Why do Siri, Alexa, and Cortana have women’s names and voices? The question opens the exhibition Women as Technology, which the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm opens on February 18, 2027, and leads straight into a design history in which computers, kitchen appliances, and robots have been gendered. The exhibition showcases more than a hundred objects, many of them images: archival photographs, film stills, and graphics. This makes it interesting for anyone considering a technology history poster for their wall, and here we review what the exhibition shows, where the images come from, and which motifs work at home.
Quick facts: Women as Technology, subtitled with references to calculators, housewives, breeding machines, and pleasure robots, is on view at the Nationalmuseum, Södra Blasieholmshamnen 2, from February 18 to September 19, 2027. The exhibition was produced in collaboration with the Design Museum Den Bosch in the Netherlands and adapted by the Nationalmuseum. It features more than a hundred design and technology objects, including a 1946 photograph of ENIAC programmers Marlyn Wescoff and Ruth Lichterman and a still from the film Ex Machina (2014).
Siri, Alexa, and Cortana: the exhibition that begins with a voice
The Nationalmuseum describes Women as Technology as a design exhibition about how applied science, engineering, and technology “are far from neutral tools.” It begins with a question many have asked without getting an answer: why do our digital assistants often sound like women? From there, the exhibition draws a line back in time and forward to the present, through automated looms and programming pioneers, kitchen appliances and dancing robots, anatomical models, imaginary girlfriends, therapeutic chatbots, and ironic housewives.
The subtitle summarizes four roles assigned to women in the history of technology: calculators, housewives, breeding machines, and pleasure robots. It’s a weighty subject for a state museum, and that’s precisely why the exhibition is one of the more anticipated additions to Stockholm this year. The question the museum poses to visitors at the end is direct: who shapes the technology and machines around us, and for what purpose?
For anyone putting together art at home, there’s a practical lesson here. The exhibition is built from images already part of our shared visual culture - advertising photographs, scientific archival images, science fiction scenes. It’s the same kind of material many modern posters are based on, which explains why a technology history poster can hang beside a classic lithograph without looking out of place.
ENIAC 1946: Six Women Programmers History Almost Forgot
One of the named objects in the exhibition is a 1946 photograph of Marlyn Wescoff and Ruth Lichterman, two of ENIAC’s six female programmers. ENIAC was one of the world’s first electronic computers and was presented to the public at the University of Pennsylvania in February 1946. The six women who programmed it were Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman. They programmed it by connecting wires and manually setting switches, since there was not yet a programming language.
For a long time, their work was described as a kind of office job, not engineering, and in press photos from the unveiling, they were sometimes referred to as models posing beside the machine. This is the kind of history that Women as Technology aims to bring to light. The image of Wescoff and Lichterman is also interesting as a subject: archival photographs from computing’s early days have the clean, high-contrast visual language often found in black-and-white photography, and they show people up close with a machine larger than the room it stood in.
"The word computer first meant a person. When the machine took over the name, the people who had borne it disappeared from the history books."
"Girl hours" and the Jacquard loom: the long history of women in computing
The exhibition explores the phenomenon known in computing’s early days as "girl hours" - a way of measuring computing capacity by the number of hours female computers spent working. The term shows how human effort could be converted into a technical unit, and how the work became invisible when it was renamed from women’s tasks to machine capacity. Before electronics, a "computer" was a person who performed mathematical calculations by hand, and in many laboratories and observatories, women did the work.
The story goes back even further. The Jacquard loom, designed in France around 1804, was controlled by punched cards and became a model for the early computer concept of programmable instructions. In 1843, mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the notes often considered the first computer program, and she herself compared Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine to the Jacquard loom. In Sweden, there is a parallel in the textile industry, where women worked at looms long before anyone spoke of technology as a male domain.
There is therefore a long thread from the loom to the computer, and it is almost always tied to women’s work. The exhibition traces that thread through objects rather than lectures, which is why it suits a museum like the Nationalmuseum, which has long collected both art and design.
Ex Machina and the invented girlfriend: the film that makes the question visible
The still from Ex Machina (2014), directed by Alex Garland and shot by Rob Hardy, is another of the exhibition's named images. The film is about a programmer who must decide whether a robot named Ava can think, and it asks the same question as the exhibition: what happens when a machine is designed as a young woman, and who decided it should look that way? The film's scenes are composed in a cool style, with glass, concrete and soft artificial light, and the images have developed their own aesthetic, which many recognize without having seen the film.
It matters when choosing wall art. The science fiction aesthetic from the 1970s onward – chrome surfaces, symmetry, clean shapes – appears in many posters, even when the images don't depict a robot. Those who like the style can find it in graphic designs with geometric shapes, retro-futuristic illustrations and black-and-white photography featuring industrial settings. Our guide to retro and vintage posters describes how eras such as the 1950s space age and 1980s computer graphics influenced poster art.
The history of technology on your wall: black and white, graphic and retro
Hanging a poster about the history of technology isn't the same as hanging a museum object, but the grammar is the same: choose images that tell a story, and let them be seen. Three visual themes are especially useful. The first is archival photography, where black-and-white images of people at machines give a room historical depth. Black-and-white posters work with almost any color scheme and are especially well suited to a home office, hallway or living room where the wall is otherwise dominated by color.
The second strand is graphic design. Graphic posters with clean lines, halftone dots and grids connect to early computer graphics, where images were built from dots and lines because screens couldn't do more. The third strand is retro and vintage posters, where advertisements and product posters from the 1950s and 1960s show how technological aids for the home were marketed – often with a smiling woman at the stove or vacuum cleaner, exactly the kind of image the exhibition questions.
Irony as a method
The exhibition uses irony, and you can do the same at home. A 1950s kitchen image with text about the perfect housewife takes on a different meaning in a modern kitchen than it did in an advertising brochure of its time. Humorous posters can likewise take the edge off serious subjects. The combination of a period image and a modern frame, without explaining anything, is often what makes guests stop and ask questions.
Tip: Hang a black-and-white archival image in 50x70 above the desk and a colorful graphic image in 30x40 beside it. The difference in scale and color creates a rhythm that the eye reads as a story, while the images together give the room both a historical and a modern voice.
One way to think about it is to look at what’s actually visible in the image. A good technology poster usually has a human figure, a machine, and a clear contrast between them. That’s why the ENIAC photograph works so well: the women are small, the machine is large, and that very difference in scale tells the story of the power relationship without a single caption. When you look for images for your own wall, you can try the same test – can you read a story in the image even if you remove the title?
You can also let the exhibition’s theme guide an entire wall. Mix an archival photograph, a graphic poster with geometric shapes, and a humorous image, keep them in the same frame color, and leave three to five centimeters between the frames. The result is a little timeline running from the loom to the screen, and it works just as well in a home office as in a hallway where visitors have time to look at the images while taking off their shoes.
Practical choices: formats, rooms, and frames for technology-themed images
The home office is the most obvious room for the history of technology. A black-and-white photograph in 50x70 with a wide mat works well there, hung at seated eye level, which is usually around 110 to 120 centimeters above the floor. Read more in our guide to posters for home offices, which covers how art on the wall behind your desk affects concentration.
In the hallway, you can use the image as an introduction: a single large poster that greets visitors and tells them what you’re interested in. A tall 70x100 format suits a narrow wall, and a black wooden frame adds weight to an otherwise gray image. In a teenager’s room, science fiction-inspired graphic images work well, while in the bedroom you should take a calmer approach, since technical images with lots of lines can feel unsettling in the evening.
For frames, black or oak are the safest choices for black-and-white and graphic prints. Choose a warm-white mat when the image is an archival photo, as this creates the museum-like feel that the exhibition itself is built around. If you want to combine several images, stick to the same frame color and vary the sizes, so the gallery wall has a shared visual language even though the images differ.
Frequently asked questions about Women as Technology and technology-themed art
If you want to bring the exhibition’s subject home without copying it, start with a single image that poses a question: an archival photo, a graphic print, or a humorous poster that makes the viewer think. Find more inspiration among our photographic art posters, and Nationalmuseum presents the exhibition on its own exhibition page.