The more I think about the idea of household appliances that communicate how much has been done with them and by whom, the more I doubt that it is a viable approach to self-consciousness of gender relations.

A practical starting point I just thought of was doing fieldwork in homes to understand the dynamics of how household labor gets coordinated and allocated. A specific observation from my own life is that people can get out of housework by emphasizing their incompetence. (In my mom's case, she sometimes emphasizes her importance by emphasizing my incompetence. :) ) So what's the problem? Are the tools not usable or learnable? Does knowledge of applicance operations strike a blow to some's masculinity? Could you make household appliances more like a game to motivate participation?

Overall, what are ways that household appliance design assumes a certain kind of commited, regular user or a user who learns how to use it through socialization rather than experience and experimentation?