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AS I approach Justine Cassell鈥檚 office, I can hear giggling. Originally trained in linguistics, Cassell is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology鈥檚 renowned Media Lab, applying her knowledge of human communication to improving the way we interact with computers. But it鈥檚 obvious she doesn鈥檛 quite fit the computer nerd stereotype. On her door hangs a picture of a dancing Barbie doll. I have to breach a makeshift dog gate to get into the office, and once I鈥檓 inside, her fluffy collie Esme rubs up against my legs. Having shaken off Esme鈥檚 attentions, I look up to find a variety of faces鈥攕ome human, some definitely not鈥攕miling at me. I鈥檓 meeting the designers and the designs for the next generation of human-computer interfaces. And gosh, they鈥檙e girlie.

No one ever said you had to be a bespectacled man to design ground-breaking technology but鈥攗ntil recently鈥攊t helped. If Cassell鈥檚 office is anything to go by, that is set to change. It鈥檚 full of cute and cuddly ideas, dreamed up by a new technological elite that is not ashamed to be feminine.

I bet I鈥檝e raised some hackles already. Why should the gender of a technologist make any difference to what he or she designs? Well, technology design isn鈥檛 pure science. The personality and ideals of the designer strongly affect it鈥攁nd there, gender plays a role. If you don鈥檛 believe me, ask Cornelia Brunner at the Center for Children and Technology in New York. She investigates gender differences and similarities. In one study, she asks boys and girls to design a machine of their choice. The results are striking, she says. Girls generally design flexible helpers for tasks鈥攆or example, the 鈥渟eason chore-doer鈥�, a machine that clears snow in the winter and leaves in the autumn. Boys, on the other hand, typically invent powerful vehicles that do outlandish things like taking them instantaneously wherever they wanted to go, with names like 鈥渢he twin valve seven booster class 4 rocket鈥�.

Brunner finds the same patterns in adults. In one study, she ran computer interviews with 60 men and women working in a range of high-tech fields. One of the questions asked people to describe their ideal technological instrument. Women went for small flexible objects that facilitate social contact: jewellery that enables people to locate each other, for example. Men were more interested in transcending the physical limitations of their brains and bodies. They imagined things like having a socket in the back of their head that connects them to the whole of human history. Brunner has carried out research into gender divisions in a range of issues: attitudes to career, money, family and so on. 鈥淲e get a certain amount of overlap on all issues鈥攅xcept the technological fantasy questions, where we get enormously clear differences,鈥� she says.

Her finding matters because women are now penetrating the world of technology design to the point where they can bring their fantasies with them. Taking computer science as a representative discipline, figures from the National Center for Education Statistics in Washington DC show the percentage of computer science doctorates awarded to women in the US has almost doubled in 15 years: these days, 20 per cent of the recipients are female. This is still a minority, but unlike the first generation of female technologists, today鈥檚 women have the advantage of female role models and tend not to suppress their femininity in order to make it in their chosen industry.

Take Cassell鈥檚 student Catherine Vaucelle, for example. Enter her website and you鈥檙e greeted by butterflies, hearts, flowers and a bluebird sitting on a pink mailbox. And when, in Cassell鈥檚 office, I meet visiting Mattel toy designer Emily Kelly, she鈥檚 sporting a black lace cap, matching skirt and bright red locks. She unabashedly provides evidence that you can be techie and girlie at the same time. 鈥淚 like dolls,鈥� she tells me. 鈥淚 like sparky things.鈥� Then she giggles, as if I need any more convincing.

So what does this mean? What happens when women finally get the chance to design technology that interests them? It means that the design of toys, games, mobile phones and computers鈥攁nything that might contain a microchip鈥攊s going to be approached from a whole new direction.

The result of this is gadgets that have a wider appeal than anything ever designed before. Take Kismet, for example. This cute, blue-eyed machine has only one function: to pull faces in response to the person looking at it. 鈥淭here鈥檚 no way in a million years a man would have designed something like Kismet,鈥� says Eliot Mack, an engineer at iRobot, based not far from the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He thinks Kismet is terrific, he adds quickly.

Kismet鈥檚 designer is Cynthia Breazeal, a colleague of Cassell鈥檚 at the Media Lab. She used to work on more macho projects, such as developing autonomous roving robots. But after several years she decided to do something different. 鈥淚 saw the Apple Mac advert鈥斺�檆omputers for the rest of us鈥�. Well, I decided that I would make robots for the rest of us,鈥� she says.

By that she doesn鈥檛 mean solely for women. Most of the funding for robotics comes from the military or NASA, so almost all robots are designed simply for getting dangerous and difficult stuff done. Aesth-etics and social skills are nowhere on the design criteria. 鈥淏ut if the field was genuinely open, you鈥檇 have all kinds of people, and all kinds of robots,鈥� she says.

Breazeal鈥檚 inspiration for Kismet came from her conviction that if untrained 鈥渞egular folk鈥� were ever going to have robots, their natural instinct would be to treat them like pets. So she decided to see whether she could use this to her advantage: could a robot鈥檚 learning processes be helped by this kind of social interaction?

Developmental psychologists believe that children begin to learn language as they interact with their parents, who are trying to interpret their offspring鈥檚 random gestures and grimaces. Kismet has movable facial features that can express basic emotional states that resemble those of a human infant, and can make it clear whether it needs more or less stimulation. Most recently, Kismet has been endowed with basic voice recognition, a squeaky voice and a desire to communicate. Although it鈥檚 not clear if the robot is intelligent鈥攊n robotic terms鈥攊ts behaviour is sufficiently complex to give the impression that it is learning how best to interact and communicate with people. Kismet has shown that it possible to get even the gruffest humans to project feelings and intelligence onto an inanimate object. 鈥淧eople find it so compelling they鈥檙e almost suspicious of it,鈥� says Breazeal.

Breazeal is not convinced by Mack鈥檚 assertion that a man couldn鈥檛 have come up with the Kismet concept, but she does think that changing the social make-up of technologists will have a positive, and possibly surprising, effect on the way technology is designed. Female input to military simulations, for example, is changing the way the US military use their technology (see 鈥淭alk 鈥檈m down, don鈥檛 shoot鈥檈m up鈥�). And Cassell鈥檚 lab at MIT backs that idea up too: the toys and interfaces I found there are like nothing I鈥檝e ever seen before.

Cassell鈥檚 projects include Animal Blocks, a magical book that prompts children to improve their stories as they write them into a word processor, and Sam, a virtual friend who comments as children play with a toy castle, encouraging them to concentrate on essential literacy skills. For adults, she鈥檚 produced Rea, a virtual real-estate agent with body language who quizzes people about their needs and understands their verbal and non-verbal responses well enough to respond and show them around properties.

Vaucelle, who works just around the corner from Cassell, is also interested in designing interactive storytelling toys that help young children, both boys and girls, to develop their story-telling skills. She鈥檚 come up with 鈥淒olltalk鈥�, in which an alien doll called Zia learns about Earth by watching and talking to children as they play with stuffed dolls. The tangled speech of young children is voice-recognition software鈥檚 worst nightmare, so instead of trying to understand the children, Zia works by cutting and pasting what children say, warping the voice, and playing it back to them. The feedback prompts children to give more explanation about what鈥檚 happening in the game, helping to improve their cognitive processes and their command of language.

I spent a pleasant few minutes playing with Dolltalk and explaining some things to Zia. It dropped my voice a few octaves, slowed me down, and cut and pasted what I said into passable grammatical sentences of its own. It made me laugh, but I still have a complaint: with its stuffed dolls and sappy name, Dolltalk is just too girlie for my taste. I鈥檓 one of the many women who remember pulling Barbie鈥檚 head off as a girl.

Vaucelle is aware that not all girls are girlie. Since my visit she tells me she has changed Dolltalk, allowing children to create their own puppet monsters to play with. Despite the lab鈥檚 feminine frills, creating entertainment and educational technology that is free of any obvious gender is high on these researchers鈥� list of priorities. Although technology has almost always been designed exclusively by men for men, Cassell doesn鈥檛 think the right response is just to create technology by women for women.

Making things equally appealing to boys and girls is not a new idea to the makers of toys and games: they want to widen the potential market as much as possible. But until fairly recently, companies have often relied on feedback from customer focus groups to get an idea of what female-friendly products might be. It鈥檚 a strategy that鈥檚 failed: focus groups cut no ice with male engineers, Kelly says. When women in focus groups describe what they want, male engineers are liable to shake their heads and suck their teeth. If it鈥檚 not an immediately solvable problem, and they don鈥檛 understand the motivation for solving it, they tend to say it鈥檚 impossible鈥攐r at least impossible to do cheaply.

What is needed is female engineers who, like Cassell, Vaucelle, Breazeal and Kelly, are willing to stand out from the crowd. When Sony decided to bring out girlier versions of its Aibo robotic dog, it had to get women on board. 鈥淭he Aibo 鈥楲atte鈥� and 鈥楳acaron鈥� were mainly designed by a female designer,鈥� says Aki Shimazu of Sony in Tokyo. Mattel now employs a mix of male and female designers and sponsors research groups such as Cassell鈥檚. This, the company believes, is the best way to ensure they are bringing gender-free (and thus highly profitable) technology toys to market.

This is not to say that all male designers are gun-toting speed freaks. In fact, men have been responsible for what are probably the two most female-friendly (and hugely successful) computer games in history. It鈥檚 17 years since the Russian mathematician Alexey Pajitnov designed the game Tetris. Men and women played it in almost equal numbers. At a time when 99 per cent of game buyers were men, this was astonishing, and sparked the first effort to make games that interested women (see 鈥淕o girl鈥�).

This change in mindset eventually spawned a project called 鈥淒ollhouse鈥�. Players create people and houses, look after their needs and desires, and control their social interactions. The game proved a hit with men and women alike and has become the biggest-selling PC game in history.

You may already have guessed that the original name didn鈥檛 stick, and Dollhouse was renamed 鈥淭he Sims鈥�. The man behind it is Will Wright of California-based Maxis Software, and his approach is doing more than just producing huge-selling 鈥渋nclusive鈥� games. It鈥檚 changing the face of the industry. Because they like the games, female designers are drawn towards Maxis, and 40 per cent of the company鈥檚 designers are women.

As these women鈥攁nd others joining the industry鈥攇ain influence, gadgets should lose their macho, 鈥渢oys for the boys鈥� image, and attract yet more women. Mack thinks the new girl-tech bandwagon is unstoppable. 鈥淚 can鈥檛 wait to see what women are going to do with technology in future,鈥� he says. But will there be any hint of a different gender discrimination? Will top engineers increasingly have to be women? Mack pushes his glasses back on his nose and shrugs. 鈥淵ou won鈥檛 have to be,鈥� he says, 鈥渂ut it鈥檒l help.鈥�