Innovation Spring 2016: Women in Design

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

Women in Design FRICTION

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PIONEERS

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SWAINSON

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The quarterly publication of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), INNOVATION provides in-depth coverage of design issues and long-term trends while communicating the value of design to business and society at large.

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WOMEN IN DESIGN 29 Celebrating & Reflecting on Change

By Nancy Perkins, FIDSA; Issue co-edited

by Ti Chang, IDSA

32 Insights that Lead to Customer Love: Designing with a Difference

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26 High School Design and Engineering: Full STEAM Ahead

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IN EVERY ISSUE

Crown Equipment, New Bremen, OH

38 Design Needs More Female Leaders: Own the Challenge

4 Chair’s Report

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By John Barratt, IDSA

Eastman Chemical Co., Kingsport, TN

By Angela E. Yeh, IDSA

6 IDSA HQ

Jerome Caruso Design Inc., Lake Forest, IL

42 Bite-Size Progress

By Daniel Martinage, CAE

By Marti Barletta

By Jasmine Burton

45 Eva Zeisel 46 Reflections on Learning, Designing and Teaching

By Joyce Thomas, IDSA, and

9 From the Editor

By Mark Dziersk, FIDSA

10 Corrections

Metaphase Design Group Inc., St. Louis, MO

12 Letter to the Editor 14 Design Defined

By Jeff Smith

50 A Crooked Path to Career Advancement

16 Beautility

By Carole Bilson, IDSA

18 Book Review

By Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA

By Mark Dziersk, FIDSA

By Qin Li

20 A Look Back

56 Designing a Better World

By Vicki Matranga, H/IDSA, and William E. Meehan Jr.

By Amina Horozic

60 Inspiring the Future Women of Steel and Stone & Plastic and Plywood

Kong McAndrews, Held & Malloy, Ltd., Chicago, IL

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52 Seeing Through Design

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64 Showcase

By Anna M. Lewis Left: A woman cuts banana fibers by hand at the Bana factory in Mpigi, Uganda. See page 56.

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

SPRING 2016

Cover: Eva Zeisel holding “Talisman” mug, 2004, Lomonosov Porcelain,

INNOVATION

St Petersburg, Russia. Photo ©TalismanPHOTO. See page 45.

WOMEN IN DESIGN

Women in Design FRICTION

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INNOVATION is the quarterly journal of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), the professional organization serving the needs of US industrial designers. Reproduction in whole or in part—in any form—without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. The opinions expressed in the bylined articles are those of the writers and not necessarily those of IDSA. IDSA reserves the right to decline any advertisement that is contrary to the mission, goals and guiding principles of the Society. The appearance of an ad does not constitute an endorsement by IDSA. All design and photo credits are listed as provided by the submitter. INNOVATION is printed on recycled paper with soy-based inks. The use of IDSA and FIDSA after a name is a registered collective membership mark. INNOVATION (ISSN No. 0731-2334 and USPS No. 0016-067) is published quarterly by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA)/INNOVATION, 555 Grove St., Suite 200, Herndon, VA 20170.

Periodical postage at Sterling, VA 20164 and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to IDSA/INNOVATION, 555 Grove St., Suite 200, Herndon, VA 20170, USA. ©2016 Industrial Designers Society of America. Vol. 35, No. 1, 2016; Library of Congress Catalog No. 82-640971; ISSN No. 0731-2334; USPS 0016-067.

Advertisers’ Index 19 2016 IDSA District Design Conferences 5 2016 IDSA International Conference 28 Eastman 8 IDSA Membership c4 LUNAR c3 Mixer Group c2 Pip Tompkin 1 The Henry Ford

CHA I R’ S R E PO R T

STAGING FOR THE FUTURE I n my previous columns I promised to use my term to help the organization look ahead and consider how we need to evolve, and I promised to use these columns as a vehicle to update the membership on our future focus under my tenure.

As a reminder, I have outlined two guiding principles for this future focus: to remain true to our core mission to be the leading advocate of the industrial design profession and to guide IDSA to embrace the broader community that encompasses the profession of industrial design today.

Working with the IDSA Board we are driving this future focus through our two most import “products”—the International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) and the IDSA International Design Conference.

As I pointed out in my last column, the Board has appointed a task force led by Mieko Kusano, IDSA, director at-large and senior director of design at Sonos. The team, which includes IDSA staff members Karen Berube, senior creative director, and Karen Foust, manager of awards and competitions, were asked to recommend what we need to do to ensure that IDEA remains a preeminent global design award. The task force presented their recommendations to the Board in December. Their key recommendations included: n Redesigning the IDEA brand to tie the program more closely to the IDSA brand and better reflect design excellence today n Transitioning the awards to be more experience designfocused to better align with a contemporary view of industrial design n Improving the exposure of top winners through better

representation during the International Conference and on the IDSA website n Broadening the outreach of IDEA to ensure the competition is truly capturing best-in-class design globally I am happy to relay to you that the Board unanimously accepted the recommendations of the committee. The task force is now focused on the implementation of these goals.

I will continue to keep you apprised of progress.

The IDSA International Design Conference is an essential part of the IDSA brand. The experience and reputation of the conference reflects directly on the Society as a whole.

Last year’s Seattle conference was a huge success with unprecedented attendance of 850 and positive membership feedback. While the attendees’ conference experience was good, there is still much room for improvement. To this end, the Board reviewed a wide-ranging research report developed by Jeevak Badve, IDSA, Central District VP, and Paul Hatch, IDSA, the former International Conference chair, intended to identify where those improvements are. This was a truly exciting presentation; I can’t wait to share with you how we intend to redesign the IDSA conference experience.

To conclude, I want to share with you that the Board has decided that these two activities—IDEA and the IDSA Conference—were so important that they needed boardlevel ownership. From May forward one board member will have oversight responsibilities for IDEA and one for the International Design Conference, an important shift to ensure these programs continue to prosper.

In future columns I look forward to reporting back to you on the progress of these two activities, along with other initiatives we have underway.

—John Barratt, IDSA, President and CEO, TEAGUE, and 2016 IDSA Chair; jbarratt@teague.com

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Including: The 2016 IDSA/Eastman Innovation Lab Education Symposium Detroit Marriott at the Ren Cen | August 17 The 2016 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) Ceremony & Gala The Henry Ford Museum | August 17 And much more!

Rates are online. Plan ahead.

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I D S A HQ

DESIGNING WOMEN T

his issue’s focus on women in indusAmerica. Neese helped build design functrial design and in leadership positions at two start-up firms and led extentions at IDSA resonated with me sive research and strategy programs for because I’ve puzzled over the gender gap major corporations, such as John Deere, LG within IDSA since coming on board as execElectronics, Navistar and Direct TV. Early on, utive director. I’m using this opportunity to she was a teaching assistant at her esteemed dig deeper into the issue by looking at how alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University. two IDSA women design leaders from differAssuming Neese becomes IDSA Board chair ent generations view how well women have in 2018, she will be only the fourth woman to fared within the industrial design profession hold the top spot in 35 years. and within the Society that represents them.

Although both women feel this number is I interviewed Katherine (Kathy) McCoy, not one to be proud of, they concur it probFIDSA, and Megan Neese, IDSA. Both ably accurately represents the current gender women are at different points in their proportion in the industrial design profescareers—McCoy in a very successful 49-year sion. They also acknowledge, however, that run as a designer and an educator and this proportion is shifting within design curNeese on an impressive 10-year climb as riculums across the country. Whereas McCoy a design strategist. McCoy was IDSA’s first was one of only two women in her industrial female president in 1982; Neese was just design classes back in the 1960s, Neese’s nominated as the IDSA Board of Directors’ classes were split about equally between chair-elect, slated to become chair in 2018. men and women. McCoy’s colleagues were In the previous issue of INNOVATION—which predominantly men; Neese’s bosses have celebrated IDSA’s 50th anniversary—McCoy been almost all women. However, both agree Top: Katherine McCoy, FIDSA was named one of only nine women among Bottom: Megan Neese, IDSA there is still a serious lack of women holding the 50 Most Notable IDSA Members. top leadership spots in today’s leading design Both rose through the IDSA leadership ranks from firms and corporations. chapter chairs to serving on IDSA’s Board. McCoy’s experiTheir journeys to becoming industrial designers were ence is split between design practice and design education somewhat similar, both stumbling upon the field rather than with her early career centered primarily on graphic design, finding it as an early career choice. McCoy wanted to be advertising and corporate identity. She and her husband coan architect but was convinced by her guidance counselor chaired the prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art’s graduthat it wasn’t a girl’s profession—too much math. She took ate design program in 1971–1995, and she was named a his advice and settled on studying interior decorating at visiting distinguished professor of London’s Royal College Michigan State College. It turned out there was more home of Art. economics in the curriculum than design. A trip to the 1964 Neese is a senior manager in Future Lab at Nissan World’s Fair in New York City and a subsequent visit to the Motor Ltd. Prior to this, she held similar positions blending MoMA, where she discovered the Bauhaus and industrial design and business: associate director at BMW Group design exhibition, sealed her future as a designer.

DesignworksUSA, senior design strategist at Samsung Neese originally planned on continuing her interest in Design America and product planner at Nissan North metalsmithing in college, but industrial design caught her

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eye after reading two back issues of INNOVATION magazine passed on to her by her father. The infamous IDEO shopping piece aired on the iconic television newsmagazine 60 Minutes shortly after that, and Neese recalls being “totally sold” on becoming an industrial designer.

When asked what her major obstacles were in her career as a designer, McCoy admits, “Most of my challenges have been the temptation to accept traditional limitations about what a woman can achieve.” She describes her male colleagues as more supportive than obstructive: “I found that my male industrial design colleagues were very open to a woman’s leadership and seemed to want to demonstrate that they were egalitarian.” She finds designers are change agents and naturally accepting, and feels the studio component of design creates a natural affiliation for collaboration that may not be as organic for nondesign professionals: “I have found that as designers we have always been judged a great deal by our skills as through portfolios, and this creates a process that is broader than just gender—as might be the case in other fields of business.”

Neese describes her experience working in the automotive industry as “cast in a male stereotype of boys and their cars. Women buy tons of cars. Sometimes I think that is one of the lowest hanging fruit opportunities in the industry; there are a lot less generic and more meaningful ways to develop products ‘for women’ but it is very hard to communicate the subtleties of these points to a huge development team of men.”

Another shared belief between the two designers is the connection between design disciplines through shared methodologies routed in design thinking and concepts.

McCoy muses, “I found that I believed in the interdisciplinary connection between all of the design disciplines with one relating to the next—creating a wonderful interconnectedness of design.”

She sees digital technologies as responsible for a large part in this convergence in design. “A lot of products are dematerializing and becoming interfaces and this is a communication problem as much as it’s a product or physical problem.”

Neese finds “the expansion of design discipline and fluidity between the areas of expertise makes professional development feel endless. There are distinctions growing within disciplines like interaction design where whole new glossaries are being invented and principles of practice developed.”

Perhaps the most passionate discourse from both women deals with the challenges the gender continues to face—choosing between balancing family and career.

McCoy says her flexible work environment, combined with a supportive husband in shared work at Cranbrook, lessoned her challenges of raising a daughter. But she notes that the United States hasn’t kept pace with other countries in providing family-friendly policies, including affordable and accessible child care options.

Neese’s struggle with this is evident. “I am going through this choice right now. I have a young baby and at the same time a job that is really pushing me toward new responsibilities and my husband is in the same situation. We are trying to balance how we share responsibilities for our child so that we both progress professionally while being engaged parents. It’s tough. Impossibly tough! We will make this work, but we’re going to have to be very creative.”

I asked what message they would offer to young women contemplating industrial design as a career choice or already working as young professionals in the field. They said: n Choose a stimulating career environment rather than one that commands the highest salary. n Find role models and mentors you can learn from. n Have self-confidence; trust your abilities and have the courage of your convictions. n Teach at least part-time in a stimulating educational institution with high-quality faculty and talented, committed students—it will keep you plugged into changes within design, which are coming fast and furiously. n Get involved in organizations such as IDSA and AIGA. Volunteering is a great way to round out your skills in non-design-related areas, such as leadership development, writing and people management. n Don’t “buy into pink”—it’s stereotypical and symbolic of a cultural code that promotes thoughts and opinions as to what girls should be.

As I reflect on my candid conversations with McCoy and Neese, I realize they have even more in common— attributes we can all strive to learn. Both women exude optimism, falling into the glass-half-full rather than glasshalf-empty mindset. They’re passionate and respectful. And they wear their accomplishments and accolades more like buttons than ribbons—summing up who they are, rather than drawing attention to themselves.

—Daniel Martinage, CAE, IDSA Executive Director danielm@idsa.org

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FROM TH E EDITOR

FRICTION IS NOT ALWAYS A BAD WORD

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oth Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are creating a lot of friction in the world today. Viewed from a certain perspective, this is a good thing. As establishment outsiders, they are shaking up the political world in a way that is causing people to ask more questions and question more conventions. It’s a safe bet that this process will pay dividends eventually. People in both of the major political parties are having to reexamine the status quo and question orthodoxy. Opportunity is being created for perhaps a third party to emerge. Said another way, via this contentious arguing, friction is creating opportunity—illustrating the conclusion that friction is not always a bad word even though it’s generally seen that way.

Mostly we try to avoid friction. It’s natural, especially in groups or collaborative team situations. Few people or groups actively seek out confrontation. But friction, more specifically creative friction, can be a very productive thing.

One might argue that it should be a key element in every design engagement and effort. Understood and used well, it can lead to better questions, answers and ideas. It may at first seem counterintuitive, but friction used in a positive way, in the service of innovation, should be encouraged.

In his seminal book The Creative Priority, legendary designer Jerry Hirshberg, the fellow who founded Nissan’s first West Coast Design Studio, introduces a number of fundamental concepts important to nurturing creativity in

“We’ve done well when there has been wide-open risk-taking–like with the Z and Xterra, when no one is doing cars like that, and the sales and marketing guys say there is no place for it.”

40th Anniversary Z courtesy of Nissan

—Jerry Hirshberg

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F RO M T HE E DI TOR

teams. One of them is called “embracing the dragon.” It’s all about learning from creative friction, a terrific ideal. I use it as a tool in an innovation and creativity class I teach at Northwestern University to demonstrate the value of creative friction. The idea is to have students role model being a designer and an engineer and to have them face off over something to be designed. It could be anything. A pen, a remote, a white board eraser. It helps to have an object to hold and to have them stand up in front of the class.

First the designer makes the argument of why and what needs to be done: which aesthetics are important, which human needs are being met and why there is a need for investment and costs. Next the engineer responds in kind regarding the realities of manufacture: what it takes to get it there, where the costs may exceed the benefit, what kind of investment is required. Once that is accomplished, the two change places. I make them physically change places and intellectually change roles. The engineer is now asked to make the design argument and vice versa.

It’s not easy. All the words for and against have already been used. Adopting another’s view is hard when you just argued against it. But if the effort is made—the “dragon is embraced”—then a very useful perspective and an amazing

C O R R E CT I O NS The Winter 50/35/50 issue of INNOVATION was an enormous undertaking by the guest editors Carroll Gantz, FIDSA, Vicki Matranga, H/IDSA, and Bret Smith, IDSA. Several errors were found in the issue; none of these were the responsibility of those volunteer editors. IDSA deeply apologizes and has updated the electronic version of the issue found at www.idsa.org/innovation.

In the 50 most notable IDSA members section, asterisks were used to indicate deceased members. James Fulton, FIDSA, and Raymond Loewy, FIDSA, should have been marked as deceased, while Robert Blaich, FIDSA, (see p.

11) and Ed Zagorski, FIDSA, (see p. 12) are very much alive.

Budd Steinhilber, FIDSA, was kind enough to point out a problem with the IDSA logo evolution story. On page 13, two versions of the 1976 logo were printed rather than the contrasting 1973 and 1976 logos. Tepper & Steinhilber did the original design in 1973 as well as the requested revised version in 1976. The logo was changed to make the right stroke of the “A” more dominant than the original left stroke.

empathy are acquired. The result of the exercise is almost always a newfound kind of respect for the other side’s concern.

Lately the design profession is going through a good amount of creative friction relative to its expanding influence and participation. It is causing conversations that are shaking up the status quo. What is the new role of design regarding user interface and user experience? Is design thinking forever or played out? Is the profession exclusive or inclusive? Is IDSA? Is the practice of industrial design diverse?

This issue of INNOVATION examines more than one orthodoxy that can certainly shake up our thinking and help us evolve. I hope you enjoy the perspectives. Huge thank yous to Nancy Perkins, FIDSA and Ti Chang, IDSA for their work in assembling the content you find within, also to Ricardo Gomes, IDSA, for his challenge and push. The time is right for us to explore new methods and ways. Our political world is being shaken up. Innovative companies like Uber and Airbnb are challenging established business models. Societal norms and morays are being tested. Creative friction, it would seem, is all around us. The thing we need to learn to do is to embrace it.

—Mark Dziersk, FIDSA, INNOVATION Executive Editor mark@lunar.com

Original 1973 logo

Revised 1976 logo

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C O RR E CT IONS

ROBERT BLAICH

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n 2007 Marco van Hout interviewed Robert Blaich, FIDSA. Below is an excerpt about his six-decade career. You can read the full interview, including Blaich’s thoughts about designing with emotion, at www.design-emotion.com/2007/04/12/getting-emotional-with-robert-blaich.

On His Long Career I was a lad of nine when I attended the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which was designed by some of the early pioneers of industrial design. Walter Dorwin Teague as master planner, Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes and others.

The futuristic designs made a great impression on me and probably led to my becoming a designer. I graduated from Syracuse University in 1952 with a dual degree in architecture and allied arts, which included industrial design. My first job was as a designer for the famous furniture manufacturer Thonet. I was given the task to design the seating for the General Assembly and Security Council in the United Nations building. The seating is still in daily use, and there are a lot of emotional debates from these seats.

I joined Herman Miller Inc. in 1953, and from then till 1979 I held several positions in marketing and product development. I was appointed the vice president of corporate design and communications in 1964 responsible for all product, graphic, communications and facilities design.

During this time I worked closely with our consultant designers Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson and Alexander Girard. I also recruited new designers to the company, including Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick, the designers of the very successful Aeron chair; Bruce Burdick; Verner Panton; Poul Kjaerholm; Fritz Haller; and others. I led major design projects, including the original Action Office, the father of all cubicle systems; many Eames seating projects and Nelson office projects; and Girard textiles and furniture designs.

In 1980 I was recruited by Philips to replace the Norwegian Knut Yran, who was retiring as head of design at Philips. As at Herman Miller, I was responsible for all product, packaging, graphic and corporate identity design with studios in 28 international locations. During this period we received over 500 international design awards. I retired from Philips at the end of 1991 and proposed Stefano Marzano as my replacement. Stefano was a young designer at Philips when I came there and was part of my management team with responsibility for major domestic appliances.

Currently [as of 2007], I am a president of Blaich Associates, a design management consultancy in Aspen, CO, a member and chairman of Teague Design in Seattle, and a member of the boards at the Institute of Design-IIT in Chicago, the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, and the Beal Institute at the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto, Canada.

An interesting factoid is that I was impressed by Walter Dorwin Teague’s New York World’s Fair designs in 1939 and 60 years later (1999) I joined the Teague board. So it went full circle!

On the Future of Design The field has already experienced tremendous changes.

From being stylists in the ’30s to the ’50s to offering a wide variety of skills and experience that include the social sciences. Design has grown from an aesthetic contributor to a core competency in the product creation process. I have participated in this change as the vice president of design at Herman Miller. I led teams of consultant and internal designers in reshaping the institutional and office environments. At Philips we redesigned the design process and grew it from a respected professional service to a corporate core competency. At Teague we took a company that 80 years ago helped found the industrial design profession to one that in recent years has redesigned itself.

This process has been a very emotional one for me, and I see that the skills required to better understand the wants and needs of the ultimate consumer will continue to grow.

And for the design profession, it is a case of grow or die. n

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n 1965 a formal merger of ASID, IDI and IDEA was formed to become the Industrial Designers Society of America. As president of the Industrial Design Educators Association and now a charter member of IDSA, I became extremely interested in the publication of the membership listing, and it was a beauty. Each member had his or her name, address, phone number, place of employment and even the universities and other schools that he or she had attended.

I took pride in the number of designers who had attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and especially those who were former students of mine.

What caught my attention was the listing of the Fellows that were printed on a separate page. These were the members who had done something special for the Society and we all looked up to them. It took about three years when I noticed that if a Fellow died, their name was removed. This shocked me. I immediately suggested that they should keep the names of the deceased on the page and simply put an asterisk next to them. I felt that it was important to remember all our honored members.

Getty Images/LIFE magazine

L E T T E R T O T HE E DI TOR

Two weeks ago, I received a call from Vicki Matranga who wanted to know if I received my copy of the Winter edition of INNOVATION. She then told me it was a special edition celebrating the 50 years of IDSA, and they had the current membership select 50 notable members and that I was one of them—but why was there an asterisk next to my name?

I shall be 95 this coming September. I go to the gym three days a week (track for two miles and free weights for 40 minutes). I still plant perennials, buy green bananas, subscribe to magazine, cut my own toenails, a feat (pun intended) that puts me above my peers in dexterity and self-inflicted agony. An atavistic gene forces me to pick up pennies in the street (a habit from my Depression years), and surreptitiously I steal unopened sample perfume scents from magazines in doctors’ waiting rooms. I do have a very optimistic outlook on life and am determined to get my name on a jar of Smucker’s orange marmalade when I reach 100 years.

Watch for me on the tube.

—Ed Zagorski, FIDSA fathill92021@gmail.com

Top: April 12, 1963, LIFE magazine photo profiling the then University of Illinois associate professor Zagorski’s egg launch project that is still performed by high schools and universities across the country. The premise—created in conjunction with concerns about the astronauts landing back from space— involved creating a capsule to protect a raw egg that was launched into space and would land in a pool. Students above celebrate the successful landing of their “Easternaut.”

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COLOR CORRECTION

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t would have been nice to have added just a bit of color to the IDSA 50 Notable Members in the Winter issue, like Chuck Harrison or Noel Mayo, IDSA. I believe both of these stellar industrial designers are longstanding IDSA members, although not actively engaged in the executive leadership and governance of IDSA, as another missing notable, Eric Anderson, IDSA. Alas, at least the 50 Notable Members are consistent and in good company with the lack of diversity and persons of color as the Academy Awards nominees.

The Churchill quote cited by Cooper Woodring, FIDSA, was quite apropos: “Never have so many owed so much to so few.”

The editor did “encourage readers to explore the choices made and offer their own.” Please accept my humble and respectful constructive comments in the interest of inclusion, diversity and representation for all. My comments mean no disrespect and dishonor to those selected, or to the good will and difficult task of the committee to select “50!” (RIP Carroll Gantz, FIDSA.) I believe when one embarks upon creating such a distinctive epoch in the history of an organization, one would seek to identify distinctive acts that establish the foundation, balance and breadth of the organization in all directions. Very much like a constellation that reaches beyond the limits of its imagination, or pluralistic ideals. (Wonderful to see the amazing and deserving women that were recognized and represented.)

Nevertheless, I feel compelled to offer some future insight, vision and recognition for those who were also industrial design pioneers and trailblazers of another “ID.” Outstanding and noble IDSA stalwarts like Chuck Harrison and Noel Mayo courageously broke down racial barriers and exclusion in both design education and professionalism.

They unselfishly opened the doors for others like me to walk through, be counted and recognized, not as a special interest or racial quota, but as a dedicated industrial designer for all to see, know and embrace!

Noteworthy merits of these men’s contributions include: Charles “Chuck” Harrison “An American industrial designer who was a long-time resident in Chicago until 2015.

He was the first African-American executive to work at Sears, Roebuck and Company, starting in 1961 as a designer and eventually becoming manager of the company’s entire design group. He was involved in the design of over 750 consumer products, including the portable hair dryer, toasters, stereos, lawn mowers, sewing machines, Craftsman power tools, the see-through measuring cup, fondue pots, stoves, and the first plastic trash can, which has been credited with changing the sound of trash collection day. Perhaps his most famous achievement was leading the team that updated the ViewMaster in 1958, designing the classic Model F View-Master.”

—From Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_”Chuck”_Harrison)

Dr. Noel Mayo, IDSA “Dr. Noel Mayo, IDSA, was the first African American to receive a B.S. in industrial design from the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts) and first African American chair of an ID program—again, at PCA. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art. Dr. Mayo was named the Ohio Eminent Scholar in Art and Design Technology at Ohio State, where he teaches product, interior, and graphic design. Dr. Mayo was the first black owner of an ID consultancy with clients such as Lutron Electronics, NASA, IBM, the Department of Commerce and Agriculture, Black and Decker, the Museum of American Jewish History and the Philadelphia International Airport. He has written for INNOVATION, the Wall Street Journal, Industrial Design, Arts Advocate and the Minority Business Journal.”

—From the IDSA website (www.idsa.org/content/ dr-noel-mayo-idsa-ohio-state-university) —Ricardo Gomes, IDSA, Professor/Coordinator, Design Center for Global Needs/Shapira Design Archive, Design & Industry Department, San Francisco State University ricgomes@sfsu.edu

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DESIGN UNEXPLAINED

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y first design assignment in college left me completely blank. The professor had explained the assignment, but after class I realized that I had no idea what he was talking about. And after conferring with some other students, nor did they. Within a few days, though, we knew that we needed to create something to bring to the next class. So off we went into the unknown of what had seemed unexplainable.

When I relaxed and jumped into the assignment, I found to my surprise that I was able to act on those ambiguous instructions, albeit more from intuition than an explicit understanding. I also found, to my delight, that I was able to have fun with what I mostly imagined it was that I was instructed do.

When the next class began, I discovered that everyone else had also returned with an array of individual creations that were wildly unique. The variety of solutions was amazing, and they formed what was my first sumptuous experience with creative ambiguity—an experience that began to teach me confidence with and interest in the vague and the obscure. And an experience, I speculated later, that might just have been intentionally ambiguous by a clever professor.

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Mark Schar, a strategy consultant and Stanford lecturer, says that with ambiguity emotions play a much more significant role in the decision-making process than they do with deductive decisions, and that in the world of design what we find is that most of the problems are ambiguous problems.

He also says that since there is not an obvious or logical solution to them, emotions and understanding emotions become an important part of the regulation of risk and the definition of ambiguity in design.

Forty years after my first instruction in creative ambiguity, I remain fascinated by the many approaches that have been and continue to be born to direct creative design. In 1896 American architect Louis Sullivan famously stated that “form ever follows function.” In the 1980s we learned that “form follows emotion” for Hartmut Esslinger. I initially led LUNAR around the idea that “form follows it all,” and more recently that “great designs possess beauty, ingenuity and charisma.”

Don Norman, IDSA wrote that emotional design happens intellectually, viscerally and behaviorally, and design thinking devotees often advocate that design revolves around human-centered empathy for users. Brett Lovelady “fights gravity” with design, and Branko Lukic starts design

with “the mysterious and largely unexplored space between human-centered and object-centered design.”

These are just a small sample of approaches that designers use to inform what they do. Despite these myriad perspectives, it seems to me that when design succeeds, when it’s truly great, it’s still full of mysterious magic that is hard to describe and even harder to replicate. For example, with all the amazing products from Apple today, many know that something’s been missing in their designs since Steve Jobs died.

What is it that’s missing? And why hasn’t it been replicated?

I’m a big fan of defining approaches to design. It is a very effective way of rallying design teams within firms and companies—and also to inform and focus design teams in developing individual products and offerings. But I’m a bigger fan of that mystery and magic of design that is born out of ambiguity.

Design resists efforts to fully describe it, codify it and turn it into a process. And if Schar is correct, that most design problems are ambiguous, then the profession by its very nature needs to also resist attempts at its complete formulation, even as it also seeks to define how and why the best designs happen. Because in the end, how can we

measure the beauty of a Jaguar E-Type (above)—still so gorgeous more than 50 years since its creation? Or how can we describe and prescribe what we felt when that apple-shaped logo beat to the tune of a human heart? And how can we understand what it is that makes something so special that you want to pass it down to your children and grandchildren?

These sorts of things may never be fully decoded or explainable, and may continue to be known only through experience and emotion—because we know great design when we experience it, when we feel it and when we sense its inspiration. And even though we know that most everything that is designed today is typically born out of a dizzying array of influences, constraints and requirements, we also know that a unique and inspired point of view is needed to weave it all together into something great.

Inspired by Einstein’s quote that “the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious,” Abraham Maslow claimed that the number-one attribute of selfactualized people is that they embrace the unknown and the ambiguous. Perhaps one of the attributes of great designs is that they are conceived, at least in part, from the mystery of the things that cannot be said or fully known.

—Jeff Smith, Co-Founder and Senior Advisor, LUNAR jeffsmith@lunar.com

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B E A U T I LI TY

SUCCESS IS BEAUTIFUL

I

n the beginning, industrial design was an elite male profession surrounded by a sexist chain-link fence protected by gearhead sentries at every weak point. Even 1986 seems so long ago, but that’s when the May issue of the IDSA New York chapter’s newsletter tackled “Gender Goals.” While editor Lisa Krohn was trying to tunnel into design, she wrote, “Is it an accident that few women pop up in industrial design? It goes back to Eve and the serpent’s tempting apple. In a different story, Eve could have been the curious experimenter, testing her hypothesis by sampling the apple. But our society is based on the standard story where the apple was forbidden and bright women are evil.”

Women’s role in society (and IDSA in particular) has changed a lot in 30 years. Back then male designers had to imagine a woman’s user experience—now women are poised to become the majority of designers. It’s been four generations (100 years) since the 19th amendment to the Constitution passed and the “weaker” gender became full American citizens. When we were designing the identity for Family Care International, they told us that 80 percent of the work done on our planet is done by women (they meant everything from walking miles to get water to walks in space).

Today more than half of the US workforce are women (meaning they get paid something for their jobs), and most interior, textile and graphic designers are women too.

“Junior industrial designers,” I wrote back then in the same newsletter, “are supposed to build their own treehouse and make skateboards from scratch. Boys are brought up playing with drills, chainsaws and hot rods, this was the foundation of our education. So how can women ever be real designers since the conventional wisdom is that little girls were busy playing house rather than taking apart the blender? How could playing house possibly train a real industrial designer? [But] the real industrial designer is made of curiosity and creativity, not puppy dog tails and power tools.”

Our then chapter secretary Heidi Schwenk-Harden went further in her piece titled “Curves in Practice”: “Women

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“God may be in the details, but

the goddess is in the questions.

Once we begin to ask them, there’s no turning back.

”

—Gloria Steinem

have a perspective distinct from men—they have responded to different stimuli growing up, they have specific biological capabilities. ... They are experts in a side of life that men can only observe. They offer another vantage point and if you will, another human factor.”

Mothers are naturally multidisciplinary (conventionally a cook, doctor, manager, teacher, etc.), multitaskers (driving while turned around disciplining) and consensus builders (party planner or referee). But those qualities now wrongly labeled “feminine”—service, empathy, support, collaboration, nonjudgmental and transdisciplinary—are just the attributes we need to dig us out of the wicked predicaments we face today. That “feminine” human factor is critical in making us smart designers. Where does our empathy for the user

come from? Where does our sensitivity to form and color come from? Where does our ability to juggle complex and contradictory objectives come from? And our sympathy for the environment is all rooted in all our feminine sides.

Let’s face it, business and engineering are more masculine than design. Businesspeople have an easy job: They play a simple game, aggression is rewarded, and keeping score is easy. Successful engineers use the typical onetrack approach: beeline analysis, break down the problems into bite-size pieces, solutions that are clearly right or wrong (just like football). On the other hand, designers have always been “artsy,” more sensitive and passionate. After all, Hartmut Esslinger said, “Form follows eEmotion.”

My mother, Beverly, always the social worker and always supportive and inclusive, admonished me (and anyone else she met) to use our design talent to correct social injustices and to design things that assist human relationships and understanding. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, my mom realized that designers’ power went beyond just form and function issues—that everything we do always will either facilitate or obstruct good behavior. We create the tools—if not actually design the experiences—the stuff that supports harmony, open-ended play, connections, the deeper involvement with people that life is the struggle for.

The digital revolution is changing everything. Things are dematerializing. It seems like just yesterday when everything we do or need was transferred to our phones and now everything has disappeared into the cCloud.

Like the Walkman, iTunes disrupted the music business.

In January, Wal-Mart announced it is closing 269 stores because Amazon is taking its business. It seems people don’t need stores to buy things (except maybe an Apple store). But the actual bricks and mortar are getting smart with embedded chips. Google will be driving us to work.

What’s next? Terrorist drones overhead? In the post–industrial era, software trumps hardware. If things keep going this way, people won’t need to buy anything! To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan: “The message is the message.”

Everything is software.

Thirty years ago Lisa Krohn wrote how it was hard for women to enter our field because all designers were grease monkeys. The tables have turned. Young designers don’t grow up working with table saws and monkey wrenches anymore. The new workshop is in Snapchat and Kickstarter. And now design students are mostly female.

They found a welcoming home for their sensibilities. I just taught a workshop at the prestigious Technologico Monterey in Mexico—where of 41 students only four were males. My class at Parsons is more than two-thirds female.

Granted, more than half of all students enrolled in all colleges these days are female—but a much higher percent are studying design. Meanwhile even engineers are turning to the soft side, teaching how to learn from failure, and business schools have become kings of design thinking!

Climate change is creating extreme weather, and the digital revolution is causing extreme economics. We are not “playing house” any more! The wicked problems we face require the dynamic feminine approach honed by our mothers. We need to tap our most powerful design methods to link our vision with reality. The abnormal imbalance between lower unemployment and lower production growth reflects the fact that the US economy has shifted to a service economy. The good news is that our multidisciplinary profession is well equipped for these challenges.

As female designers made a flip from decorative arts to strategy and user experience, service and experience design, the profession’s ranks went from all male to heavily populated by females. Industrial design has always been a bridge between the soft side and the hardware side.

Unlike Luke Skywalker, designers like Henry Dreyfuss had a nurturing force within them. Designers naturally have the temperament to deal with complexity and contradiction, form and function, conflicting needs and wants, resources and requirements. We have the resourcefulness of dynamic design thinking and the entrepreneurial sprit to “manipulate the material stream” (that’s what Rama Chorpash says designers do) to make the world a more beautiful and supportive place to live.

Gloria Steinem said, “God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there’s no turning back.” Let’s celebrate the influx of women designers as the realization that we male designers have always leveraged our feminine sides! Today there is more opportunity for women in our profession than ever before. That is not only because women are recognized as great designers but because even business is embracing those soft traits traditionally associated with women.

Those attributes are now acknowledged as basic to design thinking, the drivers of innovation and forever the soul of industrial design.

—Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA www.tuckerviemeister.com

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BO O K RE V I E W

DESIGN THE LIFE YOU LOVE

D

esign thinking has been getting a lot of press lately. In general, I suppose that’s a very good thing, but many people don’t react well to the label.

In the introduction to Design the Life You Love, the accomplished designer Ayse Birsel, IDSA, suggests that her book is designed to help you think like a designer. I don’t exactly know why, but that comes off as more real and more helpful than codifying it as design thinking. The key Birsel suggests is to embrace risk and daring in all creative endeavors. With these powerful ideas she is very persuasive.

But this is less a book and more of a playbook, with the emphasis on “play.”

It aims to enable readers in what would otherwise be the monumental task of literally reinventing their lives. She uses a simple metaphor for the process, chicken noodle soup.

Yep. Chicken noodle soup. And she explains the four principles of thinking like a designer: being empathic, optimistic, holistic, and collaborative. By employing the idea of deconstruction and reconstruction, the author demonstrates how even a classic set-in-stone idea as an iconic soup can be reimagined in a meaningful way. Now breaking a large problem down into smaller pieces is in truth a familiar technique, one taught in time management and project management protocol. But in this case, Birsel uses the deconstruction technique as the first step in reinventing the way you intend to live in a new and original way.

The step after deconstructing your life involves developing a point of view. This is a rich chapter that introduces the ideas of leveraging heroes, metaphors and values in the service of crafting a new ideal and direction. All this self-inspection and reconstruction is presented in a fun and facile way that allows the reader ample time for reflection and self-assessment. It’s a brilliant accomplishment. The book is designed to be consumed and interacted with in a 20-minute-segment cadence with a rest and return approach, along with guiding you to generate plenty of notes and sketches in the book itself. It’s a truly interactive experience.

The reconstruction chapter turns to another key dimension of thinking like a designer: creating a new direction. After distilling something to its essence, the trick is to put it all back together. But that said, the chapter on expression is perhaps the trickiest one of them all. Remember this playbook is interactive. Creating a new expression is where the manifestation of your new vision arrives. The tools she provides here are poems, manifestos, lists and letters. Because this is a big ask, Birsel offers the reader an out. You see, there is not a definitive conclusion requirement.

The solution you come to can be left unfinished or added on to and refined. Another classic hallmark of thinking and living like a designer.

This workbook may not be for everybody. Some especially left-brain thinkers may find it hard to constantly visualize. One person I shared it with called it “doodley,” mainly, I suppose, because of the illustration style Birsel uses. Also you will need to be the type who likes to fill in lists and create mind maps, not everybody’s cup of tea. And of course it helps if you really want to work on some aspects of your life that aren’t exactly the way you want them to be. All that said, I am convinced that if you invest yourself in the exercises, it is impossible to imagine that it doesn’t pay back in multiple ways. And the demonstration of how designers problem solve is a terrific refresher for anyone from an experienced design practitoner to the person just learning about design.

The most brilliant take away of Design the Life You Love is that its methods can be used to design anything, from a new kind of birthday party to a new dance or a new iPhone. The book and its processes affirm life and well-being and improve both. In the end, isn’t that what design is all about? I have had the privilege of meeting the author in person on a number of occasions. Ayse Birsel shines, literally, when you meet her—she radiates life and new possibilities.

So it is no surprise that this exceptional expression of her thinking shines as well. You will truly enjoy reading, sketching into and learning from this engaging playbook.

—Mark Dziersk, FIDSA, INNOVATION Executive Editor mark@lunar.com

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Explore. Network. Learn.

•

Explore how design is changing and take advantage of new opportunities

•

Network with design and business professionals, educators and students

•

Learn from subject matter experts, design leaders and visionaries who will enlighten, educate and inspire

It’s not too late to join the conversation. With locations in five amazing cities across the country, what’s stopping you? Learn more and register today at IDSA.org/DDC.

By Victoria Matranga, H/IDSA, and William E. Meehan Jr. VMatranga@housewares.org n wemeehanjr@gmail.com Vicki Matranga is a curator, author and design historian primarily focused on Chicago. She promotes design for the International Housewares Association and created its student design competition, now in its 23rd year. IDSA awarded her its honorary membership in 2004 for special efforts to enhance the public’s appreciation of industrial design. n William E. Meehan Jr. is a self-taught historian and active collector of American Art Deco, and an entrepreneur, public speaker and charitable fundraiser. As a researcher and author, he has published several books and magazine articles on the history of American business, industrial design and folklore.

Anne Swainson

THE MAKING OF A DESIGN PIONEER

“O

ptimistic” read the caption above Anne Swainson’s photo in the Oakland Tribune on Friday, November 11, 1932. Smiling beneath a natty cloche hat, the “New York business woman” told a reporter,

“Business conditions on the Pacific Coast look very promising; promising enough to encourage Atlantic seaboard manufacturers to develop new markets in the west…industry will experience a new type of prosperity—a slower but more certain progress.” Swainson believed, as did many at the time, that the Great Depression would be short-lived. Having met with her employer’s West Coast sales representatives in San Francisco, she boarded a plane in nearby Oakland to return to her office on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

In a career that spanned the Progressive Era to the midcentury modern period, designer, design educator and corporate design manager Anne Swainson (born in 1888) shaped the profession of early 20th-century industrial design. Through some of the most tumultuous decades of American business—two world wars, the Great Depression and the post-World War II consumer economy— Anne Swainson created a remarkable path for a woman in design. Earlier publications that describe Swainson concentrated on her years at Montgomery Ward. We were interested in what formed her, how she arrived in Chicago to work at Ward and aspects of her personal life.

Creative Educator Swainson zigzagged from coast to coast, with stops in the Midwest, during the Progressive Era when education in industrial or applied arts was evolving into industrial

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design. She also studied “household arts” in the growing field of home economics, which offered women exciting opportunities in business and social reform. Home economists worked for food companies and manufacturers of consumer goods and in retail management and the hospitality industry as well as engaged in scientific research.

Our recent research has shown that some previously published biographical information about Swainson was incorrect. Born Anna Elizabeth Swainson in Nevada, MO, she was the middle child of Per “Perrie” Swainson, a housepainter, and Bettie Swainson, both Swedish immigrants.

She received degrees from the University of Missouri (a BS in education in 1909) and Columbia University’s Teacher’s College (an MA in 1913), followed by an MA in household arts (1915) from the University of Chicago, a vibrant center for home economists. While in Chicago in 1915 and 1919, she taught

textiles and created museum exhibitions at Hull House, which was a nationally important hub for social and political activists and an empowering environment for women.

After serving as the supervisor for industrial art for elementary grades in Columbus, OH (1910–1912), and teaching a summer session in industrial art at the University of Virginia in 1915, she joined the predominately male faculty at Illinois State Normal University (now Illinois State University) in the applied arts department, where she mentored young women in student club activities as well. Although Swainson’s specialty was textiles, she was also skilled in other crafts. In 1915 she organized an exhibition to display student-produced “work in copper and silver. Desk sets, book ends, blotter corners and pen trays… in saw piercing and repousse… with beautiful colorings. A blue gray finish… is indeed pleasing… and is the result of Miss Swainson’s mixing chemistry with applied arts.”

She resigned her position in 1919 and left central Illinois to teach at the University of California at Berkeley in the Department of Household Arts until about 1928. Along the way, educator Anna Elizabeth Swainson reinvented herself to become Anne Swainson, industrial designer. As an instructor who rose to an “associate in textiles,” she taught textiles, metalwork and jewelry, pottery, and a teacher’s course in industrial arts. One of her notable students was weaver and interior designer Dorothy Liebes, who credited Swainson for spotting her talent and redirecting her from painting to textiles.

Swainson traveled to Europe several times in the 1920s, with an extensive stay in 1926. In Jazz Age Paris she was hosted by former Berkeley friends, and she visited textile manufacturers in France. In Lyon she learned about the economics of cloth supply and demand and was dismayed to see that industrial production resulted in the decline of handwork. While traveling in Italy and France with Charmian London, the widow of author Jack London, they visited artists and authors, including leftist journalist Lincoln Steffens.

New York Businesswoman She left academia for the business world in 1928 to become one of the first residents of Manhattan’s Barbizon Hotel for Women, home to generations of up-and-coming actresses and writers. She worked at New York’s Lord & Taylor as its fabric stylist at a time when elite department stores began to compete for in-house experts in modern design.

In 1930 Swainson was hired by the Chase Brass & Copper Company in Waterbury, CT, as the first director of design of its new Specialty Sales Department. Chase, a maker of brass and copper building and plumbing supplies, followed some of its Connecticut metalworking neighbors into modernistic giftware and small appliances. Chase maintained offices and a showroom in Manhattan.

Despite the worsening economy, in 1931 Chase Specialties offered 30 items to the trade, from candlesticks to vases. Some of them, like the Glow Lamp No. 01001, Coasters No. 11261 and Triple Tray No. 09001 by the selfemployed designer Ruth Gerth (later Ruth Kosmak), proved very popular. No patents assigned to Chase credit Swainson as the company’s designer, but since Chase Specialties had no other in-house stylists at the time, it is likely Swainson executed the latter two and others.

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A L O O K B ACK

By the time Swainson left Chase for her next position, she had retained Gerth and rising design consultant Arban Jay Ackerman and was directly responsible for helping independent designer Lurelle Van Arsdale Guild obtain the Chase account. They and other design consultants would create many of the most striking and successful Chase Specialties items until production ended under wartime restrictions in early 1942. Swainson was succeeded by socially prominent Bostonian, Helen Catherine Bishop Dennis, another Lord & Taylor alumna and its assistant director of design.

Saving a Struggling Company with Design In 1932, at the age of 44, Swainson took on the most challenging work of her career. In her new responsibilities as head of the Bureau of Design, a middle-management position, for retail catalog giant Montgomery Ward & Company, Inc. in Chicago, she would need the optimistic attitude toward business improvement that she had expressed in California. At Ward, she played a major role in the new concept of applying design strategy to improve a company’s market position, brand image and merchandise appearance.

Montgomery Ward, the country’s oldest catalog retailer (established 1872), along with its rival, Sears, Roebuck (founded 1893), had created the American mass market.

Both Sears and Ward ventured into bricks-and-mortar retail stores in the 1920s. Ward feared that stores would take away mail order customers and struggled to digest the changes necessary in its marketing and branding during the first years of the Depression. Sewell Avery, president of U.S. Gypsum in Chicago, was recruited to reorganize the company in 1931, when Ward operated 610 stores, most of which were losing money. Mail order sales were down by nearly 40 percent and prices were under pressure in the years after the 1929 stock market crash. Ward suffered an operating loss of $8.7 million in 1931 and was selling at 25 percent of Sears’ volume.

Avery soon made a clean sweep of management and hired new personnel as advised by a New York department store employment agency, which identified top retail talent. In 1932 Avery chose, among other executives, Walter Hoving, an executive vice president at R.H. Macy & Company in New York, to become general sales manager, and C.D. Ryan, a house furnishings buyer with J. N. Adams

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& Co. of Buffalo, NY, as the manager of housewares and home furnishings.

Swainson might have been known to Hoving because of her position at Chase, which supplied giftware to Macy’s.

After taking courses in painting, textile design, silver and furniture at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hoving strongly believed in the importance of good design in merchandising. Hoving was charged with redesigning products and packaging to align the merchandise in the catalog and the stores, develop store advertising and overhaul the catalog. He also was determined to develop the Ward’s brand for private-label merchandise. The Bureau of Design would accomplish several of these goals. He is believed to have delegated the catalog project to Swainson, subject to his review, and under Swainson the 1934 catalog, which featured 40,000 items, was successfully redesigned. In addition, she was responsible for the look of its merchandise.

She contributed some designs herself and worked with staff designers from Ward’s suppliers (some 15,000 manufacturers in 1935) to adapt their products to Ward’s specifications.

By 1934, sales at the stores and the catalog had rebounded dramatically, aided by federal income support to farmers, proving that the stores could create new business rather than cutting into the catalog business.

Although about 70 percent of Ward’s 35,000 employees were women, Swainson was a rarity in management, as was typical of large companies. In the rough retail industry, her position was affected by competitive men in management layers above her and ambitious men under her command. Only a strong woman could survive such an office environment for more than 20 years. Swainson’s experience as an educator and her work in retail and for a manufacturer enabled her to form the Bureau as a unique multifunction design agency to use design to improve the making and merchandising of consumer products for a retailer serving a huge national market.

Swainson had come to Chicago, probably in December 1932, during the streamlined Art Deco era. Never married, she took up residence on one of Chicago’s most exclusive streets, living with a maid at 219 East Lake Shore Drive, a few blocks away from the dramatic Palmolive Building completed just a few years earlier and with a convenient commute westbound on Chicago Avenue to the Ward headquarters.

A L O O K B ACK

Design Thinking in Practice Sears, which formed its design department in 1934, hired designers trained at General Motors. Swainson, who knew from her teaching about how design was included in vocational education, first hired architects, such as 1932 Armour Institute graduates Frederic David (Dave) Chapman and Joseph Palma Jr. Most importantly, she identified young talent and hired industrial design graduates from the School of the Art Institute and the Institute of Design. She trained them in the business of design to serve the Bureau’s clientele—the all-powerful buyers who headed Ward’s merchandise departments. She claimed design patents for several small products in the 1930s and early 1940s, but generally allowed her designers to patent work in their own names, unlike the common practice of managers claiming credit for staff designs.

By mid-1934, Chapman had applied to patent new kitchen appliances and assorted products. According to Chapman’s daughter, a model of a sailboat in the Bureau’s studio brought Chapman to the attention of C.D. Ryan.

Ryan commissioned Chapman to design a new yacht, during which time he met Ryan’s daughter Eileen. As their friendship deepened toward marriage, to avoid the impression of impropriety Chapman left Ward’s in 1936 to start his own firm and designed products for Ward suppliers. Palma later also left to start his own design firm and taught industrial design at the School of the Art Institute for 20 years.

The quality of products created by Swainson’s Bureau of Design attracted compliments from her peers. In their 1936 examination of America’s industrial design scene, Art and the Machine, Sheldon and Martha Cheney compared the design efforts at the country’s two major retailers, Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, which had “adopted policies of redesign for large volumes of their entire products.

Not one but many kinds of industries produce commodities directly for them.”

Swainson established a work process familiar to designers practicing today in order to educate both the buyer/client and the suppliers who produced products to Ward’s specifications. According to Art and the Machine, “Montgomery Ward and Co. began in 1934 the redesign of its merchandise to bring it into line with modern appearance standards. Miss Anne Swaynson [sic] is Director of the Bureau of Design, which has a permanent staff of accredited

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artist-technologists. She describes the procedure which always goes on with close cooperation of the merchandise divisions concerned and with reference to the manufacturing practice: ‘First, there is a thorough study of the needs; then rough preliminary sketches are developed; the merchandise division executives, and often the manufacturer, analyze these sketches with the design director; when sketches have been produced which meet with the approval of all concerned, working drawings are made and turned over to the manufacturer.’”

The authors also noted that the Ward organization had “arrived at a policy of building a permanent staff of artists who have an architectural or engineering education, after experimenting with the general run of free-lance designers and finding the results unsatisfactory.”

Harold Van Doren included the c.1939 Ward’s Electric Toaster in his 1940 textbook Industrial Design: A Practical Guide. He described it as “inexpensive merchandise” and “simple, good.” Even more striking was its simple carton labeled WARD’S Electric Toaster / MONTGOMERY WARD in red and white lettering on bold red and white stripes reminiscent of the American flag.

Wartime Conflicts Impact the Bureau Hoving left Ward’s in 1936 to head Tiffany’s and was succeeded by C.D. Ryan. In October 1940 Ryan engaged Norman Bel Geddes, one of America’s most famous industrial designers, to analyze its mail order catalog’s “pulling power, from a consumer’s point of view, as is normally provided in a well-designed retail store and to improve on its pulling power as much as possible” and to recommend improvements. In January 1941 Ward thanked Geddes & Company for its suggestions and wrote that it would review “which of your suggestions with practicality can be put to use,” and then terminated the relationship.

Yet in October 1941, in an attempt to gain the Ward account, Bel Geddes met with Ryan in his office. The two men discussed new design directions for the company’s products and stores. The merchandise and store planning managers joined Bel Geddes and Ryan for lunch. In an internal memo, Bel Geddes noted that the Bureau of Design “consists of only seven people. The head of it is a woman, who is not a designer herself, but has good taste and has been with them for years.” Bel Geddes proposed that his

firm “open a Chicago office, near or even in their building, that we absorb their present design department, that we add two or three really first rate talents, that we have one of our design directors keep a regular weekly or biweekly date out here, and that all of us be on call on one or two day’s notice.” However, Geddes & Company was unsuccessful.

During the 1940s, when the manufacture of consumer products was restricted by the war and Ward’s management suffered from conflict, Sewell Avery reduced the Bureau’s importance, and after the war, the Bureau was restructured.

Yet, while managing the Bureau, Swainson had drawn upon her social and professional network to promote design by delivering public lectures before reform-minded civic clubs and organizing trade exhibitions and competitions. In 1940, she invited 20 designers to participate in a Chicago exhibition to educate manufacturers in how to redesign products to impact sales. In 1941 she organized a competition, sponsored by the Chicago Society of Industrial Designers, for the design of traffic control lights for city intersections, and she headed the jury that included László Moholy-Nagy and Alfonso Iannelli. In 1943, she presented diplomas to the 10 graduates of a war training course in engineering drafting at the Illinois Institute of Technology—nine graduates were women and the tenth was a man of Chinese ancestry. In 1944, she was mentioned in a society column as one of the celebrities vacationing at an Arizona pueblo with Chicago socialites, artists and writers.

Meanwhile, Ward’s president, political conservative Sewell Avery, resisted New Deal regulations and reforms.

Carried out of his office by the National Guard in 1944 for refusing to settle with a striking union, he was mired in controversy for years to come. His obstructionist policies damaged the company’s present and future. Many managers quit or were fired. The federal government took control of Ward’s production plant to ensure supplies for the war effort. The board of directors installed C.D. Ryan as president in 1943, and Ryan served in this difficult role until he resigned in 1945 to become an executive of a retail operation in California.

Facing the Fifties Avery, expecting a depression to follow World War II, hoarded cash instead of updating urban stores or building suburban locations for the booming consumer culture, as

did its profitable competitor Sears. By 1955, after a 20-year standstill, Montgomery Ward had lost almost half its share of the nation’s retail market. It took a new chairman five years to cure the company to a competitive position. Ward never recovered and in 1968 was merged into a holding company and became a subsidiary of Mobil Oil Corp. in 1976. It filed for bankruptcy in 1997.

Anne Swainson survived tumultuous management changes to remain on the staff at Montgomery Ward & Company for 22 years. At rival Sears, several design directors came and left during those years. Unlike the one-hit wonders or impractical flashy New York consultants, Swainson went the distance; she played the long game. She was selected by executives who gambled that design would save a company on the brink of collapse and during the most difficult years of the Depression. According to her former employees, who went on to establish notable consultancies, Swainson ran a disciplined and efficient Bureau that trained them to think fast and think smart. Every day they delivered design concepts for countless product categories required by demanding buyers who knew the tastes of the national and regional markets. She held her position, even as company bosses cut away the foundation of her department.

Nonetheless, she created an elegant life and must have found personal reward in her design efforts. Her final residence was an apartment in a modernist high-rise constructed in 1950 on the North Lake Shore Drive site of the former 1882 “castle” of real estate magnate and hotelier Potter Palmer. A single woman of 67 years, she died of a heart attack at the office in May 1955 a week after Avery was ousted from the board of directors. In December 1955, the National Home Fashions League, of which she was a charter member, established a scholarship in her name to be given to a woman for exceptional contributions to the home furnishings industry.

Educator, talent scout, mentor, tastemaker, designer and manager—in a career of nearly 50 years with numerous firsts, unheralded Anne Swainson was a unique woman who fulfilled many roles now common for today’s industrial designers. She never appeared on the cover of Time magazine, but along with the men considered to be the founders of the profession in the 1930s, she applied the power of design to business and contributed to creating the business of design. n Sources available by request.

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By Kristen Bailey kbailey@urbanschool.org Kris Bailey has a long history in design and branding prior to moving into education, including Lunar Design (1990–2002) and a brief stint as a landscape designer (2002–05). She joined the Urban School, an innovative independent high school in San Francisco, in 2005 as director of marketing and communications, and led the school in its first rebranding in more than 30 years, soon to be unveiled!

High School Design and Engineering

FULL STEAM AHEAD

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he dozen or so young people could easily have been wearing ancient armor as they primed their trebuchets. Nearby, another group would not have looked out of place as Roman soldiers arming their onager as they marched toward expanding the empire.

But this wasn’t a historical weaponry reenactment or an exercise in synonyms; rather these were high school students designing, prototyping, refining and testing their collaborative project for their applied physics class—catapults designed to hit their target (their teacher) with the ammunition (water balloons) accurately at 150 feet. No grade could ever be as sweet as seeing your teacher, soaking wet, applauding your success!

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If the process these kids followed sounds familiar to you, that’s entirely, well, by design.

Most high schools do their best to teach skills and knowledge that will be relevant and indispensable to their graduates. Some schools, like the Urban School of San Francisco, have tweaked their core curriculum to build an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to better prepare our students for their futures. In applied physics and other science, design and computer science courses, the core design process has proved to be a useful way to deliver that curriculum.

UrbanX Labs, a program of the Urban School, offers 380 curious and serious students opportunities to explore and delve deeply into a variety of topics in its hands-on minds-on STEAM curriculum—including industrial design, engineering, advanced computer science and coding, electronics and robotics and graphic design—that will drive how designers approach and create innovative new products and experiences in the 21st century.

No doubt many of INNOVATION’s readers are intimately familiar with STEM/STEAM education and its expressions: maker faires, elementary and middle school design thinking programs, independent tech and tinker shops, and even toys and basic coding games.

All of these efforts have gone a long way toward inspiring and encouraging our children to work with their

hands, to learn basic concepts and to dream big. But for high school students, the move from tinkering and playing to understanding the gap between seeing a real problem and its solution covers a whole lot of territory in four short years.

Most high school curricula ask students to acquire knowledge and then demonstrate it on tests, papers and assignments. Students who have become adept at “doing school” know what to expect and know how the system works.

In a high school STEAM curriculum, students are asked to apply what they have learned to novel and challenging real-world problems. This is a far more difficult form of application and knowledge transfer than taking a test or completing a problem set. It requires an interdisciplinary design process expressed through creativity, synthesis, mental agility and a willingness to try the same thing over and over until it’s closer to right, a challenge for many young designers-to-be. That iterative process is what we do in the world outside of school, where problems do not readily follow a unit of instruction designed to help us answer the problem. In the real world—your world as designers— we must synthesize skills and knowledge from different domains, iterate and prototype, critique and revise our ideas and approaches, and, most critically, collaborate with others in coming up with a solution.

Urban’s extraordinary teachers take the time to learn what’s important to the product development industry and to ensure that the UrbanX Labs program is relevant to the needs of today’s designers and innovative companies. The industrial design class’ recent visit to the headquarters of a major creative design studio in San Francisco provided 10th– 12th graders with a dose of reality from the firm’s principals, and lots of oh-wow moments during the presentation and facility tour. One leader, a longtime college teacher at the Stanford D School, and Bethany Hellerich, Urban’s industrial design teacher, shared insights and tools for encouraging creativity in high school and college students alike.

High school students trying on designer, coder, engineer. It’s all nice, right? But why does this matter?

Sooner than you think (less than four years!) a current energetic high school senior will be knocking on your door seeking an internship. Wouldn’t it be interesting if that student already had basic design skills and familiarity with a process that expects multiple rounds of trial and error?

You can play a role in making this happen. Check in with a school in your community and see if there’s a way you can connect with kids and teachers. Think about how you could use your version of a medieval catapult to help students learn about integrating physics and design. And don’t forget to include water balloons—they’re key to a great user experience. n

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#MaterialsMatter

By Nancy Perkins, FIDSA njperkins@earthlink.net Nancy J. Perkins is principal of Perkins Design Ltd., an industrial design consultancy for consumer products, mass transit and industrial equipment. Her corporate experience includes Sears, Jarden Consumer Solutions and CEO of a nonprofit employing people who are blind. She is an expert witness and a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and was awarded an IDSA Fellowship in 1993.

Women in Design

CELEBRATING & REFLECTING ON CHANGE

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he following series of articles is a true celebration of the 25th anniversary of IDSA’s first section, the Women’s Section. The section has evolved over the years, but has always fulfilled the need for a resource for the exchange of ideas and camaraderie. Sharyn Thompson, FIDSA, and I

founded the section in 1991 to highlight the career achievements of women.

My current co-chair, Ti Chang, IDSA, as well as my coeditor for this issue, has ambitiously devoted significant energy to creating outstanding events in San Francisco that have focused on viewpoints unique to women, providing interactive opportunities for the participants. Of the future of women in design, Ti says, “My hope is that by creating a forum and a platform to recognize the many contributions of women designers, we can soon easily name as many female designers as easily as we can male designers. Having role models is an important way to inspire our generation of designers and the next.”

This issue of INNOVATION celebrates the fact that women students are in the majority at many schools that teach industrial design. Today it is not unique to see women winning IDEAs and frequenting the stage to receive recognition for their creativity. We celebrate their achievements, and I know Sharyn would be so gratified to see that progress.

For this series of articles, we wanted to include a wide scope of experiences to provide examples to young women in particular. The authors we invited for this issue reflect the career diversity of the profession, although we would have liked to include many more women but were limited by space.

Marketing strategies differ when appealing to women, as Marti Barletta explains in her article. When I first noticed her book Marketing to Women while browsing through Barnes & Noble, the title immediately caught my attention. I was elated that finally the subject was being given scholarly attention.

The opportunities open to women in industrial design have been expertly explained by Angela Yeh, IDSA, of Yeh Ideology. Her inclusive, personable approach in this field has been so welcomed and successful. She discusses the need for more design leaders who are women.

Jasmine Burton is embarking on solving critical needs in Africa through her social entrepreneurship Wish for WASH. She has been featured in a TED talk, and we applaud her for immediately taking on the challenge of managing a start-up enterprise, one that will significantly impact the lives and safety of women and girls.

Many of our authors have enjoyed the achievement of having clients invest resources in their ideas for manufacturing production, a crucial measure of design’s effectiveness and impact on business. For decades, Joyce Thomas, IDSA, has enjoyed success in corporate and consultant positions in numerous consumer product areas. As she and Megan Strickfaden have developed their respective education programs, they have enriched student experiences through many years of honing their methods. The experience they share with students is a priceless gift to serve as advice for our future designers.

Carole Bilson, IDSA, charts her career path, sharing valuable insights about her achievements as a designer, a manager of large corporate design staffs and now as president of the Design Management Institute. In her current position she continues the important work and influence of the DMI.

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Issue co-edited by Ti Chang, IDSA ti@craveinnovations.com

Copyright 2016 General Motors LLC. Used with permission, GM Media Archive.

Ti Chang is the co-founder and vice president of design of CRAVE, which specializes in discreet and modern sex toys. Previously she founded INCOQNITO, a line of intimate accessories that double as fashionable jewelry, which was acquired by CRAVE. She has held positions with such major consumer brands as Trek Bicycle and Goody Products, where she helped pave the way for women by serving as the first female industrial designer at both companies.

Qin Li discusses the importance of perseverance and the priorities at fuseproject. Her insights as a design leader and about design as a way of life are ideals that resonate with all of us.

Amina Horozic reminds us of how war can shape experience. The fearlessness she exhibits in developing her work in new environments highlights the hope that design can make a huge impact on the world—for the good.

As we look to the future, STEM programs worldwide will

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help girls develop the skills they need to succeed in technical and design professions. Anna Lewis’ book Women of Steel and Stone, published in 2014, has risen to the top of many best-seller lists, including the number-one best-selling young adult/teen book for architecture and in the top 10 of young adult/teen books on science and technology and young adult/teen women biographies. Her insights as an author and industrial designer outline a path to implement continuous progress to encourage girls to consider design careers.

Reflecting on the Changes During the Past Four Decades In 1986, ID magazine published an article entitled “Against the Odds” written by Lisa Krohn. I was glad to be one of the five women she profiled, across the page from Ray Eames.

Since then many of the issues that impact women’s career choices that she mentioned in the article have subsided.

We can celebrate that positive change. Critical mass does make a difference.

In the 1990s it was interesting to see how women took control of their own professional visibility to tell their stories. The founding of the Association of Women Industrial Designers (AWID) by Rebecca Welz is a case in point. In 1994 Rebecca and the AWID team organized AWID’s exhibit entitled Goddess in the Details at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery.* The exhibit and catalog included the work of 23 women, several of whom were firsts: furniture designer and architect Eileen Gray; Maud Bowers Rice, a graduate of Carnegie Tech and the first person in the United States to receive a degree in industrial design; and my great aunt, Anna Keichline, whose patents and architectural achievements have inspired me my entire adult life. Also featured were the 1950s era Damsels of Design at General Motors (left) where women were welcomed to design the interiors of cars but not the exteriors or dashboards. Contrast that notion with the recent press about Michelle Christensen’s design leadership in creating the highly acclaimed Acura NSX (http://nsx.acura.com/redefining_an_icon). Progress has been made.

Furthering the control of one’s own visibility, and in a reaction to the low level of mainstream press about women, the 1990s saw an increase in the number of design books written by women about women: the Bard Graduate Center’s retrospective exhibit and book Women Designers in the USA 1900–2000 edited by Pat Kirkham, Feminine Ingenuity by Anne L. Macdonald and Design and Feminism edited by Joan Rothschild. These publications provided a forum for independent discussions about women’s roles in the design professions. It was clear that if the mainstream

press fell short of including women’s achievements, organizing new venues was needed. Access to information is so crucial for young women, who always want to know what women are doing in our field. The need to showcase role models has never changed.

In the Philadelphia Inquirer, an article by columnist Eleanor Morton entitled “More About the Advantages of Having a Woman as Architect for the Home” appeared in 1936. She quoted Anna Keichline’s insights on the subject: “The equipment of houses has been developed by people who seldom have experience using or operating these materials. Women as engineers or architects have immense opportunities there. There should be scientifically built houses and this can be done better by women than men. Indeed this will never be accomplished until women take hold.”

Keichline was speaking to the ideas women would bring to the process of the design of their own environments if they were involved in the process.

Extrapolating from that thought, of course, now women make contributions in every area of society, including industrial design. As a college senior, when asked by my professor to set my career goals, I responded that I wanted to work in the design of society’s systems, meaning that design thinking could be applied to any aspect of life, institution or process to solve any problem, and that it should not be limited to traditional manufacturing realms. I believe that designers have a distinct advantage as business leaders because of their design process skills. I leaned on this skill daily in my former role as a CEO, and I’d encourage others to take on the challenge of being a CEO if the opportunity presents itself.

As the following articles and IDSA’s archives can attest, women are taking hold, impacting all areas of industrial design. We need to move on to creatively solve our new societal challenges, rather than rehash the old ones. More leadership is required and is the work ahead of us. I have no doubt that women and men can create that healthier future.

Perseverance is required and we, in the design professions, are already very good at that. n

*Goddess in the Details catalog and exhibit credits: Association of Women Industrial Designers © 1994 by Anice Doak, Erika Doering, Darlene Lee, Laurene Leon, Patricia McHugh, Sharon Geller Metal, Meg Prata, Susan Scior, Patricia Slee, Denise Spoering, Rachel Switsky, Rebecca Welz, (Founder), Eleanor Moretta, (Director of Exhibitions at Pratt Institute)

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By Marti Barletta marti@martibarletta.com

n

www.martibarletta.com

Marti Barletta is the world’s foremost expert on marketing to women. Her books, Marketing to Women: How to Win Your Share of the World’s Largest Market and Marketing to PrimeTime Women: How to Attract, Convert and Keep Boomer Big Spenders, are now available in 21 languages, and her presentations have garnered rave reviews on every continent (except Antarctica!). She delights in helping B2C and B2B designers, marketers and retailers enjoy more business success by better catering to their primary buyers—women.

Insights that Lead to Customer Love

DESIGNING WITH A DIFFERENCE

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wentieth Century Fox just released a movie about one of the most successful designers in history. The role of the designer is played by Jennifer Lawrence, no less, one of today’s hottest stars. Her sidekicks are Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper (of course!) and Isabella Rossellini. And

yet I bet you don’t know this designer’s name.

The Most Successful Designer You’ve Never Heard Of She focuses on the housewares sector and, happily for us, sells all her products via the home shopping channels HSN and QVC, one of the few retail formats that can provide consolidated, immediate feedback on customer response and business success. n Her first product sold over 18,000 items in 20 minutes. And to show that’s not a fluke, another of her designs sold 150,000 in six hours. n She holds the record for the best-selling product in electronic retailing history—678 million sold, all told. n She has been known to generate sales of $10 million in a single day—extraordinary for this format. n To date, over the past 23 years her designs have generated revenues of over $3 billion.

The designer’s name is Joy Mangano, and the movie title is Joy. Her phenomenal success can point the way to several specific strategies that can and should blow open your design thinking and accelerate your business success.

Joy’s most important insight is that she roots her design thinking in solving end-user problems in day-today life, not in seeking innovation for innovation’s sake.

She looks for end users who are exasperated or annoyed by some aspect of a product with a gap between what they want and what’s available.

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The second insight is that changes that seem small can have very big business impact indeed. Joy’s best-selling design, the Huggable Hanger, may seem mundane. (OK, so naming might not be her forte.) But this blockbuster product was the first to solve three closet-management problems.

First, it’s velvet-flocked, so clothes don’t slip off onto the floor. Second, it’s strong but flat, unlike heavy-duty wood or plastic hangers, meaning less crowding on the closet bar.

Third, the shoulder edges are rounded, so there are no poky little puckers ruining the lines of a lovely blouse or sweater.

The hangers come in 19 colors, including pink. And she’s sold $678 million of them so far.

5.9 US$ (in trillions)

Total Controlled by women Women in the US alone are a bigger market than the entire economies of Japan, Germany, the UK and France combined. Where’s the greater ROI?

1.6

1.0

.9

.7 .7 .6

.5 .4

4.3 1.0 .7 .6 .5 .3 .4 .3 .3 US Japan Germany UK France China Italy Spain Canada

It just so happens that Joy’s category, housewares, automatically focused her on the consumers who buy most of everything—women. In this article, you’ll discover how women as buyers drive the brand choice in almost every category (this means you, too, auto and consumer electronics); women as end users are the research resource who best notice and articulate design problems that need solving; and women as design colleagues contribute even more than their valuable guidance as the voice of the customer.

In a nutshell, centering your research and product development around more input from women will deliver better innovation, stronger sales, greater career success and more customer love in every sector of industrial design.

Want to Sell More?

Design for the People Who Spend More In the US, while women comprise only 51 percent of the population, they account for fully 80 percent of consumer spending and about 55 percent of business buying decisions. (Listen up, B2B!) According to Michael Silverstein of the Boston Consulting Group (hbr.org/2009/09/the-femaleeconomy), “Women make the decision in purchases of 94% of home furnishings… 92% of vacations… 91% of homes…

60% of automobiles… and 51% of consumer electronics.”

How can women really be that dominant in spending power? If you work in a B2C sector, keep in mind the buying dynamics that tend to evolve in most multiperson households: n For day-to-day purchases, the woman of the house tends to take on the chief purchasing officer role for the household, meaning she’s shopping not only for herself but also for everyone else who eats, bathes, cleans the house, goes to school, drinks beer, etc. as well. n For big-ticket purchases (say, anything over $200, like a new car, laptop, home entertainment system, college, family vacation), not only do women buy on their own behalf, they generally lead four of the five stages of a couple’s decision process as well.

Regarding the B2B side, it’s worth noting that according to the US Bureau of Labor statistics, women comprise over half of wholesale and retail buyers (think retail inventory), purchasing agents and managers (cost of goods), administrative assistants and managers (business equipment and services), and HR employees and managers (employee benefit plans). In other words, except for real estate and new building construction, women place the purchase order. And even if she’s a recommender rather than the final decision-maker, if you don’t make her short list, you have no shot at the contract.

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Men Women

20%

14%

Laptop (N/A)

The Crucial Insight: It’s All About Competitive Advantage So if women already buy most of almost everything, how are we going to get them to buy more? That’s not the point.

The question is: Wouldn’t you rather they bought your brand instead of your competitor’s?

Marketing to women is about protecting and building market share. It’s about offering women something they care about enough to choose one brand over another, and it doesn’t have to be anything revolutionary. As you’ll see in a moment, little things can and do move the needle significantly.

In the automotive industry, with US retail sales of over $400 billion, where a single share point is worth more than $4 billion, wouldn’t you think that women, who buy, own and drive at least 50 percent of consumer vehicles, would warrant a lot of attention?

In the consumer electronics industry, itself worth $200 billion, a study conducted in 2010 by Parks Associates (http://mashable.com/2012/01/09/women-and-technology/) reported that while men bought an average of 4.2 consumer electronics products, women bought an average of 4.7. And whereas tech-related items were bought by 83 percent of men, they were bought by 88 percent of women. The same study noted that women expressed more interest than men in buying laptops, tablets and smartphones—three of the top-selling consumer electronics categories. With that kind of spending power, wouldn’t you think that wooing women would be not just on your radar screen, but your number-one, A-plus, star-star priority? And yet it’s not.

Mind the Gap How do we know that companies are not adequately including women in their design thinking? In many categories, women report a continuing gap between what they want and what they’re offered. By large majorities, they feel manufacturers, marketers and designers aren’t paying attention to what they want.

In the automotive industry, for example, a 2014 Frost & Sullivan study of car buyers revealed that globally 50 percent of women are dissatisfied with their vehicles, which probably explains why fully 74 percent say they feel misun-

“Plan to buy....”

2011 Survey by Parks Associates of 2,000 adults.

18%

15%

Tablet $26billion

20%

17%

Smartphone $46 billion

derstood by car manufacturers. I’ve seen similarly shocking numbers from studies in other big-ticket categories, including consumer electronics, financial services and healthcare, so I’d be comfortable guessing that this pattern would hold in just about any of them.

Design firms love to say that their process is customer centric. But the marketplace is telling us that either they’re focusing on the wrong customer—at the very minimum, they’re not including the right customer—or they aren’t doing a great job figuring out what she wants. Women are different. They aren’t built like men. They have different lifestyles and roles than men. They perceive, prioritize and shop differently than men do. And as far as women can tell, designers and marketers don’t care.

Women are far more likely than men to recognize and respond to the second-tier features and improvements that all brands rely on to differentiate themselves from competitors. Women’s perceptual abilities allow them to register and retain details better than men do. Moreover, because women shop differently from men, they pay more attention to features that men—and researchers—tend to classify as unimportant.

Men are more likely to believe that little things make little difference. Women believe that little things make all the difference. In their search for the perfect answer, women seek out more options and compare their trade-offs down to the last detail. As we saw with Joy’s Huggable Hangers, the right small changes can have a huge market impact.

Women in Industrial Design Women’s differences—and the industrial design opportunities they spell out in big neon letters—haven’t gotten much attention because, unfortunately for you, women aren’t wellrepresented at the decision table. The general consensus is that only about 10-15 percent of industrial designers are women (www.good.is/articles/women-in-industrial-designwhere-my-ladies-at). In many of the major sectors—automotive, consumer electronics, appliances and home furnishings, for example—even the marketers are mostly men.

Since women account for 61 percent of marketing and promotions managers in the US (www.dol.gov/wb/factsheets/qf-laborforce-10.htm), that’s a notable anomaly. I say “unfortunately for you” because including more women on

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Courtesy of Volv0 Car Group

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the team improves the product, the process and the business results for everyone.

Can men design for women? Absolutely. I bet there are lots of male designers in the housewares industry, and that category is a fountain of clever innovation and customerresponsive design. The advantage that housewares has is that everyone knows women matter. In automotive, consumer electronics and medical appliances, not so much.

In the absence of female input, male designers focus, not surprisingly, on what seems important and valuable—which they assume holds true for all their customers.

Without a strong voice of the customer in the room, research is asking the wrong questions the wrong way.

Designers are scratching for the same techno tweaks that every other company is working on. And marketers, mostly men themselves, are waxing eloquent about elements men consider cool and women consider hardly relevant.

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#You’reDoingItWrong Looking at the big news from CES, research for big-screen TVs seems to ask just one question: “Which would you prefer?”: n Reducing the screen thickness by a fraction of a millimeter? n Doubling up on the number of pixels so it’s ultra-HD? n How about 3D, so you can all watch with funny glasses on? n Coming soon—VR. You still get the funny glasses, but instead of relaxing on the couch while you watch TV, wouldn’t it be fun to stand in the middle of the room and rotate, all the while moving your head up and down like Stevie Wonder? n All of the above? No problem. Really expensive but definitely cool. n None of the above? What’s wrong with you?

Meanwhile, until recently all indicators were that nobody had taken a second look at remote controls since literally the last millennium. Because we bought a new home entertainment system last year, I have four remotes that disperse themselves around the room, never at arm’s length. They’re all confusing and disgracefully poorly designed: unreliable signal transmission, inconsistent navigation processes, illogical button placement, unexplained icons.

So what was everyone crowing about at CES this year—again?! How thin their screens are. Good grief—what good does that do me?

Converting TVs from cathode ray monster trucks for your living room to sleek frames on your wall? Fantastic. Paring the frame thickness from 4 millimeters to 3 millimeters?

Pointless.

Or look at cars. For some reason, men’s first thought about what a woman wants is a place to put her purse.

And then, he’s stuck. But look what happens when a Volvo team of women designers and engineers asks hundreds of women drivers what they really want—and uses those insights to build the YCC concept car (left). (See the YouTube video posted by Men and Motors.)

A place for her purse? Sure. Also, pedal and seat positions for shorter people; cinema-style back seats that fold up to allow storage of large items, say a set of golf clubs; and a race-car style gas tank entry so caps don’t touch clothes or get lost. These design innovations are things that male drivers probably wouldn’t have come up with, male designers probably wouldn’t have prioritized and that benefit everyone who uses the car, male or female.

What About Pink?

Past attempts to design for women often have not turned out well. Initial inclinations in the ’80s when brands were tripping over themselves to acknowledge the new liberated woman and her wallet were to pink it and shrink it.

Some companies are slow learners and are still on that strategy. Most recently, Bic for Her, “elegantly designed pens, more comfortable for women,” were roundly and rightly ridiculed on Amazon, where you can still see the hilariously snarky reviews.

Lately, pink has been showing up in places you wouldn’t expect. Do a Google search for pink tractors, for example—not as scarce as you might have thought. Much less prevalent are pink chainsaws—don’t miss the Hello Kitty one with “I love you” on the blade.

What’s wrong with pink? Lots of women like pink. Why do women get so upset about being offered a color they like?

In the first place, women find insulting the implication that all it takes to get them to buy something is an option in pink. Actually, women care about all the same things as men do (primary features) and then a lot more, including color (secondary features). Don’t get me wrong—color can be the deciding factor in choosing one brand over another; in the world of market share, color can move the needle.

But historically, for a lot of products, particularly in technology, the only color on offer has been pink—black, white, chrome and pink. That comes across as the “girls’ option,” which in these categories comes across as condescending. The work-around is simple: In addition to neutrals, offer several colors instead of just one. That way your intent comes across as interesting color options, including one that’s pink.

Secondly—and this is important too—women have been burned by pink in the past. In fact, it’s still not at all unusual for the women’s version of identical products to cost more than the male version (see “Women Really Do Pay More,” Washington Post, Dec. 22, 2015). So naturally women are suspicious about being taken advantage of. Is it a cheaper build? Is it too small to be useful?

Women these days are super-sophisticated shoppers because they have all the resources of the Internet at their disposal, and if you offer any product “for women,” you’d better be ready for some heightened scrutiny. Make sure your designs deliver value and your benefits are real.

Return to Joy Let’s look back at Joy Mangano for a minute. Joy Mangano has made millions of dollars—no, billions of dollars— designing for women. She looks at opportunity from the perspective of finding problems to solve—from a woman’seye view, not only as the end user but just as importantly as the buyer who is comparing across similar options before choosing a brand. Because women have a longer list of considerations than men, when you meet the expectations of women, you generally exceed those of men.

In the world of industrial design, thousands of products are annoying millions of women every day. And for designers, that’s called opportunity. Listening to women—as end users, as buyers and as designers—is a sure and certain path to better innovation, stronger sales and greater career success. And anyone can find the joy in that! n

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By Angela E. Yeh, IDSA angela@yehideology.com Angela Yeh is a thought leader and entrepreneur at the intersection of design, strategy and business. As CEO of Yeh IDeology, a leading talent consultancy, she helps large corporate clients find and foster top design and innovation professionals. Yeh also actively supports the design community. She served as IDSA Chapter Chair and District VP and regularly lectures on career development for creatives. Photo: Shawn Blair

Design Needs More Female Leaders

OWN THE CHALLENGE

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here’s a tectonic shift taking place in the world of work. The way employers see the workforce is changing—it must change. Employees are no longer expendable but rather are the most valuable asset any organization has, and every company is competing with each other to attract

them.* Within that, many aspects of the design industry are changing as well. When I say design, think specialties such as industrial design, design research, design strategy, user experience, user interaction, product development and production. And while this industry is still relatively new to the world of business, major corporations and consultancies are recognizing its value and increasingly investing in design and innovation.

Things shift rapidly in business. To have staying power, a company must be able to pivot and adapt to change quickly. Businesses are finally starting to see the value of being continually focused on the future. In fact, innovation has become so popular that an increasing number of corporations are creating chief innovation officer roles and innovation departments. And we do see the day years from now when most businesses will have some degree of design within their organization or collaborate with a design resource for various aspects of their operation.

A Conduit Is Needed Innovation is about change and change is hard for business. Something that exists needs to be updated or altered in some way, or something new must be built to satisfy an emerging need. For innovation initiatives to be successful, you need the appropriate mindful change agents to effectively implement and facilitate change.

Stewardship of open, productive communication between design innovation and business is essential for innovation to work. Leaders must be the conduit between design and business to ensure all voices are heard, translate values into goals, and gather and steer everyone toward those goals.

Innovation can be led by different disciplines. Who takes on this role can be influenced by the industry or the specialty of the company. For instance, a company driven by engineering may choose someone with an engineering background to be the innovation lead. Or if the need is greatest in user experience, then the innovation leader may come from that field. The key attribute that leader needs is the ability to be mindful of the objectives and needs of the parts of the company that will be impacted by an innovation initiative.

The people that embody these roles can come from different disciplines and backgrounds, but they must have an omnibus understanding of all facets of the business.

*Visit http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobmorgan/2014/09/02/the-evolution-of-the-employee/#6447f7a7175c

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istockphoto

Employers are finding that when women are in these leadership roles they often encompass more of the collaborative leadership qualities that unify teams.

A study titled “What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women” was published in the Harvard Business Review in June 2011. It found that a team’s collective intelligence has little to do with members’ individual IQs and a lot more to do

with their gender and the dynamics within the team. As more female members are added, the collective intelligence rises.

Better team performance is attributed to the fact that women generally score higher on social sensitivity measures. Women tend to be better listeners, have the ability to draw others into conversations and are less likely to let their opinions dominate the group. While men have a competitive

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leadership style, women’s leadership style is more inclusive, task-oriented, focused on mentoring others and expressive of concern for others’ needs.

Leadership and management are changing and businesses are realizing that leadership styles that inspire, nurture and collaborate to bring consensus are more successful in cultivating driven, passionate teams.

Competent in the Backroom and the Boardroom Just a decade ago my design and strategy recruitment company, Yeh IDeology, saw that our clients—both corporations and consultancies—were looking for more specialists. Now more often they want people at all levels who are skilled at their hands-on craft but can also articulate their concepts and processes, present to clients, be organized, and possess some amount of project and client management skills (both upward, diagonal and downward management). Women often excel at these social and organizational skills compared to men, who tend to thrive at the technical.

Demand for women is evening out in all fields with the exception of leadership and technically rigorous specialties like engineering, design engineering, and research and strategy industries that have a great deal of complexity and rigor, such as a subspecialty like medical surgical device design.

While women excel at the relational skills of the fields of design research, design strategy, user experience, industrial design and service design, men still tend to dominate the more technical spaces and categories like medical device design, mechanical engineering and product development.

Some believe it’s just a nature versus nurture thing, where men are more inclined to be better at the technical and women are more akin to the life sciences. But I’m hopeful that more women will begin to recognize that if they do have the chops to succeed in the mechanical, functional, technical space (and many already do) they should continue to hone those skills.

When we do find women flourishing in a technically rigorous specialty, they often have a golden path laid ahead

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of them. One female candidate we represent never has to make an effort to get clients because her niche skills and talent are so refined and in demand that she has people continually bringing projects to her. She lives on an island outside Seattle and can pick and choose what to work on.

I’d love to see that for everyone!

While I’ve seen both men and women do it, men are more likely to claim expertise in skills that they may have only tried once—they figure they’ll learn it through trial and error. Women are less apt to do this. We tend to secondguess ourselves and experience doubts before feeling comfortable claiming an ability. We feel like we have to prove our capabilities to ourselves before we can own them in our careers. In this shifting culture of rapid iteration and adaptation, more important than how much experience you have is your ability to identify what isn’t working, discern a new direction and adjust the course of a project to adapt to these new circumstances.

The only real challenge for women is that they need to recognize their natural talent for leadership and management and feel empowered to pursue these positions, as well as those in typically male-dominated technical specialties. Although we’ve seen an increase in the number of women in design, what I am seeing is that more of them need to feel comfortable and confident tapping into the leadership abilities they use in other parts of their lives and challenge themselves to apply these abilities in their career.

Not Your Mother’s (or Your Father’s) Career Path The allure of burning the midnight oil for startups is becoming less and less of a pull unless the mission, role and goals are aligned for the individual. Companies know they have to find more compelling ways of supporting their employees.

They are now more open to flex time where unconventional hours or days in a schedule may be arranged, including remote work. Companies that offer lifestyle packages with the right mix of compensation, benefits, company culture and flexibility are going to win the top professionals. This opens up a unique opportunity for women to develop a

“We see crossover a lot in design: researchers are becoming user-experience specialists, industrial designers are becoming user-experience consultants, strategists are becoming service-design consultants and so on. Designers are discovering that they can become experts in more than one discipline.

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career path that fits their lifestyle. Juggling career and family and personal life becomes much more viable as women have a real chance to create the life they envision.

Multi-potentialites, or professionals with diverse talents and interests (aka: polymaths), are also changing the world of work. In Emilie Wapnick’s famous TED Talk, Why Some of Us Don’t Have One True Calling, she explores the polymath’s role in the evolution of the traditional career path.

This straight and narrow career pattern followed by baby boomers and earlier generations was greatly influenced by the industrial and manufacturing revolution. I liken it to a game of checkers where the path is set and one moves steadily up the ladder, advancing into midlevel and senior positions based on experience and seniority.

Today’s professionals, on the other hand, are pursuing a more organic path, not unlike a game of chess, where they’re moving four steps forward, three steps back and two to the left. They are organically exploring and growing their abilities in any direction that pulls them. It may seem like they’re jumping from one field to another randomly, but they’re actually developing multiple facets of themselves, cultivating their unique point of view and distinguishing themselves in various disciplines. They’re becoming specialists, building their authority and using their unique skill sets to seamlessly move from one path to another.

We see crossover a lot in design: researchers are becoming user-experience specialists, industrial designers are becoming user-experience consultants, strategists are becoming service-design consultants and so on. Designers are discovering that they can become experts in more than one discipline. And when two seemingly opposite career paths meet, the potential for innovation, for creation, for design is exponential.

For these folks, there is no such thing as failure when it comes to their career—only learning experiences. Each new specialty they gain only builds on their existing knowledge set, thus cultivating their unique point of view. Employers stand to reap the benefits of this trend for obvious reasons, especially those that have incorporated a growth and devel-

opment program into their company culture or require a niche skill set.

The only challenge for polymaths is knowing how to tell their story, how to brand themselves so that companies understand who they are and what they have to offer by way of specialized skills and capabilities—especially companies with more traditional HR departments that may not understand that a candidate would leave one secure, promising career to begin at the bottom of another for the opportunity to build their point of view.

Reach for Your Golden Opportunities Design is a totally different world than it was when I came into it during the early ’90s. The disparity between genders is closing quickly. But the fact remains that Yeh IDeology still gets requests for female designers almost every day, particularly in leadership, and we don’t see enough women stepping up to the plate to take on these opportunities.

The world of design is rapidly evolving. Businesses are seeking great innovation leaders at all levels, and I encourage all women to step up to the challenge and take it on with vivacity, genuine curiosity and confidence in their unique talents! I think the best thing about this trend is that companies aren’t just looking to balance out the male-to-female ratio; business knows the advantages women bring to a team—and they want to bring that in-house and develop it. Women can and should bring their gift for design to the table as well as their natural ability to lead, inspire, nurture and collaborate. The demand among employers for female design leaders is real, and the opportunities for women to create the lives they want for themselves are infinite.

In today’s society we see more and more women making a point to have it all—both a great career and a great family life. It is doable and possible. Believe in yourself, believe this ultimate balance is possible, plan for it, work toward it and manifest it. We look forward to the day when we see just as many women in leadership and pivotal positions of design and innovation. Let’s make it so. n

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By Jasmine Burton jasminekburton@gmail.com

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www.jasminekburton.com

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TEDxAtlanta talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pzFVspHIYQ

Prior to graduating from Georgia Tech, Jasmine Burton and her senior design team’s initial SafiChoo toilet design won the 2014 InVenture Prize. Burton then founded Wish for WASH, a startup that houses the development of SafiChoo in the hopes of inspiring the utilization of empathic design principles in the social sector.

BITE-SIZE PROGRESS

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his past year has been a whirlwind as I transitioned from a student designer operating with fantastical budgets and production strategies to a social entrepreneur leading cross-sector design work for use in the developing world. With an amazing team, I design toilets for use and partici-

patory iteration in the developing world through my social startup Wish for WASH, LLC (www.wishforwash. com). Throughout this journey, I have learned that with the constraints of reality also comes the opportunity for incredibly creative problem-solving.

As an industrial design student at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2013, my interdisciplinary senior design team created SafiChoo, an inexpensive mobile toilet that won the 2014 Georgia Tech InVenture Prize Competition, the largest undergraduate invention competition in the United States. The winnings enabled my original team to pilot the first iteration of the SafiChoo toilet in the Kakuma Refugee camp in Kenya with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Norwegian Refugee Council under the auspices of Sanivation.

Following the pilot, I founded Wish for WASH, recruited a new team and worked to iterate the design based on feedback we received in the field. Now the SafiChoo 2.0 modular toilet, manufactured as a production prototype in Atlanta and China, will be tested via a beta pilot in Lusaka, Zambia, this year. The 2.0 solution is a sanitary option that is intended to be universally and easily deployed by the customer (such

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as international aid agencies) while simultaneously being culturally specific with a toolbox of options that enable the end user (such as marginalized people in low-resource communities) to choose how to use the toilet to best meet their needs. Specifically, the modular components consist of: n the sit-squat seat, which allows sitting in a traditional manner or the squatting position, which is a common cultural practice in many countries and is an anatomically healthier position for defecating the spacer, which raises the toilet seat to a comfortable sitting height the underground waste collection unit, which can be adapted to existing waste management solutions or used to treat the waste internally via urine diversion or compost a manual bidet, which is still in development, for use by people who practice washing rather than wiping

The findings from our eminent pilot will determine our next design iterations and whether Wish for WASH has a minimum viable product to test at a larger scale. As a team, we are passionate about bringing innovation to sanitation with the ideal goal of creating a solution that can be community based and deployed in low-resource communities.

Today 2.5 billion people in the world lack access to a safe, hygienic toilet.

Sustainable Impact After a year leading the Wish for WASH team and after a year of being out of college, I have learned that there are numerous areas beyond the physical product where I seek to thrive and utilize my creative problem-solving skills in order to grow and create sustainable impact. Proving that a physical design technically works and is a user-friendly and intuitive option is only the first step in an entrepreneur’s journey. I constantly repurpose the design thinking cycle to iterate go-to-market strategies, manufacturing methodologies, distribution channels, and meaningful ways to measure the intended versus the actual impact of our work, as well as devise creative fundraising strategies, such as our indiegogo campaign, which continues to fund the upcoming pilot. I have been forced to realize that 24 hours each day does not provide enough time to completely exhaust all ideation and implementation possibilities in this interdisciplinary social impact design field—which is a frustrating reality of adulthood.

While in school, I approached my design work in a vacuum without truly understanding the complexities of working with people from sectors such as business, international development, finance and manufacturing, especially as it relates to gender. As a female, I have learned that work in this space requires learning to balance patience with persistence in terms of fighting for progress in a professional and culturally appropriate way; many cultures are male dominant and resist female input and decision-making.

Nevertheless, an important aspect of sanitation work, and global health work in general, involves gender equity as evidenced by the huge number of pubescent girls in developing countries who frequently drop out of school or are

sexually assaulted for defecating outside at night because their schools and homes lack toilets. These marginalized women are more inclined to share their stories with other women, as I witnessed by collecting a substantial amount of qualitative information from female heads of households and translators during our Kenyan pilot with Sanivation. It is vital for women product designers and engineers to work in the social sector to help navigate historically gendered work in order to advocate for societal advancements of women by giving them a voice they might not otherwise have.

While I continue to navigate these new and often unclear terrains, the iterative process of the physical toilet has taken much more time than I could have ever anticipated—especially since we seek to truly follow the process of a human-centered design approach to create a product the community can take ownership of. However I have learned that if I continue to persevere, with the support of my incredible team we will collectively be in a better place than where we were in our mission to make sustainable change despite the inevitable set backs. During my freshmen year at Georgia Tech, I was inspired to do something about the insanely complex global sanitation crisis, and that conviction—despite how unusual—is what propels me to do the work I do today.

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Helping to creatively end the global sanitation crisis is an incredibly monumental goal that requires more than just a great idea. This work also requires significant resilience, patience and a good listening ear. To work toward my ultimate goal of all people living healthier lives as a result of having a safe and hygienic toilet, instead of an overflowing hole in the ground, I now see that bite-size chunks of progress must be made. Most importantly, to avoid burnout and ensure the sustainability of my passion for this work, I have internalized Jonathan Kozol’s message to pick battles big enough to matter but small enough to win.

Design for Social Impact As a 24-year-old, I have created a social enterprise and have led an incredible team of Georgia Tech students and recent graduates who are designers, engineers, business people and researchers in developing two iterations of the SafiChoo toilet. Thus far we have created an ever-changing business plan, assembled an inspiring advisory board, raised some startup capital and completed our first manufactured production prototype run. We are not yet close to a sustainable business model or to mass-producing, scaling or selling the toilet, but our intentions are clear and our work is meaningful.

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The social sector needs more creatives to support the United Nations’ newly deemed Sustainable Development Goals to have innovative and human-centered solutions that work to solve the world’s grand challenges. A prominent movement toward social impact design work is growing in the industrial design community, and it must continue to grow because designers are taught to view problems as opportunities. Industrial designers are also needed to further catalyze and expand the maker movement across the developing world by making open source technologies, such as 3D printing, more widely available. These resource-constrained communities best understand their own needs and are better positioned to create relevant solutions to improve their lives.

In the end, I am learning to control my frustrations with my lack of rapid progress toward my all-encompassing driving passion. Thus, I am accepting that my work is helping inspire humanity to take a few steps forward toward improved global sanitation and health equity. A few small steps of bite-sized progress is indeed a battle that is big enough to matter. And I now celebrate bite-sized progress because as a product-designing social entrepreneur I know that I will not see large-scale change overnight. And that is okay because it is the nature of this complex work.

Rather than letting these frustrations become the dominant force, I am learning to value patience as our toilet design and organization iterates in an effort to work with low-resource communities to collectively create sustainable change. I believe that much of the young creative social entrepreneurs of today can be viewed as the millennial version of the starving artist archetype. We often have a message to communicate and a heart for a more equitable world, which frequently requires us to bootstrap our way toward progress and to achieving our dreams. We have a skill set to share with the world in a way that is not traditional, but it starts a meaningful conversation that our society needs to have through a designed experience. We often work to amplify the voices of those who have historically been voiceless through creativity. Our work is never done as the creative process is infinite. We persevere in following our passion because battles that are small enough to win still matter in the grand scheme of social progress. Design is our vehicle for activating change. As for me, I seek to continue utilizing design to advocate for universal health. n

EVA ZEISEL “She called herself a ‘maker of things’ because she created designs that were ‘more beautiful, more elegant, and more comfortable’ than the output of a craftsman, but rejected the label of industrial design as associated with novelty,

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innovation, and commerce.

—Cooper Hewitt

Bird vase and salt and pepper designed by Eva Zeisel, 1963, Nikko Company, Japan. Re-issued by Eva Zeisel Originals, 2012. Photo: ©TalismanPHOTO

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By Joyce Thomas, IDSA, and Megan Strickfaden jkthomas@illinois.edu n megan.strickfaden@ualberta.ca

REFLECTIONS ON LEARNING, DESIGNING AND TEACHING

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hrough a series of questions posed to each other, Joyce Thomas and Megan Strickfaden explore topics in industrial design (ID) practice, including reflections on design education (past and present) and the role of technology in designing and teaching. The two met at a design conference

in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 2009 where they connected over their interests in empathic design and designing for disability, and their experiences balancing design careers with family (they each have two children). Since then they have co-authored eight international publications, lectured and taught together, and continued their collaboration across the continent. As seasoned designers and educators, they provide insights into how ID practice and education are permanently conjoined.

Joyce Thomas, IDSA, is an innovator and educator with a passion to empower people through good design. She has designed consumer products for Electrolux and through Joyce Thomas Designs that have been awarded 59 US and international patents. A graduate of RIT and UIUC, she is a clinical professor of ID at the University of Illinois, Urbana– Champaign where she teaches human-centered practices, entrepreneurship and innovation to industrial design, business, and engineering students and internationally through workshops and seminars.

Megan Strickfaden is an associate professor in the Department of Human Ecology at the University of Alberta (Canada) and an adjunct professor in the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Studies Research Centre at KU Leuven (Belgium). She has designed hundreds of products, has taught design foundations and history, material culture, research and design methods, and disability studies for 25 years and has completed over a dozen funded research projects. She received a BA in industrial design and anthropology (1987), MDes (2001), engineering diploma (2002) and PhD (2006).

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MEGAN: Joyce launched her ID career in the mid ’70s when men were the primary ID practitioners and women’s liberation was in full swing. In retrospect, there were only a handful of women in ID at that time, and many of these women put their careers at the forefront of their lives. By contrast, Joyce managed both career and family, where she encountered and balanced traditional and nontraditional gender roles.

When a student recently asked Joyce to describe her biggest accomplishment, she unhesitatingly responded that her greatest success is raising two daughters who are both accomplished in creative and business careers.

JOYCE: Arriving on the ID scene approximately a decade after me, Megan had already lived in the US, Europe and Canada, when she found herself in Western Canada where (much like today) there was only batch manufacturing, a context that was not considered real ID practice.

Megan worked as a design consultant on design-toproduction projects for restaurants, museums and more.

Simultaneously, Megan taught part-time at a local college where she brought international knowledge of design and real-world design to students while her two small children often listened to design history lectures, playing quietly under a table in the lecture hall. Megan’s career took a turn

Left: Miss Possible: Marie Curie doll and activities that inspire girls to dream big using women role models from STEM fields, by Kelly Lin, a student of Thomas’ at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

Lin continues her work with Miss Possible and also practices design at Kaleidoscope.

Below: BrushUp, one of the patented iconic battery operated stick broom products that created a new product category, by Joyce Thomas

responded: “Over the years, I have confirmed that the two greatest gifts people are given are curiosity and imagination.

Everything else in life is learned. Without curiosity learning would be impossible. Without imagination the future would never arrive.”

toward education and research, and she has since worked and lived in Scotland, Belgium, France and Canada teaching and practicing design.

MEGAN: What are the most important things you learned in design school?

JOYCE: I chose to study art and design because I loved drawing, painting and making. On a freshman career day I discovered my passion when a senior ID student spoke poetically about product design. Until that moment, I had not given thought to products being designed. The most important skills I acquired in design school were sketching, drafting in perspective, building prototypes, working through and bouncing ideas off colleagues, and playing while designing (on an all-nighter we turned a can of Spray Mount into BS repellant as a gift for our professor). Craftsmanship was critical at all stages of the design process (rapid sketches, sketch models, etc.) because these represented my ideas and myself. Approaching a design problem naïvely without much background or research resulting in unexpected innovative solutions was another key take-away from design school. Years later I told my professor, Toby Thompson, that I had been using his process with my own students. He

MEGAN: At the time of my studies, combining design with anthropology was highly unusual. I intuitively chose to put these together because I recognized that understanding the cultural values and aesthetics of objects would help me as a designer. Interestingly, this decision was one of the most practical and influential decisions of my career. Anthropology provided me with a perspective and methods to study how people interact with and are affected by material things. This has proven invaluable in human-centered design toward understanding the complex relationships people have with the designed world.

MEGAN: What are some of the highlights of your professional practice?

JOYCE: Recognizing myself as an inventor is a personal highlight. Early in my career while working at Eureka I was granted my first utility patent for developing an easier way to change an upright vacuum cleaner bag. This was an ah-a moment for me. One of my inventions has been continuously produced for over three decades (the first battery-operated lightweight vacuum ever produced). Designers also frequently work on product line extensions: using existing tooling and parts to create new or fresher products. When Dyson’s cyclonic products grabbed the imagination of the American buying public, US manufacturers were caught off guard and not ready to compete.

I worked with two engineers to revamp an existing upright vacuum cleaner by converting it to a cyclonic vacuum. This product helped the company bridge the paradigm shift from one technology to another.

J. Thomas

K. Lin, S. Hobbs and T. Carlson

JOYCE: How does your grounding in design and anthropology influence you?

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JOYCE: Where does your professional ID experience fall?

MEGAN: What are your impressions of the current state of ID practice?

MEGAN: ID involves wicked and sometimes complex problem-solving. Designing involves asking questions (of myself and others, through objects, with objects), discovering many solutions, evaluating them and arriving at the most preferred solution. One of the things I appreciate about ID is that there are myriad outcomes that are one-off, massproduced, tiny, large, material and/or immaterial. I believe that examining the contexts of things is paramount: what works in Brussels will not necessarily work elsewhere. One recent project with a colleague in Sydney plays with local and global contexts. Our project involved designing a bowl together online through sketches and 3D modeling (we’ve never met each other), rapid-prototyping the bowls in our different locales and then doing interventions on our bowls separately. I continue to work on projects that have various outcomes: one-of-a-kind products for people with disabilities, systems of products (tactile images) and objects that are mass-produced (protective clothing).

JOYCE: Historically our practice has been works made for hire (the company buys a designer’s intellectual property, assumes all the financial risk and makes all the profit). While this remains the primary employment for roughly 70 percent of designers in the US, entrepreneurship in ID is providing new ways to practice. Startup costs are low. Rapidprototyping methods have evolved more quickly in the last three years than over the previous 20 years combined, allowing designers to self-produce concepts. Crowdfunding is a primary financing option for small business. While entrepreneurial endeavors provide the freedom to pursue new opportunities, follow personal passions and gain independence, the cost and process of successfully bringing new products to market remains one of the biggest barriers.

JOYCE: What are your impressions of ID practice and education from a global perspective?

M. Strickfaden

MEGAN: I have lived, worked and designed in western and northern Canada, the US, Mexico, Scotland, Belgium and France. I have taught in many of these places and conducted research on ID education in North America, the UK, Europe and China. Based on these experiences, I believe ID skills are fluid, flexible and transferable—also evidenced by recent applications of design thinking to other professions.

Interestingly, there is a relative cohesion (with nuanced diversions) among design programs taught around the world, yet in practice what happens in one place is different from another. For example, in China designers are more involved in front-end designing and then passing their work to engineers, while in Scotland and western Canada designers are more apt to open their own companies or work in peripheral industries (exhibit design, graphic design, architecture, etc.).

Although global cohesion in foundational ID education is valuable, there are opportunities for design schools to think more locally and nuance learning to relate more directly to align with their production contexts.

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North South: Making Global/Making Local, Rapid Prototyped Bowls (2015) by Megan Strickfaden and Berto Pandalfo, a colleague from the University of Technology, Sydney

Workwear Garment System to Protect from Steam and Hot Water (2013) by Sihong Yu, a student of Strickfaden’s at the University of Alberta (Canada), and Megan Strickfaden for the Alberta Oil Industry. Yu currently practices design at Apparel Solutions Inc.

MEGAN: What are the most important connections you would like to see between practice and teaching?

JOYCE: How do you envision the future of ID education as technology makes changes in the way we practice?

JOYCE: To make meaningful connections between practice and teaching there needs to be an understanding of the past and present of ID. At its inception, our profession was about making industrially produced objects beautiful. Product development was a linear process where designers created the vision and then threw designs over the wall to engineering. I entered practice as ID shifted from prescribing beauty to creating good designs with user needs in mind. Over my career new practices emerged bringing all players in product development (marketing, engineering, design, manufacturing) into collaborative teams, which in essence was a marrying of concurrent engineering with humancentered designing. As an educator, I teach collaborative courses between disciplines involved in product development; however, the core of ID education is still centered on its own process. Students are immersed in computer-based technologies that support designing, yet traditional design skills (drawing, modeling, etc.) continue to be essential. Good design is about identifying and solving problems, having the skills to render ideas, and also having knowledge about production processes, including materials, how parts are manufactured and how products work. Designers need to navigate and satisfy many needs (i.e., marketing, engineering, manufacturing) along the way to creating good products that satisfy the needs of the end users they are the champions for. The key learnings students need to take away from design school are that designing is being part of a team, involves more than just playing with technologies and requires design intentions to follow through to produced objects.

MEGAN: I have seen many positive changes as technologies emerge and influence ID practice. I have taught design using various technologies for various purposes (designing using CAD, teaching online, etc.), and I am convinced that technology will continue to provide new opportunities for designing and design teaching. However, problem-solving, critical thinking, social engagement, emotional intelligence, along with verbal and visual communication techniques, will continue to be key skills future designers need regardless of how technology changes. Also completely unrelated to technology, I believe that future designers need to be taught how to be reflexive, to understand themselves in order to design for others, so they aren’t inadvertently incorporating their own biases and assumptions into their designs.

MEGAN: If you could tell students to engage in one activity and read one book relevant to becoming better practitioners what would these be?

JOYCE: Sketch every day, everything from mundane objects to things from your imagination. Sketching develops muscle memory and stimulates the brain. It aids in understanding how objects are made and put together and analyzing the subtle details that make products work well or poorly.

Being well-versed in life values is useful to designers, and as such Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements has much to offer. Although Ruiz’s message is deeper than simple agreements, his succinct admonitions are a powerful aid for future designers: “Be impeccable with your word, don’t take things personally, don’t make assumptions, always do your best.” n

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By Carole Bilson, IDSA cbilson@dmi.org Carole Bilson is president of the Design Management Institute. Most recently she was the president of Strategic Change & Innovation, providing organizations with a roadmap to build innovation capacity, achieve operational excellence and increase value. She also served as vice president, global design and usability & technology support operations at Pitney Bowes where she oversaw an award-winning team of visual and industrial designers, engineers, information architects/human factors engineers, and front-end software developers.

A CROOKED PATH TO CAREER ADVANCEMENT

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started my career with dual majors in industrial design and graphic design and spent the early part of my career as a practicing industrial designer working at a major corporation. That company afforded me the opportunity to work on a wide variety of products and new ventures without having to job hop.

It was exciting and challenging.

Exciting because I worked for a company that at the time ranked as one of the top brands in the world and had hundreds of products on which we could work. All projects required good problem-solving skills, which years later I realized was a strength of mine. I also had a strong desire to lead and to make positive contributions to society, so I volunteered in many community service organizations.

These volunteer opportunities gave me the chance to give back, and at the same time they helped me develop and hone my leadership skills. In fact, I learned about strategy development and succession planning while I was an officer of the Rochester Women’s Network, a group of 850 women professionals, executives and business owners.

After 13 years as a senior industrial designer, I felt an imbalance between my work world and my community world. The growth path within my department was stagnant.

I also felt a desire to be in a position where I could have a stronger influence over day-to-day projects and decisions.

Using the skills I learned through an employee affinity group that I co-founded and the guidance of a good mentor, I began looking for that first management position. I knocked on doors and was met with smiles, pats on the back and the question “Where is you MBA?” No opportunities surfaced.

My second mentor happened to see a unique job description in the local paper for a city coordinator to lead a New York State and National Science Foundation initiative, working in concert with other coordinators across the state. I beat out many other applicants, including seasoned educators. I was told by the interviewers that my industrial design background positioned me perfectly for what they were trying to bring about in the education system. (By

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the way, this was long before the term “design thinking” had been coined.) My company then put me on “loaned executive status” for the next year while I worked in this initiative.

Expanding Opportunities Before I get too far along and lest one thinks that my career path was paved with milk and honey, allow me to set the record straight. As a woman and member of a minority group, I experienced extreme difficulties at every step of my career. The climb took seemingly forever. Not only did I often feel invisible, but I also had constant obstacles thrown in my path. I worked long hours (and still do), I took on tough projects, I traveled when I didn’t want to, and I networked and went out of my way to build relationships with my natural sense of curiosity about people and life. But all of those things come back to benefit you when and where you least expect it. I distinctly remember my husband saying, “Sometimes the path is not straight; you may have to take zig-zags in order to get where you want to go.” Eventually, one success leads to other successes.

After 19 years at one company, I got a call from an executive recruiter who was referred to me by a thoughtful design associate. This new career opportunity would require me to leave my home, family, and state to commute for an entry-level executive position. It was scary and exciting— here was my chance of a lifetime—and I took it. Then four years later I was given the chance to run a second department within the company’s engineering division. To my knowledge, I was the first woman to head up a global design department as well as engineering operations, reporting to the chief technology officer in a Fortune 500 company. A

year later, I became a vice president, the first woman at that company to obtain that level within the engineering division—and a designer to boot.

Being a vice president allowed me to see what happens at the executive level and the influence a single person can have on the careers of others and on the direction of a company. I also used my power and position to ensure that other women and minorities were given projects of substance and visibility so that they too could gain exposure and advance.

My department was the most diverse in the entire division.

I was invited to join the CEO Council, a team of highpotential executives that would participate in strategy discussions with the C-suite executives. I had a seat at the table and the chance to influence. Back then I didn’t know what to call that influence; now I refer to it as my design thinking skills and the resourcefulness that designers learn and develop over time. We designers can bring tremendous value to an organization or company if given the opportunity and if we step up.

The Dynamics of Change through the Influence of Design Among the initiatives I spearheaded was to take my team through a strategic planning process with an organization development expert. Organization development experts with business savvy are able to work with leadership teams to develop and implement a strategy. They take you through a process that ends up creating team alignment and motivation to drive the right set of goals, strategies and deliverables. The work we did helped our design team identify over 29 possible opportunities or initiatives to work on.

We shared these 29 initiatives with other leaders across the company, anyone willing to listen, and then we chose the top three that we wanted to work on. (Most leaders know that you can only work on one to three major goals at a time or over a year period.) By sharing these ideas broadly, it allowed others to either support what we were focusing on or take some of our ideas and lead them themselves.

One of our top-three strategic initiatives was to form and run a company-wide user experience council to build awareness about the user/customer experience. Ultimately, the design team wanted to build a culture of user/customer aware peers so that together we could create awesome customer experiences and contribute to better business value for our company. As the department head and leader of these ideas, I headed up the council. Together, my boss, the chief technology officer, and I invited 25 executives from around the company to participate.

As a team we created our own strategic plan and we selected three pilot projects (to work on over three to 12 months) drawing on cross-functional teams made up of company executives. A designer from my team drove one of these pilots, which identified that there were 23 user-related issues on a product development refresh that was just starting development work. The designer created a chart that listed the user/customer issues, along with their degree of difficulty and the cost and time required to fix them. The

product development team was originally only planning to fix about six of these issues (per direction from the commercialization leader). They did not like the fact that the design team was trying to convince them to take on more work because they said they didn’t have enough money and the work was not in their project scope.

Over time, once the commercialization team understood the impact of making these improvements, the team members found a way to go the extra mile, taking ownership and the willingness). They ended up fixing about 19 of these problems despite the fact that they were not being forced to do so by their management, nor were they being funded to do so. The end result meant a better product for customers, less complaint calls to the call center and increased profit for the company.

The designer felt pride and a tremendous sense of accomplishment knowing that he had made a difference on this team, and that our customers would benefit tremendously from these improvements. Also, having a user experience council at the management level provided a backdrop of education and support companywide about the value of design’s impact on product development beyond the obvious. So now when a designer would make a pitch about customer focus points, pain points and opportunities, their peer team members were more likely to pay attention and ask, “How can we help?” rather than saying, “It’s not in the plan” or “You’re creating extra work for us that is not in the budget.”

Full Circle I ended up becoming president of the Design Management Institute unexpectedly. In 2014, our former president, sadly, passed away suddenly. I was on the DMI board at the time and working as an independent consultant. I knew that the DMI needed someone to step up quickly, and I felt that I could do the job. Over the years I had benefited from DMI’s strong programs, the camaraderie among members and its influence, and felt a strong bond to the organization. Now it was time to give back. The DMI and IDSA are two organizations I feel very strongly about and encourage anyone to join as they offer much to benefit from.

Now I have the opportunity to bring a fresh perspective and diversity to the DMI. It starts simply. I can reach out and ensure that we have a good mix of men, women and global cultures participating. There are many more women in the various fields of design today (industrial design, interaction design, user experience design, human factors design) then when I first started. But I still see far too few women design managers and executives. I believe that it’s a matter of preparedness meets opportunity.

I strongly encourage women and people of underrepresented groups to have a solid foundation of education and experience, but to also pay attention to and to feed your career development. Extend yourself to others, get a mentor or two, join committees outside work, practice leadership skills. Then when you’re ready, start knocking on doors and network to let people know that you are skilled, willing and able. Never give up—persistence pays off. If I can do it, anyone can. n

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By Qin Li qin@fuseproject.com Qin Li is the director of industrial design at fuseproject. Originally from China, she received her BS in industrial design from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art and MFA in industrial design from Academy of Art University. At fuseproject, she has worked on a variety of design projects. This diverse experience has given her unique points of view to apply across different areas and categories.

SEEING THROUGH DESIGN

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am from China. When I chose to study industrial design in the late ’90s, industrial design was still not fully established in China. People thought design was just about making products look prettier—nice to have, but not necessary. Industrial designers were called “art workers.” Most industrial design stu-

dents ended up doing graphic design or interior design, if they were lucky. People, and industry, did not fully recognize the value of design yet. I did, though. I believed design and art were very different.

This was the ’90s. There was no Dezeen or Pinterest for immediately sharing design and ideas like we have today.

So I learned from mostly American design magazines—like ID and INNOVATION—how design does have value. Design takes objects we know and makes them better. A spoon even. We just accept the function of a spoon. But design could take a spoon and turn it into something much more marvelous, functional, and easier and delightful to use. And the value of that spoon, that design, is for everyone.

This is why I wanted to take my art background and apply it to industrial design. I saw art as something more subjective, internal, personal. Design though—design is about emotion, about connecting people with the objects around them. Industrial design could help make things better. It could help see the ways people use things. And could use that understanding, and vision, to make lives better.

This was my dream, to be in this kind of innovative design process thinking and working as an industrial designer. This was a tough dream in China back then where the emphasis seemed more on imitation than innovation.

Imitations of foreign designs were everywhere—the idea being that imitation makes the process of design and business easier, and faster, for people. This was not the environment to cultivate creative minds or to learn the process of innovation. So I decided to come to the US—to San Francisco, Silicon Valley—to follow my dream.

After receiving my master’s degree in industrial design from Academy of Art University, I began working at fuseproject with Yves Béhar, IDSA. The team back then was very small—but, the same as now, very talented. This is where

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I discovered the joy of the innovation process in real life.

Working at fuseproject (office shown at the right) was the first time I realized how much fun the creative process can be, and how important it is in driving innovation. Yves pushes us to think out of the box; to create solutions that are smart and simple, but not conventional; to find unique approaches that tighten the connection between humans and technology.

Our designs might look effortless, but it takes a great amount of creativity, effort and work to achieve this.

Design Takes Perseverance Designing through the lens of innovation could mean taking a multidisciplinary approach, looking at new materials or new ways of experiencing an existing paradigm, or simply seeing beyond the rules of the world. It means starting from scratch, pulling inspiration from the world and the people around you, and looking closely at every aspect of the design.

And in my career, I have realized that innovation must be paired with perseverance. A creative idea is essential, but it’s just the beginning. Pushing design through the engineering and production process is key for successful innovation. Our design process can never stop at the final design render—it does not stop until the product is in the market and in consumers’ hands. Our team drives the innovation process to make sure the product on the shelf looks as amazing as the original design. We go through countless iterations to ensure that the function, look and feel, and user experience will not be compromised by manufacturing constraints. This design-driven process leads to a highly controlled execution for all of our projects.

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The Sayl chair (above) is a perfect example. The final look and feel of the chair is very simple, but the effort and the amount of detail and refinement behind it are enormous. When designing the Sayl chair for Herman Miller, we decided to use a new material for the backrest. There was no established approach for using it, so we had to invent one. We spent weeks sketching, prototyping and testing to generate the most efficient, simple and elegant way to mount the material—and then to define the perfect position for the attachments to ensure people would not feel pressure points when they lean fully into the backrest. In order to use a single piece of material to create the Herman Miller standard of ergonomic comfort, we studied the body and developed a pattern that follows the body’s shape with strings of different widths and thicknesses. The team then spent a lot of time testing and finetuning directly with the engineers. The end result: a chair that is incredibly simple and intelligent—it has been called “a minimalist masterpiece.”

The Jawbone UP (inset) is another example of this.

When we designed the first-generation activity tracker

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for Jawbone, we defined the wearable experience by saying it needs to be 24/7. Unlike the conventional method of wearing a pedometer, we were the first to define that the best location to wear this device is on the wrist.

This way it can be worn all the time, and the data will be holistic and accessible.

Comfort is a top requirement for wearable technology—so we designed a product that would fit comfortably on the wrist. But the early engineering packaging we received was about two times wider and thicker than our design’s dimensions. It wouldn’t be comfortable to wear during all kinds of activities or while sleeping. With a lot of back and forth looking at the internals with the engineers and mocking up different configurations, we arrived at a breakthrough manufacturing process that injects soft plastic around the internal mechanism. This got us to our desired size range.

With the size reduction and innovative molding process, we were able to bring comfort together with lifestyle aesthetics, hiding the technology in a simple, nice bracelet that sits naturally on the wrist. In its final form this design allows users to effortlessly track and learn from their present and

the founder of the Cradle to Cradle approach, has said that as designers we are the creators of good and bad. We are not just responsible for how the design looks or works, but also how it is sourced and how it ends.

This holistic thinking drives our process here at fuseproject. When we designed the new packaging for the Jawbone UP24, we removed the plastic case and only used recycled PET film and molded fiber. It was a brave step to use an internal structural material for an external purpose. And it worked. The packaging is five times lighter, costs much less and offers much more protection. Most of all, it is a much more sustainable and environmentally friendly design. As designers, we carry a great responsibility in this way. We need to continue to strive with innovation and creativity to design for both the product’s life and its death.

the past activity and to promote a healthier lifestyle. This is what the team’s perseverance, and design-driven process, has made possible.

Design Is Responsibility Industrial design is the creative process used to generate physical objects that suit human needs. Through design we help people experience a better life, know themselves more, and stay connected to each other and the world around them. With the rapid growth of technology, industrial design has become more and more important in quickly bringing new ideas and technologies to life. Intelligent products are springing up all around us. Sensors can be embedded into the smallest devices, and everything is connected to the cloud. This is only the beginning.

There is so much opportunity to innovate these days.

There are more and more opportunities for designers to reach into different areas that we couldn’t before—different groups of people, different ages, different countries—to make people’s lives much easier, smarter and healthier on a global scale.

But with the rapid growth of technology, a lot of physical designs now suffer shorter life spans. This brings a big challenge—how to create less waste. William McDonough,

Design as a Way of Life I’m sure some people are surprised to see a woman director leading such a prominent industrial design team. To me, it was always natural to be in industrial design—and to aim to be good at what I do. I wasn’t raised with the idea that women did some things and men did other things. My parents wanted me, their only child, to be able to do anything and everything.

I spent a lot of time with my grandfather, who built furniture, and learned from him how to build things smartly and efficiently, and to strive for perfection. His work was always better than anything I saw in stores. And my father, who taught physics, used to reward me with strange gifts: I remember once, when I did well on a test, receiving gigantic magnets that he had removed from an antique radio. From these things I learned a different view of the world than what I was seeing with my own eyes: I saw how things take form and the magic and possibilities of objects and how they fit together.

With this upbringing, I never really considered myself a woman designer. I am an industrial designer. I see design as neutral, standing at the center of everything: of art, engineering and technology. As a designer, you want to create designs that appeal to everyone. So you must be everyone, think like everyone: male, female, elderly, even see a child’s perspective on things.

To me, design is not just work—it is a way of life. Every day is an incredible opportunity. Every day we can find ways to make life better, to create something that’s outside the realm of normal thinking, to build deeper emotional connections between objects and humans, and to craft better and more beautiful experiences for us now, and for our children in the future. n

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By Amina Horozic hi@aminahorozic.com Amina Horozic is currently a lead industrial designer at fuseproject. Previously she worked at Aether Things, frog design and Chrysler as a car designer. She is also the author of BREAKING INÂŽ: Product Design. She has degrees from the College for Creative Studies (BFA) and California College of the Arts (MBA).

DESIGNING A BETTER WORLD

SPRING’s curriculum took entrepreneurs through the process of designing solutions with a human-centered approach.

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hen I was nine, all I wanted to be was a world-renowned synthesizer player. Yes, not a pianist—but a

synthesizer player. To me, that was the sound of the future, and I wanted to be a part of it. I went to the shop with my mom and picked out the largest synthesizer with the most buttons and proudly

All Images courtesy of SPRING Accelerator and fuseproject.

paraded back home with it.

I started my lessons the week after. They were going relatively easy, at least from what I remember. But I wanted the instructor to hurry up and move us on from practicing the asinine and repetitive “Mary Had a Little Lamb” to the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” as soon as possible. The story of the yellow submarine sounded way more uplifting than that of Mary and her lamb.

But just few short months into my lessons my instructor stopped showing up to the class. Then all of my teachers went on a strike and we were told there was no class for a day, then two days, then a week. Then barricades were put up around Sarajevo. Then the water was cut off and the electricity, and the bullets started flying, followed by grenades.

One grenade.

Four.

Nine. Teneleventwelve. Thirteen.

Thirty-seven in a minute.

And it just kept going. The air-raid sirens became the norm, as was rushing into the makeshift shelter in our building. As was tape over our windows, sleeping in the most remote room away from them, and not going outside to play.

Sarajevo was under siege. The country I was born in didn’t exist anymore, and the dreams of becoming a worldrenowned synthesizer player faded away along with everything else that by that point I knew to be true, right and dear.

Soon thereafter, I boarded a bus headed out of Sarajevo, becoming a refugee.

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During SPRING’s workshops, entreprenuers applied the principles of prototyping to service, product and experience designs.

Cut to 2015, I am 32 and waking up slightly jetlagged in Nairobi, Kenya, after a 30-hour trek from San Francisco.

It’s June, and the air is crisp and fresh, peppered with sounds of small monkeys, various buzzing critters and a morning sunrise every artist dreams of. I am here with my colleagues from fuseproject kicking off the first SPRING Accelerator Boot Camp. Fuseproject is a partner in SPRING, a pioneering business accelerator that supports businesses whose products and services could transform the lives of adolescent girls. This five-year-long program is being funded by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, the Nike Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development, and focuses on eight countries in East Africa and South Asia. The goal of SPRING is to enable these early-stage ventures to reach more than 200,000 adolescent girls with innovative products and services that can improve and change the way they live.

The ambition is to reach 50 million girls by 2030. The first cohort we met in Nairobi is a uniquely curated collection of 18 entrepreneurs from Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda.

Our aim through SPRING, with our partners, is to give these entrepreneurs tailored support to grow their businesses, overcome barriers and empower adolescent girls. During the two weeks of the boot camp, we not only rebranded each one of the businesses, but we also completed an in-depth analysis of their businesses as we would do for any of our clients back home. In addition to this two-week kickoff, the accelerator includes nine months of intensive mentorship, prototyping and networking activities with leading local and global advisers and investors.

The impact of successful entrepreneurs and the investment they stimulate has the potential to lead to a broader shift in markets and enable girls and their communities to end the cycle of poverty.

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The focus on businesses that could impact the lives of girls is intentional. The 250 million adolescent girls living in poverty today are the most powerful force for change on the planet.

When girls are included in education, health and economic investment, societies have a better chance of preventing issues such as child marriage, teen pregnancy and HIV/AIDS, and of breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty.

This is what is known as the “girl effect.”

When adolescent girls have access to the right products and services, they can learn, earn, save and invest safely.

They can transform lives in the process—not just their own but those of their families, communities and entire societies.

That’s why girls and girl-centered products and services are the core focus of every business SPRING accelerates. By focusing the passion of entrepreneurs on the potential of girls, we can help unleash the girl effect around the globe.

As a girl who 23 years ago jumped on a bus out of a war zone and was given an opportunity to learn and thrive, I feel a certain heartfelt connection to SPRING’s goals because I’ve lived through the benefits of the same myself.

With that said, the looming questions around the intention of SPRING have been big and hairy. Can design really save the world? How is involving design in the business and development sector the right thing to do? What can design do here that others have not been able to?

It’s easy to declare that design can do nothing, to quickly wave the hand of dismissal. It’s easy to point to complexities, systems, politics, budgets and so forth. It would be naïve of us to assume that we can come in from the West and solve all of the world’s problems by just applying some design thinking to brush over everything. The world is not so black and white. Instead, the world is complex and layered, filled with characters that often have no interest in changing the status quo because the status quo works to their advantage, regardless of how designed the thinking may be.

Progress of any scale takes time. Systematic changes take time. But as fuseproject has done so for many other global clients—like Jawbone, Herman Miller and One Laptop per Child—through design we have an opportunity to expedite and accelerate the pace by making the solutions more approachable, adaptable and accessible to all stakeholders of the business.

The fact is, the systems we have in place right now in the developing world are failing. They’re set up as short-term Band-Aid solutions, not as fully integrated ideas that have the actual end audience in mind. By deploying design and the design process in areas where it was traditionally deemed as a luxury or superficial nice-to-have, we are enabling businesses—and the communities they impact—to develop sustainable and scalable solutions. These solutions, no matter how minor and minimal, have the potential to give dignity back to girls, who have for so long been either forgotten or disenfranchised. We are working together with the entrepreneurs to prototype, test, refine and co-create experience and business design solutions that can have a lasting and wide-reaching impact. Together is the only way to design solutions for the complex problems that lay in front of us.

At the boot camp farewell dinner organized by our Maasai hosts in an open field, I sat next to an entrepreneur from Rwanda. As our conversation unfolded, we realized that we had been about the same age when both our countries found themselves in middle of violent turmoil in the early ’90s. Our childhood experiences were eerily similar. As he shared his story of escaping to a neighboring country as a refugee, I thought about my own parallel experience. But in our stories, there was hope. Here we were, two former refugees of the same age, two former war children from different continents sitting at the same table 20 years later trying to figure out how we can make a better world—through design. The future, if ever, looked extremely bright that night.

Cue the Yellow Submarine. n

Amina Horozic sketching on Totohealth packaging options.

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By Anna M. Lewis anna@annamlewis.com Anna M. Lewis is an award-winning toy inventor, product designer, author and creativity advocate. She is the author of Women of Steel and Stone: 22 Inspirational Architects, Engineers, and Landscape Designers; City Doodles: Chicago; and several children’s magazines.

She encourages students to think creatively in her author presentations and in classes she teaches on cartooning, game design and monster imaginations through her company, Ideasplash—along with the newly launched Stemsplash, which inspires and promotes the STEM agenda through social media and the schools.

INSPIRING THE FUTURE WOMEN

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OF STEEL AND STONE & PLASTIC AND PLYWOOD

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s I began writing my initial proposal for Women of Steel and Stone: 22 Inspirational Architects, Engineers, and

Landscape Designers, I Googled “top 100 architects.” Scrolling through the lists, I was surprised to find only two women: Julia Morgan and Zaha Hadid. Two out of 100 architects were women? I did the math. That didn’t sound right to me.

While researching, uncovering and snooping, I discovered many wonderfully talented and inspiring architects who also happen to be women. Architect Barbie and Computer Engineer Barbie were also showing up. I thought about how a girl might play with Architect Barbie. Growing up, I knew how to play with Doctor Barbie or Teacher Barbie or Astronaut Barbie because I had seen women working in those fields, but girls haven’t seen architects in action. In fact, our only exposure to a working architect was the Bradys’ dad, Mike Brady, on The Brady Bunch. That began my inspiration to write about these women. Girls and all readers needed to learn about some of the amazing women who work in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields.

While writing this article, I Googled “top 100 industrial designers,” and among the first 100 designers on that list I found only one woman: Eva Zeisel. Incidentally, Ray Eames was listed under her husband’s name, Charles Eames. As I continued on this list to 200, more women popped up. What a relief. The other women included were Nanna Izarsson, Agnete Enga, Eileen Gray, Marianne Brandt, Betony

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Get Parents On Board Numerous studies by the American Society for Quality indicate that parents are the main deterrent to students pursuing STEM careers. They found that “while 97% of parents stated that they believe that knowledge of math and science will help their children have a successful career,

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only 20% encourage or will encourage their sons or daughters to become engineers.” The STEM professions are perceived as being harder fields in which to achieve respect, equal pay and equal opportunities, thus making for a stressful career choice.

The common thread I found throughout writing Women of Steel and Stone was that all the women profiled had supportive parents.

Architect and inventor Anna Keichline built a card table made of oak and walnut when she was 14 years old, taking first prize at the county fair. A 1903 Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper article explained, “At her home here she has a workshop complete in every detail… she goes to school but every spare moment is put into her shop.” She first studied mechanical engineering at Pennsylvania State College, but transferred to Cornell to study architecture. In 1920 she became the first registered woman architect in Pennsylvania and designed several buildings in and around Bellefonte, PA. She was also an inventor with several patents; her shining achievement was the invention of the K-brick.

To get a perspective about current high school industrial design programs, I talked with team leaders at my son’s high school. They said that most parents think that an industrial designer is somehow tied to manufacturing plants.

Incidentally, at the school they have three 3D printers and a milling machine and use all Autodesk products—mainly AutoCAD Inventor and Revit. Based on the Project Lead the Way curriculum, they now have 11.5 engineering classes and an advanced honors product design class. What I wouldn’t do to go back to high school right now.

When I was looking at colleges and careers in high school, I thought I wanted to go into graphic design because that’s the only design field I knew; it was the only design class available at my high school. During my search, I spoke with all the department heads at the University of Cincinnati’s Design, Art, Architecture and Planning program. Gil Born, dean of industrial design at that time, explained that industrial design encompasses all the design principles: graphic, ©2015 Nancy J. Perkins, FIDSA

Vernon, Patrica Urquiola, Belle Kogan and Zaha Hadid—with Mary Wright listed with her husband, Russel Wright.

Why haven’t these women become household names like Raymond Loewy, FIDSA, Walter Dorwin Teague, FIDSA, and Buckminster Fuller?

I believe that we haven’t heard a lot about women industrial designers for the same reason we haven’t heard a lot about women architects, engineers and landscape designers. In researching the women included in Women of Steel and Stone I found that they chose their profession because they were drawn to it. They had a passion and a strong drive to break down barriers and prove that women could work in the same fields as men. They were all determined women who wanted to create, whether it was a building, a bridge or a beautiful environment. We haven’t heard about all these amazing women in architecture, engineering and landscape design because they weren’t doing it for the fame or notoriety; they were doing it for the love of the work.

A prime example is Julia Morgan, who designed and supervised the construction of Hearst Castle in San Simeon, CA. She traveled from San Francisco to San Simeon most weekends between 1919 and 1938—close to 30 years— while designing and building over 700 structures through her San Francisco practice. Early in her career, she received a lot of attention after her very successful redesign of the Fairmont Hotel, but a reporter misquoted her and she vowed never again to be interviewed. In fact, she stipulated in her will that all her drawings and office files be destroyed when she died. She said, “My Buildings will be my legacy… they will speak for me long after I’m gone.”

interior, architecture and planning. Totally sold on the program, I went home and announced to my parents that I had chosen industrial design as a career. As a sign of approval, my father, an engineer, gave me a copy of The Designs of Raymond Loewy.

Market Industrial Design Better to Students (and Parents) A clearer picture of the scope of industrial design—that it’s not just related to manufacturing plants—needs to be presented to the public. Industrial design surrounds and supports the STEM arena, but it is also so much more. The STEM community has actively tried to promote itself by redefining the group’s acronym.

“Men have no concept of how to design things for

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the home. Women should design the things they use.

—Eva Zeisel

Neil deGrasse Tyson, a world-renowned astrophysicist and STEM advocate, explained in a 2011 CNN interview that “innovations and creativity in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics will be the drivers of tomorrow’s economy.

And if you are not a participant on that frontier you will trail behind. Most people opt out of hard things. Math needs better marketing.” Every year the Annual White House Science Fair, now in its sixth year, presents the STEM agenda in a fun and engaging format—and makes front-page news.

The experience of Ruth Gordon Schnapp, an engineer profiled in Women of Steel and Stone, also praises STEM. She explained to student groups, “It’s a very rewarding profession because you know that you’re doing something for humanity, because engineering deals with safety. Every branch of engineering deals with safety.” She also said that she saved her math homework for dessert.

We should take a few notes from the STEM experts and expand on their lead—just look at the arts community and their fabulous job of piggybacking on the initiative by creating the STEAM agenda. How can the STEM-ID community hop on that bandwagon?

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In a 2001 TED Talk, Eva Zeisel explained the role of an industrial designer as an innovative maker of things. While making the point that she doesn’t specifically call herself an industrial designer, she said, “I call myself a maker of things.

I don’t call myself an industrial designer because I’m other things. Industrial designers want to make novel things.” I love that she included a comment in her talk about this publication. She said, “The industrial design magazine, I believe, is called ‘Innovation.’ Innovation is not part of the aim of my work.” Innovative makers of things and drivers of tomorrow’s economy are just a few of the fun ways we can market the profession.

Mentor Future Industrial Designers We can all help to inspire all our future industrial designers by speaking out and educating the public—specifically the education community, parents and students—about the profession. To reach out specifically to students, mentoring would be a great start.

A wonderful way we could reach out to young girls would be to encourage them to participate in Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day—a program that the National Society of Professional Engineers created in conjunction with the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) during National Engineering Week. SWE also recently created a program called SWENext for girls aged 13–18.

S HO WCASE

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Do we need our own Introduce a Girl to Industrial Design Day? Do we need to have a separate website or section on the IDSA website to educate girls on the career?

Giving industrial design a voice would help market industrial design and launch it into the whole STEM media bonanza— creating not only a great resource for young students, but also a vehicle to reach and teach parents and educators.

As we look back, it has been over 125 years since Louise Bethune became the first female member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Currently, approximately 17 percent of all AIA members are female compared to 9 percent in 2000. The resources I found gave the percentage of women in industrial design at about 15–20 percent. The percentage of female IDSA Fellows is about 7. These figures and percentages need to be more balanced. In the words of Zeisel, “Men have no concept of how to design things for the home. Women should design the things they use.”

We need to inspire the industrial designers of tomorrow. The ideas of our students, our children are so important. They will be creating our future. And by giving all of them a strong STEM, design and creative foundation, we are giving them the tools to invent and build a better world. We want the minds of all our children thinking about the future. We have some great challenges ahead. Every child can build great things in steel and stone and plastic and plywood. n