struggled to balance work and home life.

“It’s easier to talk to women about these struggles,” she says. “They know how it feels because they have been through it too.”

Update Your Knowledge

Working in the consumer electronics industry is rewarding, Cruz says. She loves going into a store or visiting someone’s home and seeing the machines that she’s helped build in action.

A degree in electronics engineering is a must for the field, Cruz says, but she’s also a big advocate of developing project management and critical thinking skills. She is a certified associate in project management, granted by the Project Management Institute, and has been trained in using tools that facilitate critical thinking. She says the project management program taught her how to solve problems in a more systematic way and helped her stand out in interviews.

It’s also important to constantly update your knowledge, Cruz says, “because electronics is a discipline that doesn’t stand still. Keep learning. Electronics is a science that is constantly growing.”

In 1993, well before Google Glass debuted, the artist Lisa Krohn designed a prototype wearable computer that looked like no other. The Cyberdesk was an experiment in augmented reality. At a time when computers were mostly beige and boxy, Krohn envisioned a pliable, high-tech garment that fused fashion with function.

Krohn studied art and architectural history at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) before completing an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., in 1988. With the Cyberdesk, she tapped into a cultural moment in which artists, techies, writers, and others were celebrating the convergence of humans and machines and eagerly anticipating our cyborg future.

What is Lisa Krohn’s Cyberdesk?

Although a working prototype of the Cyberdesk was never built, the yellow eyepiece suggested a retinal display.Lisa Krohn and Christopher Myers

The Cyberdesk, made of resin, plastic, metal, and glass, was meant to be worn like a necklace. The four circles along the breastbone are a four-key keyboard with a large trackball at the top center; the user would use the keyboard and trackball to make selections from menus of options. A small microphone lies against the throat, and an earpiece hooks into the left ear. Krohn imagined the yellow tube in front of the right eye as a retinal scan display that would project a laser beam directly onto the back of the eye, creating a screen centered in the user’s field of vision. In the back, there is a port suggestive of some type of neural link. The Cyberdesk was intended to run on energy harvested from the body’s movement and the sun.

A port on the back of the Cyberdesk was intended as a neural link.Lisa Krohn and Christopher Myers

Krohn, along with Chris Myers, a student at the Art Center School of Design, made two models of the Cyberdesk, but it was never turned into a working prototype. The underlying technology wasn’t there yet, although there were engineers who were experimenting with similar ideas. For example, Krohn knew about work on virtual retinal displays at the University of Washington’s Human Interface Technology Laboratory, but she didn’t pursue a collaboration.

And so Krohn’s design existed as “strategic foresight, speculative technology, predictive design, or design fiction,” she told me in a recent email. Krohn imagined a possible future, one in which, as she notes on her company’s website, “person and machine merge into one seamless collaborative super-being!” In other words, a cyborg.

The Cyberdesk wasn’t the only piece of cyborg gear that Krohn designed. In 1988, before the age of smartphones and Web searches, she imagined a wrist computer that combined satellite navigation, a phone, a wristwatch, and a regional information guide. Made of a flexible plastic, it could be folded up and worn as a decorative cuff when not being used as a computer.

Lisa Krohn also designed a flexible wrist computer that could be folded up when not in use. Lisa Krohn

Krohn designed the wrist computer prototype before “wearable” became a common way to refer to a portable device that incorporates computer technology. Futurist Paul Saffo is credited with first using the term “wearable computer” in an article in InfoWorld in 1991. Saffo predicted the first wearables would be worn on the belts of maintenance workers and then be extended to deskless, information-intensive tasks, such as conducting store inventories. He also suggested a game console consisting of a tiny display integrated into sunglasses and paired with a power glove. Nowhere did he consider technology as a fashion accessory, and I suspect he wasn’t even considering women when he made his predictions.

Meanwhile, Steve Mann was working on ideas for mediated vision as a graduate student at MIT. Mann was first inspired to build a better welding mask that would protect the welder’s eyes from the bright electric arc while still allowing a clear view. This led him to think about how to use video cameras, displays, and computers to modify vision in real time. Both Krohn and Mann ran into similar real-world challenges: cellphones, the Internet, civilian GPS, and online databases were still in their infancy, and the hardware was heavy and clunky. While Mann built boxy functional prototypes that he demoed on himself, Krohn imagined more speculative technology.

Each “page” of the Krohn’s phonebook represents a separate function—dial phone, answering machine, and printer. Lisa Krohn, Sigmar Willnauer, and Tony Guido

Krohn also worked on utilitarian business technologies. In 1987, she designed a prototype for the phonebook, an integrated phone with answering machine and printer. Each “page” of the phonebook had its own function, and an electric switch automatically changed to that function as the page was flipped, with instructions printed on the page. That intuitive design was in sharp contrast to most answering machines of the time, which were clunky and not particularly easy to use.

The phonebook was an example of “product semantics,” which holds that a product’s design should help the user understand the product’s function and meaning. At Cranbrook, Krohn studied under Michael and Katherine McCoy, who embraced that theory of design. Krohn and Michael McCoy wrote about that aspect of the phonebook in their 1989 essay “Beyond Beige: Interpretive Design for the Post-Industrial Age”: “The casting of [a] personal electronic device into the mold of [a] personal agenda is an attempt to make a product reach out to its users by informing them about how it operates, where it resides, and how it fits into their lives.”

Lisa Krohn championed cyberfeminism and cyborgs

Lisa Krohn designed the Cyberdesk in 1993, at a time when wearable computers existed mainly in science fiction. Dietmar Quistorf

The Cyberdesk as well as the wrist computer were early examples of designs influenced by cyberfeminism. This feminist movement emerged in the early 1990s as a counter to the dominance of men in computing, gaming, and various Internet spaces. It built on feminist science fiction, such as the writings of Octavia Butler, Vonda McIntyre, and Joanna Russ, as well as the work of hackers, coders, and media artists. Different threads of cyberfeminism developed around the world, especially in Australia, Germany, and the United States. While mainstream depictions of cyborgs continued to tilt masculine, cyberfeminists challenged the patriarchy by experimenting with genderless ideas of cyborgs and recombinants that melded machines, plants, humans, and animals.

The feminist theorist and historian of technology Donna Haraway kindled this cyborgian drift through her 1985 essay, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” published in the Socialist Review. She argued that as the end of the 20th century approached, we were all becoming cyborgs due to the breakdown of lines dividing humans and machines. Her cyborg theory hinged on communication, and she saw cyborgs as a potential solution that allowed for a fluidity of both language and identity. The essay is considered one of the foundational texts in cyberfeminism, and it was republished in Haraway’s 1990 book, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.

Krohn imagined a possible future, one in which “person and machine merge into one seamless collaborative super-being!” In other words, a cyborg.

Krohn and McCoy’s 1989 essay also highlighted communication as a central problem in modern design. Mainstream consumer electronics, they argued, had reached a monotonous uniformity of design that favored manufacturing efficiency over conveying the product’s intended function.

Both Haraway and Krohn saw opportunities for technology, especially microelectronics, to challenge the restrictions of the past. By embracing the cyborg, both women found new ways to overcome the limits of language and communication and to forge new directions in feminism.

Cyberdesk 2.0

I had the privilege of meeting Lisa Krohn when she participated in a roundtable on the Cyberdesk at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology. The assembled group, which included curators and conservators from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (each of which has a Cyberdesk prototype in its collection), considered a possible Cyberdesk version 2.0. What would be different if Krohn were designing it today?

In 2023, Krohn reimagined the Cyberdesk. It now incorporates technology that hadn’t been available 30 years earlier, such as sensors to monitor brainwaves, hydration, and stress levels.Duvit Mark Kakunegoda

The group focused their discussion around the idea of “design futuring,” a concept promoted by Tony Fry in his 2009 book of the same name. Design futuring is a way to actively shape the future, rather than passively trying to predict it and then reacting after the fact. Fry describes how design futuring could be used to promote sustainability.

In the case of the Cyberdesk 2.0, a focus on sustainability might lead to a different choice of materials. The original resin provided a malleable material that could mold to the contours of the body. But its long-term stability is terrible. Despite best practices in conservation, the Cyberdesk will likely turn into a goopy mess in the not-too-distant future. (In a previous column, I wrote about a transistorized music box owned by John Bardeen that suffers from the same basic problem of decaying materials, which in curatorial circles is known as “inherent vice.”)

The panelists considered alternatives like biomaterials, and they discussed the entire product life cycle, the challenges of electronic waste, and the mining of rare earth elements. They wondered how the design process and the global supply chain might change if such factors were considered from the start, rather than as problems to be solved later.

These are just a few of the ideas that percolated while historians, artists, curators, and conservators considered the Cyberdesk. Now imagine if a few engineers were also present. To me, that would have been a really worthwhile discussion. Not only can art unlock creative design and push innovations in new directions, it also allows us to reflect on technology in daily life. And artists can learn from engineers about new materials, technologies, and possibilities. Working together, technology and design no longer need the modifiers speculative and predictive. Engineers and artists can create the future reality.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the July 2024 print issue as “The Wearable Computer as Bling.”

References​

I first learned about Lisa Krohn’s Cyberdesk and design theory at the Society for the History of Technology’s conference in Los Angeles in 2023, during the session “Revisiting Lisa Krohn’s Cyberdesk (1993), a cyberfeminist concept model.”

Both the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art have featured their respective Cyberdesks in exhibits and online articles. Note that the difference in the colors—SFMOMA’s is white, while Cooper Hewitt’s is brown—is due to the instability of the plastics and resin, as well as variations in the materials.

As I considered Krohn’s cyborg designs, I couldn’t help but recall Donna Haraway’s classic essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” a foundational text in cyberfeminism. Forty years on, we are more cyborgian than Haraway originally posited. Her challenges to traditional notions of identity still resonate with today’s nuanced discussions of gender. Addressing algorithmic bias and generative AI training may be a new frontier for cyberfeminism.