LONDON — One half of Gabriel Ann Maher’s hair is cut short, and the other half has been left to grow long. “If I wear it up with a blunt fringe, I look like one person, but with the hair down and my fringe swept away from my face, I look completely different and someone always says: ‘Oh! You look so feminine,”’ Maher said. “That’s why I have asymmetric hair — it allows me to be several people.”

An Australian designer now living in the Dutch city Eindhoven, Maher is one of the growing number of people who regard themselves as neither male nor female, but as having a fluid gender identity. Gender politics is a central theme of Maher’s work. A recent project analyzed the depiction of gender in a year’s issues of the Dutch design magazine “Frame,” and discovered that more than 80 percent of the people, mostly designers and architects, photographed in its editorial pages and the models in the advertisements were male.

At a time of renewed interest in feminism and growing awareness of transgenderism, designers are striving to imbue products, graphics, environments and technology with subtler, more eclectic interpretations of gender both in commercial projects and conceptual ones like Maher’s. What will the outcome be?

Until recently, most design experiments in gender identity focused on clothing and other aspects of personal styling that can be customized easily and inexpensively, like hair. This spring, the British retail group Selfridges opened dedicated spaces selling gender-neutral fashion in several department stores. But reflecting diverse interpretations of gender in other areas of design has proved more challenging, not least because they often involve the development of expensive, technologically complex objects whose design has traditionally been standardized to facilitate mass production.