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QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA  SUMMER 2019

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Immediately following the trophy presentation ceremony, all guests are invited to join us in the IDC Design Gallery for the IDEA Gala evening extravaganza event, generously supported by Samsung.

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QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA SUMMER 2019

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IDC 2019 20 A Celebration of the Diversity, Convergence and Undeniable Power of Design 22 What’s Your Excuse?

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38 Meet Solar Cat: Creating People-Focused Sustainable Technology

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41 The Importance and Evolution of Industrial Design at General Motors

24 The Five Love Languages for Design

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26 Presenters 32 Venues: Chicago, New and Old 34 Pre-Conference Workshops: Learn from Some of Our Industry’s Top Minds 35 IDSA Education Symposium: Exploring the Future of Design Education

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15 Transparency

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16 The Triple Bottom Line

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IN EVERY ISSUE 4 IDSA HQ

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5 Beautility

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8 Design Defined

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9 Design DNA

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QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA SUMMER 2019

INNOVATION DESIGN FOR

INNOVATION DESIGN FOR

SUMMER 2019

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. ©2019 Industrial Designers Society of America. Vol. 38, No. 2, 2019; Library of Congress Catalog No. 82-640971; ISSN No. 0731-2334; USPS 0016-067.

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I D S A HQ

DEEP CONNECTIONS & DEEP-DISH PIZZA I n its inaugural year in 2018, the newly rebranded International Design Conference was a clear departure from IDSA’s past endeavors for our largest community event. With a deep focus on end-to-end experience and invigorating content, IDC 2018 was fueled by our passion to assemble diverse perspectives in order to create a unique shared experience for guests. We are so happy that over 550 of you joined us for such a special event that included our annual IDEA Gala Celebration and the IDSA Education Symposium.

In 2015 Paul Hatch, FIDSA, presented a bold vision for a new conference architecture to IDSA’s Board of Directors.

This was done at a time when increasing competition across the conference landscape demanded that we take a step back and rethink our biggest gathering of the year. Three years later, IDC 2018 was the first realization of IDSA’s new conference concept. It did not disappoint. Our host city, New Orleans, was as warm and inviting as ever. It’s a city overflowing with expressive vibrancy, it has a deeply resilient community and it’s the perfect backdrop for crossdisciplinary designers from around the world to convene for a really good time.

We’re excited to carry that momentum to Chicago for IDC 2019. Chicago has a deep history in all forms of art and design. With its iconic skyline and public art, the city is celebrated around the world for its unique character and, of course, deep-dish pizza. IDSA also has a lasting legacy in the city and maintains a very large and very active Professional Chapter there. We could think of no better place to return to. Yes, we’ve had at least five major conference events in the Chicago area dating back to 1965. And we can’t wait to welcome you all to the Windy City very soon.

Zooming out a bit, the IDC is just one part of IDSA’s complete conference portfolio. This year we also launched a new event format called Deep Dives. These are one- or two-day gatherings where design practitioners can share ID-relevant content built around a specific subject matter. This new format features a mixture of speakers/presentations, interactive skill-building workshops, off-site experiences and more. Because we are keeping things agile, we can build event content around highly relevant topics that will help you stay in step with our rapidly shifting professional landscape.

Deep Dives will rotate around the country as well. This keeps things fresh and offers an annual opportunity to connect with other IDSA members in your local area. In 2020 we will expand the offering to a minimum of three Deep Dives per year, with the very real possibility of more as demand grows.

Since IDSA’s founding, in-person gatherings centered on design and fellowship are what IDSA has always been good at. This is a truth many of us who have been with the organization for any length of time can attest to. So when one of my first missions as executive director was to bring Paul’s vision a reality, I knew I had a momentous task ahead of me. But I’m thrilled with the result, and I hope you are too. I’m now into my second year, and the team at IDSA HQ is strengthening our rhythm and beginning to execute with a confidence we’ve not held before. We’re delighted to embark on this new journey to re-envision how IDSA supports our design community through these types of occasions, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to bring together our global community of designers and top creative minds each year for a few days of connection, inspiration and exchange.

—Chris Livaudais, IDSA, IDSA Executive Director chrisl@idsa.org

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BEAUTILI TY

OUR FORCE

The industrial designers’ three-dimensional process of sketching, modeling and innovating is the source of our exceptional ability to collaborate.

Until Einstein redefined gravity as just another manifestation of the time-space continuum, gravity was the force attracting things together and poetically drawing people together. The force holds us together and holds us down to Earth, like the Jedi Force that Obi-Wan Kenobi says binds the galaxy together. Those forces of attraction affect designers both ways: as the force that defines the place where we work (real space and time) and as the social gravity that powers it.

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Our force comes from working in real three dimensions, and we use a lot of energy transforming dreams into 3D. Designer/artist Isamu Noguchi once said, “The essence of sculpture is for me the perception of space, the continuum of our existence.” When we transform ideas into actual artifacts, those new things transform us. Thoughts become test models in context and surrounded by interaction when presented physically and displayed socially in space and time for all to see.

I always say that industrial design is more than a profession. “With a good design education, there’s nothing you can’t do,” says Michael Sianato, the Design Within Reach creative director. We get to make the coolest things, play with the coolest toys and have the most fun.

But why is that? How did we get here? Looking for the source and exploring the origins of industrial design education, I realized that the pedagogy developed by Donald Dohner, Alexander Kostellow, FIDSA, and Rowena Reed Kostellow, FIDSA, clearly framed the iterative design process, visual literacy and production methods, preparing students to create and manufacture stuff, but it didn’t include teamwork classes. When I went to Pratt, we never had any team projects. We didn’t even have a shared studio! Everyone worked alone at home. So how did we learn to work together? Which assignment inferred it?

Could our excellent collaboration skills have come from the critique? Naked comparison of pinned up sketches and displaying actual models causes social interaction.

When we stand back, it literally widens the perspective and changes the point of view, setting the stage for frank discussions. Like boot camp or fraternity hazing, this kind of brutal confrontation of what we made—in front of our peers and teachers—fosters a reality check and an awakening to the truth. We learn to see what they see.

We learn to take criticism and make it constructive. We learn to pay attention and ask for more. Editing, curation and critique open our minds; multiple sources feed solutions that encourage us to roll up our sleeves and get back to work. But since those judgment experiences are not unique to our profession, there must be some other source of our extreme collaboration ability.

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Maybe our need for sharing comes from our talent for manipulating our environment. Could working in three dimensions exercise more than one talent? Physical designing connects our eyes, minds and hands, uses all kinds of muscles. There is no mind and body dichotomy (maybe multichotomy). The human brain and hands evolved together—the whole human body developed as a collaboration of interconnected devices (and organisms), seeing, moving, feeling, thinking, etc. Just like practicing the piano, making models strengthens our internal collaboration skills, especially when we are designing something new. “The hand is as much at the core of human life as the brain,” writes neurologist Frank Wilson in The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language and Human Culture. We get our best workout in the workshop, not the gym. Design thinking is no good without physical design solutions!

The struggle going on in design education between digital and physical is misplaced. Computing lab verses the workshop is not a zero sum game—it should be a win-win. Any kind of modeling and prototyping is the key to development, testing and collaboration. When the screen doesn’t seduce us, digital technology allows us to make things no one can imagine.

Revealed in the exploration of the origins of industrial design pedagogy is the central role of prototyping. Learning by doing is also the essence of progressive education. Caroline Pratt’s unit blocks are the foundation of the elementary education at the City and Country School, which Pratt founded in Greenwich Village in 1914. She saw that blocks are a versatile material for quick prototyping. Children can easily build a house, a table or a truck.

You see, making things, sketching and mocking up are powerful tools for developing the imagination and building the collaboration dexterity of children as well as professional designers.

Like a three-year-old playing with blocks, three-dimensional design is not just about form. Thinking and working in the round puts our ideas into the environment in a tangible form shared with everyone. That makes us sensitive to seeing our work from many sides—different points of

view, both visually and conceptually. As Rowena Reed Kostellow told us: always rotate your work. Could it be that when we make models with blocks or clay or Maya, build cars or create whole planetarium experiences, thinking and working in 3D opens our transdisciplinary abilities? Three-dimensional thinking helps us solve complex problems while juggling contradictory objectives. Does this merge us into superpower status?

“I sometimes wonder if the hand is not more sensitive to the beauties of sculpture than the eye. I should think the wonderful rhythmical flow of lines and curves could be more subtly felt than seen,” said Helen Keller.

Sculptors work in three dimensions for its power to tap into all the senses. “Working in the round addresses the whole body,” says Cloud Gate creator Anish Kapoor.

Transforming an idea into a real tactile thing takes energy to break through the dimension barrier, entering our space and our time. “Sculpture occupies real space like we do ... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object,” observes artist Chuck Close. Our artifacts join us in a real relationship competing for space and attention within the environmental composition. They leave a physical record.

Modern industrial designers are not just good teammates—we are all-stars. It’s not just because we need to work with everyone: the user, marketing, manufacturing, accounting, management, middle management and now social media. We don’t just work with all these stakeholders—we partner with them! We’re not just interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary—we’re heterodisciplinary. Alexander Brandt, founder of the exhibit design company Xenario, says that designers “wish to have other people’s input.”

Is it biological? Britannica online says: “Organisms are grouped into species partly according to their morphological, or external, similarities, but more important in classifying sexually reproducing organisms is the organisms’ ability to successfully interbreed.” Poet Eleanor Wilner, of course, says it better: “The great poem of the Earth could never be written by one person; it is presently being written by many of us, freed of authority, born out of our myriad differences, our brilliant plurality, our mutual con-

cern for the fate of the Earth; it is the shared imaginative work we are each doing now, and in the time to come.”

Looking at our work from different angles is the first step in user testing—we start to see how users see and use our designs. “Avoid the teachings of speculators whose judgment are not confirmed by experience,” Leonardo da Vinci wrote in one of his notebooks. Natural feedback is literally grounded in reality. And our last collaborator in every project is the user.

Form and function are defined by use. Our work is about behavior, the function of the user and the society around it. Deane Richardson, FIDSA, co-founder of Richardson/Smith and the Design Foundation, ICSID president and the recent winner of the Rowena Reed Kostellow Award, says that Kostellow “taught us to develop our intuitive powers and to integrate aesthetic analysis with imagination. Exactly those skills needed to forge strategic paths to new visual languages and positive user-interactions.” And solutions to real physical problems (flooding, tornados, bullets, giant asteroids—stuff that really hurts) are falling to industrial design’s interactive/prototyping/ collaborative approach.

Working in 3D is critical to building our teamwork skills and form-giving talents. Collaboration in a mind–body meld sets the stage for industrial designers’ objectivity. Could teamwork be regarded as the highest form of beautility? Let the Force be with us!

—Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA www.tuckerviemeister.com

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OOOH, THAT FEELING …

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t first there is an inkling, a tingling, an excited and vague sense of curiosity, and then there is a void, a question, an opportunity, a challenge, a problem to be solved, more to consider and more to explore. With a little time there is more clarity, not about a solution so much as a problem. There is a new challenge not yet fully formed or defined in one’s mind.

There are numerous and often mixed notions, clues, insights to be sorted out, and more excitement, but still uncertainty about what to focus on and invest in. What am I trying to do? Where will this take me? I need to learn more.

I need to continue to scratch this itch.

The excitement builds as a picture and notion of what the challenge is emerges. Sketches and more sketches and endless considerations, all aimed at getting to see what is of importance. A leap of faith and other leaps, each providing new ideas, questions, directions, domains, issues and possibilities. What fun. But there is more to do. Many desperate parts and nothing fully formed as yet.

Many unsure starts and stops. More clarity, some confusion and more questions arise. It’s frustrating and wonderful as problems and possibilities begin to come into focus. Mixed feelings of joy and frustration, of discovery and more questions. We are moving forward, but to what end? Am I wasting my time, or is this what open-ended exploration, invention and discovery feels like? Two steps forward, one back. Two back and one forward.

There is more clarity, a fuller understanding of what I am doing and what I am working toward. Now there is a sense of accomplishment and progress and originality,

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with increased enthusiasm and an increased pace toward something still incomplete but promising. I am on the cusp of something. More refined and focused challenges, possible solutions, questions and answers continue to emerge.

A whole notion, idea, question, concept, picture and challenge becomes visible. I can see it now. I am close to the whole idea minus many of the details. I can grasp the big picture, the macro and micro of it, the parts and pieces, the most promising concepts and numerous configurations.

There continues to be a feeling of excitement, joy, discovery, accomplishment, expectation and hope that the time spent and the time yet to be spent will deliver benefits and discoveries and something of value.

There is a thrilling sense of discovery, invention, innovation, creativity and contribution in ways original to me.

I have finally worked my way from nothing to something, from problem to solution—and yes, others may benefit.

I have already benefited from having gone through the process. I have learned a great deal about this project and about me.

I can now put all the pieces together. I have just invented and innovated and created an original idea, a complete and most promising concept and design from my mind. What if my idea really is original, and what if it really works?

This is what humans do. We engage our minds as we consider what was, what is and what can be. I love this thing called designing.

—Allen Samuels, IDSA Emeritus Professor and Dean, University of Michigan allenall@umich.edu

DESIGN DN A

THE ABSTRACTION OF PHYSICS “Good design should be a projection of life itself, implying an intimate knowledge of the biological and artistic.” —Walter Gropius, 1925

In my last column, I touched on how easy it is to talk about design from the standpoint of lifting the five-step scientific method invented in the late Middle Ages and calling it design thinking, and how blindly following this process like it’s uncontested gospel can rob your design of its soul. This time, let’s take a look at some other exciting and inspiring roads less traveled, such as undervalued nature, psychology, the untapped potential of aesthetics and how the universe itself can flow through your designer mind and manifest itself in your artifacts.

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Appearance, You Wicked Fool I recently read a Design Council UK article entitled “What makes a knowledgeable, talented, and skilled designer?”

by Yasushi Kusume, the innovation and creative manager at IKEA. In addition to noting that design thinking has led to an unfortunate misunderstanding of design and the rise of the “Sunday” designer (amateur), Kusume talks about the need for designers to contribute to business strategy: “If designers are to extend their contribution beyond appearance, then businesses need to nurture designers with new competencies that enable them to contribute to every stage of the business process. What’s required are experts in business as well as design.”

While reading the piece, I paused to consider: what is so wrong with a contribution that is focused on appearance?

Why the constant need to be the jack of all trades and master of none—watering down our own brand message?

We do this for one reason only: We regard aesthetics as superfluous, meaningless and valueless, and as a result, so do our clients. Except without appearance, a design will not become a something—it will remain a nothing.

As a designer, I have always struggled with the industry’s shame and embarrassment over its role in defining what something looks like. Often, what something looks like and how it works are one and the same. Other times, the logic and reason behind a design’s appearance comes from influences that are more abstract, dealing with ideas rather than a direct association with concrete elements. Whether from one origin or the other, neither is pedestrian. The secret is that aesthetics are not about beauty at all—they are about thought. The stronger the idea, the more beautiful the design. When there is no deeper meaning embedded in the appearance, no story to tell, the aesthetics are meaningless and the design is valueless—it remains a nothing.

The Subconscious Expression of Nature Let’s back up a little. OK, let’s back up a lot: 13.8 billon years ago, we had the big bang. This event seems to have shaped everything we have ever seen or touched in a surprisingly consistent way. The aesthetic blueprint left over from the big bang is everywhere around us and affects how we perceive

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all things. We live within a system of genetic codes resulting from this event, and the system lives within us. Sensitivity to this dynamic is directly related to generating design that most people will like.

Before you distance yourself from being an authority of the visual and a master of the third dimension—an exceptional skill most people can never begin to approach or understand—consider some of the influences that drive great-looking things: Nature has amazing occurrences like self-similarity, fractals and geometric efficiencies. For example, ice crystals on a frozen glass window look graphically the same as ferns. The great mesa rock formations of Monument Valley look like icebergs, with the exception of color. The salt flats of Bolivia naturally form in perfect hexagonal patterns, just as bees laboriously construct perfect hexagonal honeycombs, capitalizing on geometry’s most efficient mathematical shape. Human lungs, leaves and the negative space left between tree branches all seem to flow from the same mood board. Perhaps the most profound example underscoring that the way something looks is anything but fluff: the network of neurons in the human brain looks identical to the galactic super-structures of the universe itself. At least from a graphical standpoint, the human brain and the universe are identical!

Human beings are not merely observers of phenomenon like this, preprogrammed to respond positively when they are stitched together in the form of a good design. It’s much bigger than that. We are ourselves components of the system, fibers in the same fabric, made from the same ingredients. We do not choose to appreciate design that is expertly woven from this DNA. We have no choice—we are this DNA! How things look and the meanings their surfaces convey to our deep inner psyche is territory that should not be dismissed as limiting. The closer we align our 3D compositions to this genome of the earth, the broader the audience will get, the better the product will sell and the more soul the design will exude.

According to Richard Taylor, director of the Materials Science Institute and professor of physics at the University of Oregon, studying aesthetics holds a huge potential benefit to society. Studies show that viewing the fractal patterns

of nature can put our brains in a comfort zone that reduces stress by 60% and can even help patients recover from surgery faster. Taylor also remarks on how the fractal drip paintings of Jackson Pollock are impossible to counterfeit. He asks, “To what extent is aesthetics determined by automatic unconscious mechanisms inherent in the artist’s biology, as opposed to their intellectual and cultural concerns?” A fascinating notion, to say the least, that the universe we are part of and made from can flow through us subconsciously and manifest itself in our artifacts!

When a form follows its function, simplicity overtakes the design solution because the user can see firsthand how the product works and can understand it instinctually. This demystification reduces stress and generates a positive experience. Something that is easy to understand is fun to use. Now that fewer and fewer of our products have a mechanical component and much is happening on a screen, nonmechanical appearance and its various meanings, origins and effects are more important than ever.

The Psychology of Aesthetics Complexity in today’s product design brings into play the psychology of aesthetics as well. The pallet is wide open for new ways a product’s presentation can affect our emotions.

Designers have historically been drawn to and instinctually want to create minimalist solutions. Just as the bee uses the hexagon to maximize the structural integrity and space efficiency of the honeycomb, the designer boils away any extras in the design solution in order to be left with the simplest result. However, this simplicity often yields adjectives like cold, austere, serious and gray. Human beings, on the other hand, tend to gravitate toward things like warmth, friendliness, fun, color and even cuteness. This dichotomy sets up new challenges for the designer.

In some cultures, including our own, lightness equals strength. In the corporate world, for example, you will notice as you sit around a conference table to discuss the serious issues and needs of the company that it’s impossible to do so without your team members interjecting humor, cracking jokes and portraying a cavalier, nonchalant demeanor. This is done as an expression of strength. By making light of

things, it shows that even complex challenges are easy to tackle due to your impressive and formidable abilities. Our designs, though, strive for seriousness and weight. Does that make them weak?

If abstraction is playing a bigger role now in aesthetics due to a diminished mechanical world, should all product design continue to communicate serious utility first and foremost? Or are there other factors to consider that speak directly to less considered human behavior like the complex dynamic of lightness?

In parts of Asia, lightness is also a prevalent theme in design, referred to as “aegyo” in Korea and “kawaii” in Japan. Even road signage in Asia, something the West has deemed strictly no-nonsense territory, has been known to include a cute teddy bear to help lead the way. Aesthetics can have diverse meaning on a global and cultural scale. To dismiss that is to lose! Today, we strive to rise above appearance, and yet design in its most traditional, time-honored, industrial-revolution state —which was originally and mostly about appearance— is far more complex and valuable than we have ever sold it to be.

Articulating the abstract influences that make a good design great—influences that give today’s great designs cult-like brand loyalty, reverence and soul—requires an understanding of factors well beyond the mechanics of a juice press or tea kettle. A better understanding of these nuances might make us welcome, rather than shun, our role as the virtuosos of the visual and the mavens of manifestation. It might also lessen the urgent need to become as much businesspeople as we are designers.

—Scott Henderson, IDSA, Principal, Scott Henderson Inc. scott@scotthendersoninc.com

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FORGING A NEW PATH A few years back, I set out on an incredible journey when I started my design studio, level design sf, with my creative counterpart and business partner Robin Hubbard. Entrepreneurship can be daunting to anyone, but as a woman the stakes felt higher. I knew I had the skills, having spent 15 formative years of my career in San Francisco where I soaked in the optimistic creative culture and honed my talent within some of the greatest ID studios. Yet despite my proven track record designing a highly awarded body of work, I was fearful that being a woman would hold me back from achieving success.

As I looked around at the landscape of ID firms in the Bay Area, there was an unmistakable reality I found impossible to ignore: Nearly every recognized and established industrial design firm was founded by men. I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a place for me as a founder. I didn’t know why there weren’t more female founders. What was stopping women from doing this?

Was I about to run into unbreakable barriers?

I didn’t want to be seen as a female designer because I dislike standing out. I wanted to be noticed for my talent, not my gender, and I especially did not want to think about this issue when starting the studio.

Unfortunately, I also recognized that I didn’t fit the mold of a traditional ID studio founder. I decided I wasn’t about to allow that to stop me from following my dreams. With so few examples of female founders, it was impossible to not question such a big decision, especially since I was about to put everything on the line.

Foundational Beliefs “Live life with no regrets” is a motto I often try to adhere to. With that in mind, I threw caution to the wind and set out with Robin on a mission to build the dream.

Beyond forming a studio, we were determined to be a force of change in a male-dominated industry. Our studio is founded on the belief that balance, diversity, collaboration and inclusion are essential ingredients to providing a stimulating creative culture.

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Being a female leader has transformed my approach and allowed me to find my voice. Rather than molding myself in the old-fashioned ways of male mimicry, I have found the courage to be myself and lead authentically as a woman.

What was once feared as a weakness has proven to be a strength as clients come to us in appreciation of the balance we have at our own company and for what we do to shape the practice of industrial design at large.

It makes sense. We are living in a moment when clients understand the power of the female voice. Women make up the single largest opportunity in the market today— representing 85% of consumer spending. It’s time for women to have a stronger voice in shaping the products they purchase and use.

Beyond Design Robin and I felt an overwhelming sense of joy as we watched our studio blossom. We were gaining traction in the industry as we nurtured our studio culture and launched our first products into the word. As amazing as this was, I couldn’t help this feeling inside of me that said I needed to do more to empower women. Being a role model and cultivating change within the walls of our studio was not enough.

This itch came at a time when we were having a hard time finding female ID candidates for the open roles in our studio. In conversation with other ID leaders, I came to understand that companies everywhere were experiencing the same issue. Leaders who were driven to diversify their teams were struggling to do so when less than 10% of their applicants had diverse backgrounds.

As I was hearing this, I also started to witness the industry bleeding female talent. Many of my female friends and peers were leaving design entirely. After sticking it out for years within the confines of toxic and unsupportive environments, they were done. Some pivoted to other fields, but many left the Bay Area and

Nichole Rouillac, IDSA, working in the level design sf studio alongside creative partner and co-founder, Robin Hubbard.

abandoned their careers. Their stories and experiences shook me and were the driving force for me to do more.

Around the same time, I was fortunate enough to discover that IDSA was hosting its first ever Women in Design Summit. This conference was special.

Never before had I dove into such personal dialogue with strangers at a conference. From the intimate conversations with young women seeking advice to the moment I bonded over a glass of wine with a woman I always looked up to as a design goddess, I was forever moved. I realized at that conference that this is what was missing for myself and the women around me—a place to bond and talk openly with other like-minded, talented ladies. I didn’t want to wait another year or two to do this again.

Upon my return to San Francisco, I reached out to our local IDSA chapter to discuss how we could activate our local Women in Design community on a more regular basis. Within months, I became the chair of IDSA’s Women in Design special interest section. As I took the reins, I made it my mission to bring together the community and create a positive impact so that we can help more women succeed in the field of industrial design.

Fostering Change In the initial years of chairing Women in Design, it was very event focused. We hosted panels, such as our timely debate at Google on sexism in the workplace.

We also had inspiring presentations, like when the Yona team at frog showcased its case study exploring female reproductive healthcare. All these events helped shine light on some incredibly talented female designers and allowed young women entering the field to see that there is a place and a path for them.

I loved watching the community grow as our events sold out to crowds of 200 attendees. Talking about the issues felt great because we were having honest conversations and getting these tough topics out and into the open so we could learn from the past.

“Our studio is founded on the belief that balance, diversity, collaboration and inclusion are essential ingredients to providing a stimulating creative culture.”

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Nichole Rouillac, IDSA, presenting at the Women in Design Deep Dive 2019 in San Francisco.

Success in my mind wasn’t about scaling, though; it was essential to keep it real and dig deep into the heart of the issues. At this point, I realized that the momentous attraction we were receiving was actually causing us to lose sight of our mission: to help more women land fulfilling design roles through the support of our community.

I wanted to get back to the intimate experiences we had earlier on. It was time to return to the heart of it all through smaller-scale initiatives with measurable impact.

A Better Future With that in mind, IDSA’s Women in Design SF began a mentorship program in spring 2019. I knew my network was one of my greatest strengths, having worked and studied in San Francisco for 18 years. It was time to tap into my fellow lady boss friends and ask for their help in fostering the future generations of female leaders.

We started a pilot mentorship program with just 20 women, the perfect size for returning to those intimate settings of our past. The kickoff event was hosted at level. It felt so powerful as we went around the room and heard each woman’s story of what brought her there.

Having a mentor early in my career helped me get on the right path, but I knew I had been one of the few lucky ones. So many women I knew didn’t have a single other woman in their studio and weren't able to find a female to connect with in their network.

The night of the kickoff I had an overwhelming feeling that we had started something special, something

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that would help guide the young women in that room to achieve their own versions of success in industrial design. I am proud to be leading the team that is making this happen and excited to announce the expansion of the mentorship program. If you are in the Bay Area and would like to find a mentor or mentee, you can sign-up on our website, WomenInDesignSF.com, where we will be pairing applicants with mentors on a regular basis.

We have a lot in store and are continuing to look at new ways to build a more balanced future for the field of industrial design. I know I don’t have all of the answers, and I don’t expect an incredibly diverse ID workforce to appear overnight. All I know is that the designer in me is always up for a good challenge and I am driven to solve problems. My hope is that demonstrating leadership at level and fostering future generations through Women in Design can help shift the balance a little closer toward equal.

—Nichole Rouillac, IDSA, nichole@leveldesignsf.com Nichole Rouillac is co-founder at level design sf, an industrial design shop based in San Francisco.

She has deep experience taking complex new technologies and shaping them into forms that foster emotional connections between consumers and brands. Nichole is the chair of IDSA’s Women in Design special interest section and has a mission to bring balance to the industrial design field at large.

SOC IAL M ED I A

TRANSPARENCY

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ocial media has become an integral part of modern society. It sends us immediate updates on news, celebrity gossip, sports, pop culture and what our friends are up to—but only through a pinhole. It has disrupted industries, changing how we communicate with each other, how we educate ourselves, how companies advertise their products and even how we watch television programming.

Social media, specifically Instagram, has revolutionized the discipline of industrial design. With the use of hashtags and collaborative tagging, Instagram allows designers to showcase their work to a large audience, whether or not they know what ID is. Instagram essentially provides a platform for a designer to share their portfolio with anyone in the most seamless way possible. Because of this, Instagram has the power to both build confidence and emphasize insecurities for both the poster and the viewer. The consequences can be devastating if the validation expected isn’t received. It’s almost as though a lot of likes on a post or a certain number of followers on a page are required in order for a designer to be deemed “good.”

There’s no doubt that social media is overwhelmingly beneficial when it’s not being used as a tool for validation, but there isn’t enough transparency to overcome the negative effect it has had on the design community. Instagram is filled with seasoned designers posting photorealistic KeyShot renderings, staged prototypes and clean process shots—essentially eye candy. Meanwhile, this platform has become the new way that students learn about ID. When designers post images for the sole purpose of gaining likes and followers, instead of being transparent about their process, they eliminate the potential for dialogue with viewers who are hungry for knowledge. It is truly a disservice to those who use the design work for reference, motivation and inspiration.

As designers who use Instagram as an unofficial portfolio platform, it’s our responsibility to be honest and straightforward about the content we post—for the sake of fostering

a healthy design community and to provide the appropriate knowledge and expectations to aspiring designers, who could be our future colleagues.

Instagram should be a place for learning and growth.

While scrolling through your feed, resist the urge to compare yourself to others, because it’s an impossible standard.

You’re only seeing the good parts, the polished perfection, not the rough surface that everyone starts with nor the endless work and skill it takes to get to the final product. Nothing is as effortless as it seems, so let’s be transparent about it.

—Hector Silva, IDSA, hello@advdes.org Hector Silva leverages his career industrial design expertise in his introductory product design and design sketching courses at the University of Notre Dame. In his professional practice, he works as an industrial design consultant under the brand H Design, partnering with companies like Crate & Barrel’s DesignLab, Nickelodeon, LeapFrog, Foster Grant, Insight Product Development, Kellogg’s Pringles and Lund & Company Toy Invention, as well as various entrepreneurs.

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HE TRIPLE OTTOM INE

SU STAIN ABILI TY

“When a designer see’s a problem, they say YES!” was a philosophy Victor Emoli, IDSA, now the dean of the School of Design at SCAD, instilled in his industrial design students. This design-oriented mentality got me thinking about all sorts of problems, big and small. And there is no problem more massive than the fact that the industrialized world, fairness in society and the environment seem to be at odds with each other.

The Germination of an Idea In summer 2003, I traveled to London to do an internship at JAM Design and Communications. The projects the JAM team worked on that summer were wideranging, from designing a bar at the Chelsea Football Club for Audi to architectural bus tours for Channel 4.

As Jamie Anley, co-founder of JAM, often would say, “We are helping brands build a bridge to contemporary culture.” This experience gave me a new insight into the need for companies to communicate their brand values.

We would frequently go to the rooftop of the JAM Studio to have lunch. The view of London’s skyline was amazing. One particular evening, toward the end of my summer experience, I was the last to leave the office.

On the way out I went up to the rooftop to see the city in the evening.

Thinking about this impossible contradiction of people, planet and profit, inspiration struck me. I envisioned a network of creative companies that would collaborate and compete to donate a portion of their proceeds to helping people and the planet. As they evolved, they would move closer to the goal of bringing the triple bottom line of profit, people, planet into alignment.

When I returned to Savannah the following semester, I felt inspired by this vision, but also felt an immense responsibility to not let it go to waste. So much so that by the time winter break came around, I told my parents and other family members that I thought I should drop out of school to create a company that donated a percentage of it’s income to societal and environmental causes. I also said that they should all drop what they were doing and join me. My parents, understandably concerned, urged me to finish school. Eventually, I realized that I’d have a better chance at successfully creating a company with a triple bottom line mission if I had a degree first.

So I went back to school with the resolve to apply everything I learned toward creating the International Design League (IDL). It’s funny how the ideas that stick with you seem to send you reminders at every turn. In spring 2004, people were wearing the Lance Armstrong Livestrong bracelets everywhere I looked. Of course, the business world has been supporting nonprofit initiatives long before it was on my radar. One great example is Newman’s Own. According to the Newman’s Own Foundation, the company has contributed $500 million to charities since 1982.

In summer 2004, my team from a Procter & Gamblesponsored universal design class was awarded an internship. One of our projects had identified the elusive and unmet user need of cleaning on the go. My team’s solution was the stain patch. P&G’s better solution was the Tide to Go Pen. As proud as my teammates and I were to have contributed to the creation of a new category of consumable, on-the-go products, it was also scary to think about how many of these pens would wind up in landfills or go into an imperfect recycling system. This got me thinking that the holy grail of universal, unmet needs is to figure out how consumable products can be sustainable. I also began to imagine the amount of good that could result from giving a percentage of sales to people and the planet for products that are sold on a global scale.

Just as the contradictory question of how consumables could be sustainable was on replay with me, I had the opportunity to hear a William McDonough lecture. At the time, I remember being enthralled by the concept of cradle-to-cradle production systems, as opposed to the cradle-to-grave model that is closer to the reality of the lifecycle of most of our products.

By the time graduation rolled around, the wisdom of getting a few years of industry experience before starting

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S U S TA I NAB I L I T Y

a company won out over any thoughts I had of starting the IDL right away. I wound up in New York, working in the toy and licensed-products industries. The years ticked by. I looked on with fascination as companies like Toms Shoes came onto the scene. Toms’ one-for-one model has a simple, straightforward message drawing a connection between customers buying their own shoes and giving a corresponding pair to a child in need.

In 2015 I became a dad for the first time and moved with my family to my hometown of Cincinnati. The IDL was officially getting started. My old boss became our first client. With a new location and new bills, the wisdom of holding off on making a commitment to nonprofits won out for the time being. So we went at it one project at a time. We’ve been designing toys, products and packaging for clients for four years now. Hard to believe! We also have some in-house projects we work on, like an illustrated children’s book and furniture designs.

Finally, at the beginning of 2019, the IDL made the commitment to contribute 3% of its revenue to Habitat for Humanity of Greater Cincinnati and 3% to the Green Umbrella Regional Sustainability Alliance. Habitat is committed to giving hardworking, low-income people a hand up. All across America, individuals and families struggle to find affordable places to live. Habitat seeks to remedy this injustice by providing low-income people the opportunity to realize their dreams of homeownership. The Green Umbrella is the leading alliance working to maximize the environmental sustainability of greater Cincinnati. It is driving collaboration to fuel measurable improvements in key areas of sustainability.

Sustainably Produced Products Designers shouldn’t have to feel guilty for creating new products. Even before the Industrial Revolution, mankind was creating objects with form and function. As designers, the problem-solving creative process is in our DNA. I think industrial designers are uniquely positioned to shift the reinvention of industry and the wave of innovation we need to see with the materials and manufacturing of our products.

We are starting to see the tipping point come into view as renewable energy sources like wind and solar are becoming cheaper than traditional fossil fuels. Similarly, we need to aim for sustainable materials to become costcompetitive and widely available. In order for sustainable best practices to grow, manufacturing companies, gov-

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ernments and scientists all need to engage in a global design challenge to make sustainability accessible to all.

Leaders like McDonough and Michael Braungart are doing great work to eliminate harmful chemicals from our human-made world. Whether it is the cradle-to-cradle certification or something similar, we need a universally implemented system for grading the life cycle of products that is even easier to understand than the nutrition facts on the back of food packaging. The process of recycling needs innovative breakthroughs to close the loop so that technical materials are upcycled infinitely without carbon dioxide emissions or pollution. Simultaneously, we need a second process for collecting and composting used biological plant-based materials. Unfortunately, biodegradable bioplastics have not worked yet because they require very high temperatures to decompose.

Many companies are already making great strides toward sustainably producing products. Unilever, Seventh Generation, Patagonia and Adidas come to mind. Lego has committed to transitioning to plant-based plastics by 2030.

Toward Alignment Achieving a harmony of the triple bottom line—profit, people, planet—may seem like an impossible task. However, we all share an urgent responsibility to move toward that goal. Part of the IDL commitment to Habitat and the Green Umbrella is to always remember to consider people and the planet as we create.

We all need meaning in our work, and we all want to make a positive impact. As designers, the easiest and seemingly wisest thing to do is to stay in your lane and avoid the loaded topic of sustainability. But we must make sure that wisdom is not fear in disguise. It is going to take all of us to achieve an alignment of the triple bottom line.

If you have a seed of a triple bottom line idea, I hope you can let it grow.

—Tom Riddle, IDSA, triddle@idesignl.com Tom Riddle is a founder and CEO of the International Design League. Prior to starting the IDL in 2015, he was a designer in the toy and licensed products industry, working on brands like Fisher Price, Marvel, Star Wars, Skylanders and Angry Birds. Tom has a BFA in industrial design from the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Medical Design Deep Dive Boston, MA

October 9-11, 2019

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A CELEBRATION OF THE DIVERSITY, CONVERGENCE AND UNDENIABLE POWER OF DESIGN With its roots as the national meeting of our organization, the International Design Conference has grown into something much bigger. This landmark event presents participants with a truly special experience that is so much more than just speakers on a stage. With an eclectic mix of interactive workshops, off-site experiences and talks from some of the world’s most influential design voices, IDC 2019 packs a powerful punch.

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IN TERN ATION AL D ESIGN C ON FEREN C E

IDC 2019 will be all new, although it’s not the first time IDSA has assembled designers from around the world for relevant discourse, focused networking and a really good time. In fact, IDSA has hosted a large-scale annual event, in addition to multiple regional events, for more than 50 years. Now, as our audience continues to shift with the changing landscape of industrial design, new experiences are necessary in order to capture the attention and imagination of the modern creative community.

Even among all this change, at the core IDSA and IDC will forever remain platforms for amplifying the unique and bold voice of industrial design.

By design, the IDC marks a departure from the classic conference. You know the type: stuffed into a hotel ballroom with little character, poor lighting and minimal access to meaningful connection. Based on feedback we heard from you year after year and our own goal to create something special, we felt it was time to do something new, something that would invigorate the design community and celebrate the personal connections that can be made while experiencing two days of high-quality, cutting-edge content.

Design Has Evolved Today, we recognize that our creative community is not binary, and that the role of design is constantly shifting. Once siloed disciplines now overlap and blur. The need for cross-disciplinary dialogue is more urgent now than ever. To face this reality, it is critical that we open the conversation to as many creative perspectives as possible in the interest of developing a shared dialogue that advances our ability to collaborate and that magnifies the impact of our work.

IDC 2019 presents a unique opportunity to connect with hundreds of designers from around the world in a discourse that will expand your lexicon, challenges assumptions and break down barriers.

You Must Stay Hungry No matter where you are in your career, there is always something new to learn.

This is especially true as the complexities of technology, culture and humanity continue to multiply at exponential rates. Preparing for this future means putting yourself out there and committing to being an active part of the conversation. In addition to presentations from world-renowned designers and creative leaders, IDC 2019 offers multiple interactive sessions hosted by design experts who are pioneering new tools and methodologies critical for building your skill set and advancing your career.

Value Is Experienced As the famous Confucius quote goes, “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” Active participation is vital to creating memorable moments. IDC 2019 will provide countless opportunities to learn from the best, socialize with colleagues and kick back with a refreshing cocktail. On top of all that, we’ve got several studio tours and after-hours events in the works that are all geared toward maximizing your complete conference experience.

It’s time to get ready for a sensory-oriented playground, purpose-built to ignite your creative mind and deliver inspiration. Pack your bags and book your flight— see you in Chicago!

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EMCEE Mark Wilson, Fast Company

WHAT’S YOUR EXCUSE?

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y first job out of college was running graphics for a morning news show for a CBS affiliate in central Illinois. I’d get into work around 3:30 am.and program an aging Chryon machine, the computer graphics station that posts those lower thirds on news broadcasts, in the omnipresent dark of the control room. At any moment, it could be 1 am or 1 pm. In the broadcast vacuum, there is no true sense of time, just the cadence of weather reports and the faintest glow of twilight from the screens.

It was a nasty year of work, with nothing to look forward to but the next broadcast. In the haze of the early shift, I put on 40 pounds and now have only a vague recollection of anything from that era. I became too competent at my job, to the point that it became a bore. That’s when I started watching the news broadcast with one eye and refreshing Gizmodo, an early tech blog, with the other.

Back then, every 10 minutes brought a new story. There was no Twitter or Instagram to occupy my time, and YouTube was in its infancy. So I just had this weird publication that promised a taste of the future and one 45GB USB hard drive. Gizmodo was like a drip of hope incarnate, the promise that tomorrow would be better than today.

To spoil the story, I eventually escaped that terrible job, and many other terrible jobs, and landed a gig writing and then editing at my dream publication: Gizmodo. There, I didn’t just read about the latest gadgets, I had them FedExed to my door before they were released. I had so many iPod docks and Netbooks. Remember Netbooks? *shudders* I tell you all this not just for my own personal indulgence (thanks for listening though!), but because now, many years later, I’m a senior writer at Fast Company magazine and our design vertical Co.Design. In the publishing world, that means I’ve made it. I’m no longer a blogger; I’m a 1%er of the written word who still cuts down real trees now and again to make a point in print.

But looking back at those first days of my writing career, I’m envious of that other me. Oh, don’t get me wrong. He was an imbecile. And what was with all those graphic tees? But he lived in a time of impossible optimism. Technology and design were being married for the first time at a meaningful scale. I’m not just talking about how YouTube made it so any kid with a webcam could reach a worldwide audience, or the eventual launch of the iPhone that would pretty much fix every UX problem known to mobile computing. USB missile launchers were EXCITING BREAKTHROUGHS in the mid-aughts. An SD card reader that

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“We live in the future now, and it’s terrible.”

ALSO dries your hair? Hellz yesss! Much, maybe even most, of what I wrote about back then reads like punchlines today. But ignorance is bliss. And we were all so, so ignorant.

Fifteen years later and boy, has that marriage of design and technology broken everything. (Yes, I’m looking at you with stern, disappointed eyes when I say this.) In my mid-aughts life, I literally flew a jetpack on assignment. Now I write about dark patterns, prejudiced algorithms and those apps that convince you to spend $50 to get some virtual coins to buy some virtual candy.

Design has lured us from the technological utopia of the early internet and its 10-pound, LED-infused laptops.

Design has given us smartphones that are so addictive that we’re replacing them with lobotomized dumbphones—just imagine removing one wheel of your car because it drove too well. Design has caused ecological problems of global proportions—we’re running out of the rarest earth materials because both $20 Uniqlo jeans and $800 iPhones are built to be equally disposable. Design allowed us to tap away our human right for privacy in a split second—good plan, Apple!

Design has hooked us into liking away our days on Facebook—even though it’s proven to make us unhappy and it has likely cost us our democracy.

Design has even changed the way we’ve communicated for the entire history of our species. We don’t talk anymore. We text emojis in place of feelings, cram apologies into the limited bandwidth of Twitter and share rainbow-puking Snaps. We communicate, first and foremost, in respect to the business plan and engagement metrics of a corporate entities, all empowered by design.

We live in the future now, and it’s terrible. Which is to say, we will have a lot to talk about when I host day 1 of the International Design Conference this August in Chicago! And you? You will have a lot of explaining to do.

—Mark Wilson Mark Wilson is a senior writer at Fast Company, where he writes about the intersection of design, technology and culture. Before that, he founded a site called Philanthroper to raise money for nonprofits. His work has also appeared in GQ, Esquire, American Photo, Gizmodo, Kotaku and Lucky Peach.

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EMCEE Marcelle van Beusekom, IDEO

THE FIVE LOVE LANGUAGES FOR DESIGN

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anguage matters. It’s an obvious statement for those working cross culturally, and it especially holds true in the field of design. In conversations about design, innovation, transformation or the future, misinterpretation is a common pitfall.

As a designer, I have always been inspired to use my skills to create conversation tools that enable shared understanding. This mainly happend out of necessity. I was born and raised in the Netherlands, and I have also lived in Sweden, the UK and, for the past seven years, the US. In my 14-plus years working as an industrial designer and creative leader, I have collaborated with clients from almost every continent, ranging from cities like Saõ Paulo to Johannesburg to Seoul. Through these collaborations, I have experienced firsthand how language connects us to our cultures and one another, and how it shapes our individual view of the world around us.

Designers have a wonderful advantage when it comes to communication. We have the benefit not only of our words but also of visualizations, from sketches and 3D CAD to infographics and physical objects. Designers are capable of making words real and expressing a thought or idea in form, color, material and finish.

We are truly tangible storytellers. Yet, having the means to make words tangible doesn’t necessarily solve all communication issues.

The reality is that we all speak nuanced languages and carry biases toward the things we already love to hear, see and experience. You may have heard of the five love languages: words of affirmation, quality time, giving gifts, physical touch and acts of service. It turns out that everyone experiences love differently, and it's easy to miss the mark when it comes to showing that you care. Similar to the love languages, there are also five different languages that make people fall in love (or not) with an idea. As a designer, I use this knowledge to make sure our ideas are multilingual.

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1. Words of reason and a bit of smooth talk.

It’s the thought that counts—the logic of the idea. This goes far beyond how the idea actually solves a problem for people and the business. It’s about the thoughtful descriptions of how the idea came about, why it will make an impact in the world, how it is better than other ideas and why we feel confident about that. The best test to know if your idea will be loved is to pretend your idea is on a speed date: If people understand it in a single sentence (or visual framework) and get excited within 30 seconds, you are on to something.

2. Make it personal.

This is about the context in which the idea lives, how relatable it is and the familiar elements we can all inherently understand. It is like turning your idea into a movie, including the actors, scenes, props and emotions taking place or, even better, making it a reality show where real people experience the idea. The idea speaks to our intuition and our understanding of the context that is often seen through the lens of other people. This is where empathy really matters.

3. Creates excitement or makes us zing.

The things that make us express emotions—the oohs and aahs or wows we express without realizing it and the smile or expression on our face—are often out of our control. Think of this as the first picture you see on a dating app. It's the first impression your idea makes. A good tip: amplify the core emotion of your idea that you want people to feel. The zing happens when the idea flirts with us and tickles our intuition, senses, gut instinct and imagination.

4. Try it to believe it.

For some, actions speak louder than words, and people can only fall in love with the idea after seeing or trying it—they want to use it over time, test it, live with it, try to break it and have others try it. Always make sure to bring your ideas to life in the form of rough or smooth prototypes and experience them out in the wild.

These could be works-like or looks-like prototypes or even a hacked existing product. Know that it’s OK to fake it till you make it.

5. Symbols for the soul.

These are the ways ideas can connect to a greater purpose or meaning, a symbol of change, a conviction about how things can be better. The beliefs and values that individuals hold true and recognize in the idea. These symbols are the elements that create excitement beyond the idea and connection to the brand, its values and the people behind it. Toms Shoes, a company that matches every pair of shoes purchased with a new pair of shoes for a child in need, inspires a sense of belonging to the brand. From joy to pride, this type of idea can inspire personal change, improved health and well-being or even ethical or societal mindfulness toward sustainability and equality.

Designers are often in a dating game, uncovering the languages that innovation teams speak to help them fall in love with ideas. But more importantly, designers are learning how to speak the languages of the various audiences we design for.

It’s important for us all to realize our biases toward our favorite language and have the empathy and capabilities to listen to the other ones. Your design love language might be different from the person using your design.

—Marcelle van Beusekom Marcelle van Beusekom is a design director at IDEO San Francisco, where she helps lead the design of hardware products. Fueled with a passion for craft, she aims to develop products that attract, intrigue and delight users and enhance the overall brand experience. Together with other leaders at IDEO, she strives in her work to humanize technology.

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PRESENTERS

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KEYNOTE

J MAYS A world-renowned automotive and industrial designer, J Mays has a history of transforming companies into design leaders. As the group vice president of global design and chief creative officer at Ford Motor Company from 1997 to 2013, he led the design direction of Ford’s eight brands—Ford, Lincoln, Mercury, Mazda, Volvo, Land Rover, Jaguar and Aston Martin—and was responsible for numerous concept car designs.

Prior to his 16-year tenure at Ford, Mays worked as design director for Audi AG, and up until 2017, he acted in a design advisory role to Disney/Pixar. Mays also has served as a visiting professor at the Royal College of Art in London.

Mays’ influence is recognized throughout the automotive industry in the design of vehicles such as the VW New Beetle, Audi TT, Ford GT and three consecutive Mustang generations. His work has been celebrated by institutions as diverse as Harvard and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

In 2018, Mays joined Whirlpool Corporation as vice president of global design and chief design officer. He owns and leads design strategy and execution across all Whirlpool product platforms and categories, including advanced design and user experience design.

Born in Pauls Valley, OK, Mays studied automotive design at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA.

KEYNOTE

SHANNON GALPIN National Geographic Adventurer of the Year and global activist Shannon Galpin worked for a decade on women’s rights in Afghanistan with her nonprofit, Mountain2Mountain. She is a fellow with the Explorer’s Club and the co-founder of the wildlife conservation organization Endangered Activism with her 14-year-old daughter, Devon Galpin Clarke.

In 2009, Galpin became the first person to mountain bike in Afghanistan. In 2012, she began to support and train the first Afghan Women’s National Cycling team and helped build and support the burgeoning right-to-ride movement in Afghanistan. Her work with the national team in Kabul was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016.

She is the producer of the award-winning feature-length documentary film Afghan Cycles.

The International Olympic Committee awarded Galpin an Honorary Achievement Diploma in 2015 for her work promoting gender equity through sports.

Galpin’s work in Afghanistan supported deaf education, and she has worked with at-risk women in prisons, heroin rehab centers and burn centers. She also supports emerging artists with street art mentorship and development.

Galpin is the author of two books: her memoir, Mountain to Mountain: A Journey of Adventure and Activism for the Women of Afghanistan, and a photography book, Streets of Afghanistan. She and her daughter are co-writing a graphic novel, The Rosette, to launch in 2020. Galpin also is working on her second memoir about the process of losing her memory to two back-to-back brain injuries.

Currently, Galpin is directing a feature documentary with her daughter about wildlife conservation and youth activism.

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Audra Norvilas, IDSA

Carrie McEwan

Associate Creative Director, Industrial Design, Kaleidoscope I design for EMPOWERMENT

Senior Human Factors Specialist, TEAGUE I design for PEOPLE

Audra Norvilas is an experienced associate creative director with 13 years in the field and a demonstrated history of bringing strategic cultivated designs from concept to production. Throughout her career, Norvilas has touched a wide range of products, including furniture and interior design for Michael Graves Company, collections for Room & Board and housewares for Target and JCPenny.

Her other clients include Wrigley, Hospira, Thermos and Unilever. With a strong art and design background, she has an industrial design degree from Purdue University and a project management associate degree from Northwestern.

Norvilas finds beauty in the details and is inspired by her love of nature and the outdoors.

Brett Lovelady, IDSA

Chris Jackson

Founder, Creative Capitalist and Designer, ASTRO Studios I design for NEW REALITIES

Director, We Create Futures I design for INCLUSIVE FUTURES

Brett Lovelady founded ASTRO Studios in 1994 to blend design, technology and cultural insights into a wide range of iconic market-defining products and brands. Over the past 24 years, Lovelady has designed or directed the creation of over 500 new products and 100 new brands, including two of his own, many of which have helped define American culture and industry.

ASTRO Studios was named one of the world’s most innovative design companies of 2018, according to Fast Company, and its projects have won international design awards and recognition, all helping to establish Lovelady as one of America’s leading entrepreneurial designers and advocates for design in business. To date, projects designed by ASTRO have helped clients generate over $60 billion in new revenue worldwide, including Bose Sleepbuds and Frames, Nike’s Triax Watch Series, the Nike Fuelband, the Microsoft Xbox360 gaming console, Shinola Electric & Audio and many more.

Cara Oba Designer and Cofounder, Pas de Chocolat I design for SOCIABILITY

Cara Oba is a designer and cofounder of Pas de Chocolat, a tiny research, design and development studio based in Honolulu, Hawaii, where her work focuses on developing transformational technology strategies for public-sector clients. She is intrigued by systems, models and generative collaboration. Her educational backgrounds are in mechanical engineering and industrial design. She is an investigator and experimenter at heart, enjoying projects that involve process improvement, ethnographic research, discursive engagement and opportunities to make art with data and technology.

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As an experienced human factors engineer and researcher, McEwan works with leaders in aerospace and technology to infuse a human-centered perspective into the design of product systems. For over 15 years, she has grown her expertise within the aviation industry, working with both airlines and manufacturers to deliver products that enhance the travel experience. As part of the research group at TEAGUE, she works with multidisciplinary teams to understand and advocate for the abilities, limitations and behaviors of the end user through a systems-thinking approach. McEwan holds a BS in industrial and systems engineering and an MS in human factors engineering from Virginia Tech.

A classically trained furniture and product designer, Chris Jackson now finds himself working in evermore strategic problem spaces. He has been an academic, public servant and freelancer, and he worked in one of New Zealand’s leading CX agencies. As founder and director of We Create Futures, Jackson aims to build a more resilient designerly practice to successfully navigate complicated and complex challenges. This bricolage of methods includes tools taken from design, strategic foresight, anthro-complexity and strategic planning, with the aim of creating more creative, inclusive and regenerative futures.

Chris Lovin Senior Interaction Designer, frog I design for EVERYONE

Chris Lovin is a systems designer with a holistic perspective on connected experiences. His focuses are connected products, medical solutions, complex services and strategies for end-to-end customer experiences that span multiple channels and devices.

Eddie Gandelman

Hazal Gumus Ciftci

Senior Product Designer and Sound Design Specialist, Priority Designs I design for AUDIBLE EXPERIENCES

Designer / Researcher I design for GRASSROOTS PRODUCTION

Eddie Gandelman is a product designer with an expertise and passion for music composition and sound design. He helps clients understand how merging musical semantics with emotional-rich sound design can strengthen user interactions and build deep connections. Gandelman specializes in taking complex auditory interfaces full of notifications, alerts, alarms and sonifications and defining a hierarchy and set of core sounds to elevate the user experience and minimize distraction. He has worked in product sound design for several years and is excited about a future with more thoughtful and respectful product sound.

Hazal Gumus Ciftci is a design researcher with an interest in practice-based design research, design for sustainability, local production, participatory design and social innovation.

She holds a PhD in design from Lancaster University. She received her bachelor’s degree in industrial design from Istanbul Technical University and a master’s degree in product/service/system design from Politecnico di Milano in Italy. She is a visiting assistant professor at The Ohio State University. She also taught at the Industrial Design Department of Izmir University of Economics between 2012 and 2015.

Jay Peters

Frank Spencer Founding Principal and Creative Director, Kedge, and Founder and Lead Instructor, The Futures School I design for COMPLEXITY

Frank Spencer is a published author and speaker, delivering presentations and workshops around the globe. He holds an MA in strategic foresight from Regent University. With a strong background in both business and academic foresight, Spencer was the creator and lead instructor of The Futures Institute: Shaping The Future Now at the Duke University Talent Identification Program Institute. He has worked on foresight for companies like Kraft, Mars and Marriott. Spencer also led the effort to establish foresight as a leadership competency across The Walt Disney Company. He is co-founder of The Futures School, a multidisciplinary strategic-foresight training program. He is also the founding partner at Kedge, a foresight, innovation, creativity and strategic design firm.

Glen Hougan Associate Professor of Design, NSCAD University, and Principal, Wellspan Research and Design I design for DIGNITY

Glen Hougan is an industrial and service designer. He is an associate professor of design at NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and principal of the design consultancies Wellspan Research and Design and BlueZone Design. His work in the area of design for health, aging and dignity has been covered in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He has been awarded a research fellowship in healthcare innovations from the Center for Innovation at the Mayo Clinic and was made the Sun Life Financial Chair in Design in Health and Aging in Canada.

Managing Director, Grow I design for HUMANITY

Jay Peters is the managing director of PARK USA, a world-leading design and innovation management consulting firm, and managing director of Grow USA, a world-leading professional education provider in design management and design leadership. Collectively, PARK and Grow endeavor to deliver on their shared mission to empower design leaders.

Peters consults, coaches and educates clients from major leading global brands such as Lego, Nestle, Sony, Kimberly-Clark, Novo Nordisk, BASF, Unilever, Honda, Roche and many others, as well as (non) governmental organizations and academic institutions on using design and innovation lead practices to maximize value across the triple bottom line: profit, planet and people.

Peters has lived and worked extensively across Europe and the U.S. and holds a bachelor’s degree in product design with a marketing minor from Southern Illinois University and a master’s degree in business design from Domus Academy in Milan, Italy.

Jeremy Barribeau MDes Candidate and Teaching Assistant, University of Washington I design for DELIGHT

Jeremy Barribeau is an industrial designer and interaction design graduate student at the University of Washington, Seattle where he is a Top Scholar Fellow, teaching assistant and research assistant. Barribeau has worked as an industrial and user experience designer for organizations ranging from startups and consultancies to Fortune 500 companies and governments. He has authored numerous patents and defensive publications, and a number of his projects have received Red Dot and iF awards.

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Jonathan Chapman Professor and Director of Doctoral Studies, Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design I design for LONGEVITY

Jonathan Chapman is professor and director of doctoral studies at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design.

His research shapes future design paradigms for longerlasting materials, products and user experiences, an approach he calls “emotionally durable design.” He is the author of several books and consults to global businesses and governmental bodies from COS, Puma and The Body Shop to the House of Lords and the United Nations, advancing the social and ecological relevance of their products, technologies and systems. His work generated international media attention from The New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent, CNN and BBC Radio 4. New Scientist describes him as “a mover and shaker” and part of a “new breed of sustainable design thinker.”

Kat Reiser, IDSA Founder, Rise Design I design for PROGRESS

Kat Reiser is known for her strategic approach to today’s design challenges. She is notorious for trying to sneak broader discussions into the smallest of projects. She is currently working to break down the assumptions designers make about gender when designing for a specific consumer demographic.

Reiser graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana– Champaign in 2016, where she received multiple honors for her merit. As a student, she worked with Big Monster Toys, Miss Possible Dolls and Neutral Design Studio.

Reiser is a hobby hoarder. Whether its learning a new instrument or developing another side project, she always has something interesting going on after work. Talk to her about art, food, culture, society, music or politics and you’re guaranteed a thoughtful response.

Katie Mowery Senior Human Factors Specialist, Priority Designs I design for HUMANS

Katie Mowery has more than 15 years of experience in the field of human factors applied to industries such as healthcare, defense, automotive, retail, web, consumer products and software applications. She adds an understanding of human cognition and perception to her user experience design acumen, ensuring end-user needs and desires are met via usable and safe product

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interfaces. Her psychology background brings a solid foundation in experimental design, ensuring each research program has the appropriate level of control and external validity needed to understand user experiences. Mowery is actively involved in the design process from idea generation through final concept validation testing, helping clients to define the next opportunity space through validating that the final product meets users’ needs and desires.

Krista Donaldson CEO, D-Rev I design for RESILIENCE

As D-Rev’s CEO, Krista Donaldson leads the organization, establishes D-Rev’s direction and vision, and ensures that D-Rev impacts the health and well-being of everyone it serves. In 2018, D-Rev surpassed 500,000 people treated with its products, most in low- and middle-income countries.

Donaldson holds degrees in product design and mechanical engineering. She has driven innovation in design and international development for more than 15 years. Her doctoral work was among the first to focus on design and social impact. Prior to D-Rev, Donaldson was an economic officer at the U.S. Department of State in Washington and Baghdad and a design engineer for KickStart International in Nairobi. Her leadership has won her acclaim as one of Fast Company’s Co.Design 50 Designers Shaping the Future, a TED speaker and a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.

Laura Silva Vice President, Accessibility Technology UX Design Lead, Bank of America I design for EQUITY

Laura Silva is a Colombian-born designer who specializes in diversity and inclusion in UX. Mallory Evans, IDSA Senior Industrial Designer, Linx Global Manufacturing I design for EMPOWERMENT

Mallory Evans is a senior industrial designer at Linx Global Manufacturing where she helps clients through the full development process, from ideation to final assembly.

Mallory co-founded Women in Industrial Design Chicago with McKayla Barber, IDSA, with the goal of empowering the female community of industrial designers.

They hold regular events as a way for women to meet and support other women in the industrial design industry and continue to find ways to promote a more inclusive design community.

McKayla Barber, IDSA

Sebastian Gier

Industrial Designer and Strategist, Beyond Design I design for EMPOWERMENT

Senior Designer for Design Strategy and User Experience, BMW Group I design for POSITIVE MOMENTS & EMOTIONS IN MOBILITY

After graduating from Purdue University with a BFA in industrial design, McKayla Barber joined Beyond Design as an industrial designer and design strategist where she helps clients of all sizes create new and innovative products.

Since moving to Chicago, McKayla has continued to pursue her passion for gender-inclusive design. McKayla and fellow Purdue alum Mallory Evans founded Women in Industrial Design Chicago in order to grow the community of female industrial designers in Chicago. As she continues to grow as a designer, McKayla hopes to empower young women in the industrial design field so that one day there is no longer a need for organizations like WIID.

Sebastian Gier is a designer from Germany, currently working at BMW Group on the future of mobility experiences. He is also the founder and host of the Designdrives.org podcast, where he explores with design leaders why, how and what design drives forward. He frequently talks at conferences and universities about the value and positive impact of design. He previously gained work experience in the U.S., Asia and Europe at Bosch and MNML, and worked on projects with such companies as Philips, John Deere, Rolls-Royce, Siemens, Midea and Newell. His work has been recognized from institutions like Core77, IXDA, Red Dot and others.

Michael DiTullo Founder and Chief Creative, Michael DiTullo LLC I design for MASS APPEAL

For more than 20 years, Michael DiTullo has been designing iconic products and brand experiences for some of the best brands in the world, including Nike, Google, Motorola, Honda and Hasbro. He has been a design executive at Nike Inc, a creative director at frog design and the chief design officer of Sound United.

DiTullo’s eponymous studio focuses on industry-leading halo projects across autonomous automotive, consumer electronics, travel, mobile devices, wearables, toys, housewares and conceptual Hollywood entertainment projects. His book, 365: One Year of Design Sketching Every Day, is available on Amazon.

Sooshin Choi, IDSA CDO and Executive Design Director, DEKA Research & Development I design for DREAMS

Sooshin Choi has 26 years of experience in automotive design, system furniture design and innovative product design. His 15-year education experience includes provost and vice president at the College for Creative Studies and professor and director of the School of Design at the University of Cincinnati. He has served as the IDSA Education Vice President and the Chair for the IDSA International Conference 2016 in Detroit. He has received many awards, including iF, IDEA, Good Design Award, IDSA Education Award and the National Merit Medal from the Korean Government.

Paula Falavigna

Yoojin Hong

Associate Creative Director, Kaleidoscope I design for EMPOWERMENT

Vice President, Head of User Experience, Mobile Communications Business, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. I design for HAPPY USERS

Originally from Brazil, Paula Falavigna has nearly 15 years of branding and packaging design experience across a broad spectrum of categories. Having worked with a variety of national and international brands, including Conagra, P&G, and Kellogg’s, she has led countless brands through redesign and refreshes to successful evaluations at shelf.

Yoojin Hong leads the global UX design of Samsung mobile products, including Galaxy phones, wearables and services such as Bixby, Samsung Pay and Samsung Health. Hong is a 25-year veteran of the UX industry. Prior to joining Samsung, she gained experience in consumer devices and mobile platforms at highly respected technology companies, including BlackBerry, Adobe Systems and Sun Microsystems, Inc. Hong holds a BSc from Yonsei University in Korea and a master’s degree in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Many more to come . . .

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VENUES

CHICAGO, NEW AND OLD Chicago is known as a design capital of the world. Looking around downtown, it is easy to see why. The postindustrial metropolis is a playground of skyscrapers and other iconic structures, designed by some of the world’s most visionary architects: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Bertrand Goldberg, Louis Sullivan and Jeanne Gang, to name a few. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home and Studio reside in nearby Oak Park; and across the city, converted factories and warehouses serve as work spaces for a diverse array of well-respected designers and creatives.

One modern building that stands out on Michigan Avenue is Venue SIX10, where all things IDC 2019 will take place. The award-winning facility is powered by 100% renewable energy and features a striking 10-story faceted window wall that provides panoramic views of Chicago’s skyline, Grant Park and Lake Michigan.

IDC speakers, sponsors and attendees will enjoy more than 35,000 square feet of stunning event space. The venue includes an open atrium that soars three stories, a grand glass and terrazzo staircase that extends to the second-floor landing and a great hall with floor-to-ceiling windows for showcasing Navy Pier, Millennium Park, Buckingham Fountain, the Museum Campus and Lake Michigan.

The IDEA Ceremony, IDSA Education Symposium, IDC keynotes and other presentations throughout the conference will be held in the spacious Feinberg Theater on the second floor. The 409-person-capacity room features a state-of-the-art sound system, proscenium stage, wraparound mezzanine and balcony.

Following the IDEA Ceremony on the evening of August 21, the IDEA Gala will commence in a resplendent design gallery on Venue SIX10’s top floor, with access to the glass-enclosed Landmark Room and a picturesque open-air terrace. Pre-conference workshops and breakout sessions will occur in a variety of well-appointed rooms across multiple floors, most with lakefront views. A Welcome Happy Hour on August 22 also will take place in the design gallery.

A testament to sustainable design and energy efficiency, Venue SIX10 has won numerous design awards and is Silver LEED certified. Its advanced computer-controlled lighting and HVAC systems significantly reduce energy consumption, while the windows are fritted to control heat gain and glare. A green roof, planted with special vegetation, allows rainwater to evaporate rather than enter the sewer system. Additionally, the venue’s roof absorbs air pollution and keeps the building cool in the summertime.

A short walk from Venue SIX10 is the historic Palmer House, where IDC guests are invited to stay at a deeply discounted rate. The Palmer House first opened its doors on November 8, 1872, making it the nation’s longest continually operating hotel.

By 1900, the Palmer House had become a lively social center, hosting a long list of prominent figures such as Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and several US presidents. In 1933, the Golden Empire Dining Room was converted into an entertainment epicenter. This space hosted a pantheon of legendary entertainers, including Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald and Liberace. In recent years, the Palmer House underwent a $170 million renovation. A Hilton Hotel since 1945, the property now brims with 21st-century comforts and amenities, though its intricate beauty and history remain intact.

One lasting touch is the Palmer House brownie. Yes, the chocolate brownie was invented in the Palmer House kitchen in the late 19th century when Bertha Palmer decided they would be served at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. The recipe that the Palmer House cooks came up with is unchanged and still the same one used today. Trust us: You should try one!

Opposite Page: Venue SIX10, photographed by Kendall McCaugherty

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PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS

LEARN FROM SOME OF OUR INDUSTRY’S TOP MINDS Maximize your trip to Chicago with a series of pre-conference workshops designed to help you advance your skill set and gain an edge on the competition. Arrive early to the Windy City and put on your learning hat! We’ve partnered with our good friends at Lexion, makers of KeyShot, and Grow, a group enabling design leaders of tomorrow, to offer you a unique opportunity to take in-depth classes taught by industry experts.

These workshops will take place on Wednesday, August 21, and are open to any designer looking to further their professional education. Both KeyShot and Grow will offer a morning and an afternoon session. Each session will feature different content.

KeyShot

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Beginner.

This session will cover the basics of the software with a focus on KeyShot for industrial designers. It will cover the interface, importing, editing materials, using textures and setting up cameras, as well as lighting and render settings. Come caffeinated, because if you blink, you might miss something!

Design Leadership.

Learn how to better speak the business of design to deliver more value and impact to your company, customers, clients, consumers and colleagues alike. Understand the relationship and difference between leading and managing design, and how to more effectively lead design within your teams and across the organization.

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Advanced.

This session will take a deeper dive into topics introduced in the previous session. It will cover how to use the material graph and how to light products with physical lights and studios. You will also learn a handful of efficiencies and best practices.

Design Value.

Learn how to predict and justify investments, and how to prove a stronger business case and ROI for design initiatives. Understand the qualitative and quantitative factors and the complexity of stakeholders that make proving the value of design so challenging.

S P E CIA L OFF E R IDSA is pleased to offer all current IDSA Chapter Leaders the opportunity to participate in the Grow series of workshops for FREE! We’re thankful for all the volunteer work you do in your local communities. This is one way we’d like to help repay you for that service, while enhancing your ability to lead with confidence and professional prowess.

Visit InternationalDesignConference.com/preconferenceworkshops to register.

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IDSA EDUCATION SYMPOSIUM

EXPLORING THE FUTURE OF DESIGN EDUCATION For over 20 years, IDSA’s Education Symposium has been a platform for celebrating the very best in design academia. It routinely draws design educators, students and design practitioners from all over the world and helps connect our vast community through knowledge sharing and networking opportunity.

We’re very excited for our 2019 event, which is themed “Looking Ahead: The Future of Design Education.” Design educators have an immense influence on future generations of designers and play a vital role in shaping the pathway for many individuals pursuing a career in a design discipline. At the symposium, we will be unpacking the mindset, vision and objectives that is positioning future design talent for success in today’s ever-shifting creative landscape.

The IDSA Education Symposium will take place on August 21, 2019, and is open to all registered IDC attendees. The full-day event will be lead by IDSA’s Education Director, Raja Schaar, MAAE, IDSA. Schaar is assistant professor of product design at Drexel University. As an educator, Schaar works to infuse her teaching with human-centered design methodologies that address real-world problems. Schaar pushes her students to apply design thinking, making and life cycle analysis to the development of devices and products that positively and sustainably impact the lives of users.

Visit InternationalDesignConference.com/educationsymposium for more information.

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THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS AND EXHIBITORS FOR YOUR SUPPORT D I AM O N D

G OL D

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B RO N Z E

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MEET SOLAR CAT: CREATING PEOPLE-FOCUSED SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGY The fundamental design of commercial solar panels hasn’t changed in 60 years. If you look at the original Bell Labs solar panel from 1954, it is almost indistinguishable from current panels you see installed on roofs today. Most people, including industrial designers, view solar panels as utilitarian eye sores that are drafted up by scientists and engineers and then slapped on buildings and lamp posts. Even though the design hasn’t changed, the price of solar cells has dropped a whopping 99% over the last four decades.

If solar cells are more affordable than ever, why aren’t we seeing them everywhere?

The answer is the lack of industrial design.

At Grouphug, a New York City–based tech company, we want to empower more people to adopt sustainable technology. Our mission is to change the perception that renewable energy is a boring utility purchased by the most privileged. We believe the technology itself can be designed to be more relatable, have a personality and be fun. On Earth Day this year, we unleashed Solar Cat: The Cutest Solar Panel Ever Made, a giant cat-shaped solar panel, at the historic New York Hall of Science in Queens. The accompanying exhibit was designed to educate visitors from around the world about the creative possibilities of renewable energy.

Inspired by panda-shaped solar arrays in China, we wanted to create something whimsical that would instantly make visitors smile. The exhibit centers around a 140-watt cat-shaped solar panel mounted to a window.

The energy harvested by Solar Cat powers an adjacent

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interactive pedestal that features fun facts and diagrams about how solar panels work. Visitors can physically flip a switch to send Solar Cat's harvested energy to power a model house. You will most definitely hear meowing if you power up the exhibit. Visitors can also charge their phones using one of two built-in USB ports powered by Solar Cat. The solar cells are mounted on transparent, durable plastic so visitors can see the components up close.

Opposite Page 1. Launched at the New York Hall of Science on Earth Day 2019, the 40-watt catshaped solar panel powers an interactive pedestal where museum goers can learn about sustainable power.

2. Unlike most solar panels, the Window Solar Charger by Grouphug was designed to hang in any window. The rechargeable battery and USB port embedded in the bamboo frame will charge your devices off the grid.

3. The design of the Solar Cat solar panel was inspired by a panda-shaped solar panel array in China.

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“Our mission is to change the perception that renewable energy is a boring utility purchased by the most privileged.”

From my experience, here are three ways design can revolutionize the solar industry: Put humans first.

While developing Solar Cat, we talked to at least 100 museum goers at the New York Hall of Science. We asked them what they knew about solar panels, what they wanted to know and what they wished was possible.

User feedback is not a process done by utility companies.

They may ask installers or sales reps for feedback, but never the customer. Solar panels are designed to be installed, not interacted with by humans. Over and over again, people told us that they think solar panels are ugly, confusing and expensive. So it became our goal to create a solar panel that could make someone smile and would feel more approachable.

Inject emotion.

A cat shape may seem like a silly novelty, but it was very intentional. Choosing a playful shape was a way to add emotion and humanize the technology. The cat profile makes people smile and puts them in the mindset that they are interacting with a toy, not a complicated piece of technology. When playing with toys, people tend to be in a more open-minded and curious state.

Form and function.

The tension between form and function that designers are used to balancing doesn’t exist with utilities like solar; it’s all function and no form. The panels we create are designed to be hung in a window, not out of sight on a roof. The most common piece of feedback I get is, “What you’re doing is cute, but solar panels are the most efficient if they are installed outdoors at a specific angle in relation to the sun.” While these critics aren’t technically wrong, I think they are missing the bigger picture. If sacrificing a little efficiency empowers a larger population of people to adopt solar, that’s a win.

We need more industrial designers bridging the gap between technology and humanity. There are so many important innovations out there like photovoltaics that are stuck in the past. At Grouphug, we have some exciting projects in development, all around the idea of people-focused sustainable technology. We believe that if you make something fun and accessible, even a utility, the adoption rate will boom. We’re starting with the cat people.

—Krystal Persaud, krystal.persaud@gmail.com Krystal Persaud is a product designer and the founder of Grouphug, where she is creating a line of solar panels for apartment windows that empower city dwellers to go off the grid. She has a BS in industrial design from Georgia Tech and is previously the senior director of product design at littleBits.

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AUTOM OTIV E

THE IMPORTANCE AND EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRIAL DESIGN AT GENERAL MOTORS At General Motors, industrial design has been both a key strategic advantage and an important partner, always challenging itself to remain forward thinking. This goes back to 1927, when the company opened its Art and Colour Section. Today, GM still believes it has a good idea of what the future will look like as it relates to personal mobility. It’s a bold vision of a future with zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion. Industrial design is making that vision a reality by executing what the transportation of the future looks and feels like.

Across our business, designers and engineers are collaborating to solve problems, address the customer’s every concern and fulfill the customer’s every need. As far as bringing the future closer to the now, that’s always been a big part of design’s job: looking down the road a few years out, defining what customers will want and creating the right products. While industrial design doesn’t typically stand center stage, it will play an increasingly vital role in the changing landscape of automotive interiors and design as the industry moves forward.

A Drive through the Design Eras Harley Earl, a pioneer in automotive styling, started the car design field at General Motors with the launch of the Art and Color Section, later called the Styling Section.

Today, GM defines it simply as Global Design, due to the global nature of our studio footprint and the problemsolving required in the field.

GM also has a rich industrial design heritage. The GM Industrial Design department has been stimulating the desire to own since 1939, when it was officially created.

From 1942–47, the department was named Camouflage, Blackout & Industrial Design to reflect the growing needs of the U.S. Department of Defense and the manufacturing demands of World War II. The studio’s activities shifted

significantly during the war, with more emphasis placed on research than on true design. After the war, the name changed again to Product and Exhibit Design, and the department entered into a productive, prolific era with wide-ranging projects such as the Parade of Progress, the Motorama and the Kitchen of Tomorrow.

An Architectures Interiors Studio was added in the 1950s to focus on the design of office spaces and facility interiors at GM. Most notably, the GM Technical Center opened in 1956. This past November, the GM Design Center opened an exhibit designed by the ID team, Carl Benkert and GM Industrial Design in the 1950s, to honor this era. Carl Benkert was an untrained and relatively inexperienced designer who, during his 10-year tenure, ultimately became the head of the Architecture and Interiors department, overseeing one of the most significant eras of industrial design at General Motors. In 1959, graphic design was added to the studio, and the name changed for the final time back to General Motors Industrial Design to reflect the breadth of the studio and its output.

Throughout the years, the automotive landscape has changed, but General Motors Industrial Design has remained at the helm of solving new problems. Most recently, GM announced the launch of ARIV, the company’s new e-bike brand, which was led by GM’s ID team and GM Senior Creative Product Designer Jess Bailie, IDSA. “The ARIV design team combined its automotive and cycling expertise to create an innovative eBike design that addresses the unique needs of urban commuters,” said Bailie. “The compact design allows for easier transit and more convenient storage for customers.”

The ID studio has continued to grow and evolve through the decades, and by end of the last century, it had responsibility for more than a dozen brands globally and

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hundreds of individual nameplates. Today, GM Industrial Design is the largest creative team at GM Design.

The team has different backgrounds and disciplines of emphasis, and its diverse responsibilities include product, graphic and component design; exhibit and experiential design; photography; video and animation; and color and trim design.

Growing Diversity As it looks to the future, GM Design sees a need for a more diverse talent pool. Diversity in thought and in education is critical to getting the best ideas, the most innovation and the most creative solutions possible.

The goal is to catch students at an early age, help them develop their talents, direct them toward art education and, most importantly, encourage them to pursue a creative career in design. This requires GM Design to demonstrate that there are great career opportunities available in automotive. This is where the GM Design Academy comes in. It supports recruiting, sponsored projects with universities, outreach initiatives and employee training in the technologies needed for modern design.

We have to dispel the myth of the starving artist. And we must convince young people and, most importantly, the people who influence them—parents, guardians and teachers—to embrace the field so that young artists who like cars aren’t pushed into engineering, or kids who can draw well aren’t told it’s a nice hobby but to go to medical school first. There are so many creative opportunities in our field, that even if you never sketch a car, you will make a significant contribution to global products and brands.

GM is placing many of its bets on this team and the team of tomorrow to help deliver the future—because the work of industrial design will have a great impact on the automotive interiors of tomorrow.

—Sharon Gauci, IDSA, sharon.gauci@gm.com Sharon Gauci, a native Australian, was appointed the executive director of industrial design at General Motors in January 2018. She leads GM Design’s largest creative team across the globe, including North America, Australia, Korea, Brazil and China. Gauci graduated with a Bachelor of Design in industrial design in 1993 from Swinburne University in Melbourne.

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Opposite Page 1. A designer and sculptor in the studio at work on the 1954 Buick Wildcat III concept vehicle.

2. Top: Illustration of the 1956 Motorama Kitchen of Tomorrow display. GM Design Archive & Special Collections.

Bottom: The 1956 Motorama Kitchen of Tomorrow display.

3. The 1958 Firebird III concept vehicle on view at the 1959 Motorama event held at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel.

4. The design proposal by Gere Kavanaugh for the interior of an executive office at the Design Center, circa 1954. From the Carl Benkert Collection, GM Design Archive & Special Collections.

5. The compact design of the ARIV e-bikes allows for easy transit and more convenient storage.

6. The Design Development Program interdisciplinary collaboration (from right to left: Loc Dao, Lu Wang, Darby Barber).

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INCLUSIVE DESIGN:

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n 2017, I was diagnosed with a genetic connective tissue disorder. This condition ultimately resulted in losing my career as a hair salon owner, hobbies and access to things that were previously very functional to me. One of those objects was my menstrual cup. I approached my friend Andy Miller, who happened to be a medical device designer, to create an easier-to-use cup. We took a novel approach to designing and executing our project, which resulted in our menstrual cup going from Kickstarter to nationwide distribution at Target in a little over a year. Our project is a great example of how inclusive design can lead to the creation of successful products.

Inclusive design means that product designers include diverse voices in every step of the design process. It has become a bit of a buzzword lately, and for good reason.

In my opinion, inclusive design leads to better fit between the product and the users. When designers break down accessibility barriers for some, the resulting design often solves pain points for the majority of other users as well.

That said, there are a few critical steps for design to be truly inclusive: Include potential users with diverse voices in the design process to cultivate radically new combinations of rich ideas.

Empower users to be full co-designers in every step of the process; their needs will be elevated and amplified through successive design iterations. This ensures that user needs won’t get edited out for cost, timeline or manufacturing efficiencies.

Listen and seek additional perspectives that challenge your design assumptions to make more robust solutions that drive to the heart of user needs.

Inclusive design is more than designing for extreme users.

If designers think specifically about designing a product for someone traditionally left in the margins (such as someone with a disability), we might listen to their needs and then return to our office to design a solution specifically for them.

This approach can sometimes result in product features that address a specific user’s challenges, but the same features may not be appropriate for the wider context of the design.

That’s because the resulting design might solve for the wrong problems, or it might be too expensive to produce, which would prevent the resulting product from being truly accessible. Liz Jackson, a notable disability design expert, has dubbed this design misstep a “disability dongle,” a solution that creates more issues than it solves.

If product designers choose to focus on inclusion, it’s important to design with, rather than for, the end user. This means the end user should be a full collaborator in every step of the design process.

First, Some Anatomy To understand why our menstrual cup design was such an important advancement, it’s helpful to know how a menstrual cup works. A menstrual cup is a small medical-grade silicone device that’s shaped like a bell. The cup is folded and inserted into the vagina, with the widest part facing upward toward the cervix and a stem pointed toward the opening of the vaginal canal. After insertion, the cup unfolds with the widest open portion located at the base of the user’s cervix.

The circumference around the top of the cup makes contact with the vaginal wall on all sides, forming a seal with the body. When blood is expelled from the cervix, the open cup collects, rather than absorbs, the fluid. This is an important distinction from tampons, which absorb all vaginal fluid, and which can result in dryness, irritation and a disruption of vaginal pH. The cup also differs from an absorbable

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tampon because cups can be worn for up to 12 hours, whereas tampons must be changed every one to eight hours, including at night. Tampons must be changed more frequently due to absorption limitations and safety concerns. (Manufacturers recommend a maximum wear time of eight hours to help prevent the risk of toxic shock syndrome, a rare but deadly disease.)

In order to remove a conventional cup, the wearer has to reach far inside their vaginal canal with a finger, wedging the finger between the vaginal wall and the open cup. The finger is then used to manually indent the side of the cup in order to break the seal that was formed with the vaginal wall. Pulling on a cup without breaking the seal first results in a suction force, making it difficult to remove. This is a complicated maneuver, and people of all abilities end up in the ER to have cups removed.

Since the vagina is essentially a tube of muscles, fear can result in clenching, making cup removal that much more difficult. This can be a traumatic experience for first-time and experienced cup users alike.

Trial and Error During our design process, we wanted to explore possible changes to the menstrual cup form in an effort to make it easier to use. We managed to make a number of prototypes. Early one week, Andy returned from a camping trip and arrived at my door excitedly holding a store-bought menstrual cup. It had a button stitched to the side that connected to a string that ran through the bottom of the cup. He handed it to me, and I immediately pulled on the string, which made the side of the cup indent. My first reaction was, “This is it!”

With Andy’s string passing through the bottom of the cup, we successfully created a design that meant the complicated removal maneuver could now be replaced with the familiar move of pulling a string, similar to the way users remove a tampon. Since the string was connected to the top of the cup, pulling from below would break the suction and significantly reduce the risk of the cup getting stuck. This ultimately led to the prototype we launched on Kickstarter.

In order to create our silicone prototypes on a shoestring budget, we utilized the eggshell mold method.

Andy would design a 0.3-millimeter-thick shell of the part, which we would 3D print with a FormLabs printer. From

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there, we hand injected silicone. Getting the process right was a matter of trial and error, but we eventually got it down. After the silicone solidified, we broke away the rigid 3D printed mold with a hammer and were left with the finished part. The complexity of our design—a cup with a tether that would need to pass through the middle, all molded as a single part—posed some challenges when it came to injection molding, but Andy and I were able to make it work.

An early problem we needed to solve was that we had taken a vessel that is designed to be leakproof and put a hole in the bottom of it. We were confident we could solve this with a carefully engineered seal, but we weren’t sure how it would be received. Surprisingly, thanks to video content demonstrating how this worked, our Kickstarter backers held enough confidence in what we had created, and we successfully met our funding goal.

Feedback, Iterate Before, during and even after the conclusion of the campaign, we were committed to factoring in as much feedback as possible from diverse perspectives as we worked our way to a final product. With a new group of over 1,000 Kickstarter backers and many more fans, we listened to their needs and continued to iterate our product design.

Around the same time, Lauren Schulte Wang, the founder and CEO of The Flex Company, makers of innovative and sex-friendly menstrual discs, reached out to us.

She had read a Teen Vogue op-ed I wrote about disability and menstruation and was excited to see what we were doing. After the successful conclusion of our campaign, she flew up to the Bay Area from Los Angeles to join us for a celebratory dinner. As we developed our friendship over several months, our manufacturing challenges caught up with us.

Originally, the pull string had a small nub on the end to grab on to. During testing, we determined that the nub had certain benefits, but in practice it could be a tricky task when wet and slippery with vaginal fluid. But I was determined to make the product truly accessible, so I pushed hard for another design iteration late in the process.

I remembered a message we had received from someone named Molly who was following our Kickstarter project. She shared with me that she had difficulty with grasping objects and requested that we make a version

“designers may have to take a chance on including someone like me” with a loop instead. Originally, this idea was passed over because it didn’t seem practical to pass a wide loop through a small seal. When we understood how important a loop design could be in aiding removal, I looked around for a solution and presented Andy with a needle threader, which is shaped to facilitate a large opening feeding into a smaller opening. Ultimately, this is how we came to modify our design. When we finally completed our first shippable cups, I sent one to Molly as a token of gratitude for her fantastic suggestion.

Attacking Scalability Once the prototype was complete, it was time to order our manufacturing molds. That’s when we hit the second snag. We were able to manufacture the product, but the design of the delicate string and soft loop created

challenges in production. It took us a week just to make a hundred parts. This was painstakingly slow. We could make enough product to fulfill our Kickstarter orders, but if we wanted to continue selling the product, we would have to change the design for manufacturability. On a hunch, we tried a few tweaks that ultimately left the core product functionality intact while addressing the issue of manufacturing at scale. It required us to redesign the geometry of the product as well as order new molds. We hoped this investment would pay off. It did.

We were also able to leverage The Flex Company’s existing relationship with Target to secure national distribution at launch. Together with Lauren, we dreamt up an unorthodox retail concept: Why don’t we give users the choice of two radically different period products for the price of one, so they can discover what works best for them? We named it The FLEX Discovery Kit. It includes a FLEX Cup and two free FLEX Discs. Our kits come with two sizes of our cup, slim fit and full fit.

Target loved that our combined products solve real pain points for all people with periods, and that we were giving people two options for the price of one. We loved that our products would be more accessible to people all over the United States. Access, while in part is a matter of design, is also a matter of availability.

The takeaway we hope you’ll receive from reading about our journey is this: Truly inclusive design makes better products that work for more people. In order to do that, designers may have to take a chance on including someone like me, who may not have a traditional design background, as a core member of the design team. With the partnership and trust of skilled product designers, we can work together to make a more accessible world—one product at a time.

—Jane Hartman Adamé, jane@flexfits.com Jane Hartman Adamé is a customer engagement and user research professional and former hairdresser living with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder. She is a co-creator of FLEX Cup an inclusively designed menstrual cup made in collaboration with Andy Miller, a medical device designer. She lives in Oakland, CA.

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COMPUTATIONAL IDEATION: GENERATING A NEW STARTING POINT

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he role of industrial design is rapidly evolving as commercial interest in truly designed products grows.

It is critical that designers rethink and implement new tools that allow for the most creative freedom, while maintaining increasingly tighter deadlines and greater project involvement. As a team of two designers embedded within a corporation of 1,200 employees, time is often our biggest limiting factor while we navigate the development of simultaneous products.

The two of us have wildly different talents and preferences, but we both firmly believe that iteration is key, and that design without diligent exploration is a snipe hunt or design-by-ego. Initially, in our mini-design studio within the company, we would leverage every tool in our wheelhouse to try to realize and deliver fully explored, designed and vetted concepts to engineering, all while adapting to the often changing scope and mechanical requirements. We quickly found that our mutual appreciation for wide-net iteration was at odds with our workload and caused a bottleneck.

Our current tools, whether CAD, physical mockups or digital sketching, still proved fruitful for quick thought generation and bold ideas. We yearned for a magic wand that would let us ideate, develop, edit and demonstrate ideas at greater quantities and qualities.

Developing an Algorithmic Approach The task set before us was to create a new brand image and physical design for a series of lighting control consoles for High End Systems, an ETC Company. We knew we wanted to push form in a unique direction that broke the status quo of industrial design within our company.

After noticing the incredible generative works in the field of architecture, such as Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera House in China and Moshe Safdie’s ArtScience Museum in Singapore, we questioned how we could implement an algorithmic approach to our design practices that would allow for rapid iteration and model generation, while avoiding blatant parametricism and still creating varying appropriate brand images that were unique yet honest.

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To do this, we worked closely with our key stakeholders and established baseline brand aesthetics for High End Systems and this product line. After delivering a basic representation of our intentions in simple, manually produced CAD models, we further developed the aesthetic by leveraging the computational power of Grasshopper.

Taking cues from the architectural industry, we developed a custom-made generative algorithm script that empowered us to realize full CAD models using simple sketches. The process begins by creating a 2D array of points. Grasshopper then takes our drawing and divides it into samples taken at intervals across our sketch. The contrast value of each sample is assigned to the Z value on our 2D array, bursting it into 3D. This creates a rippling sea of points to which we can conform a polysurface. The result produces a native Rhino polysurface that can be manipulated the same as any other Rhino object, and can be edited more fluidly than a Solidworks surface.

Since Grasshopper can parametrically perform the same operations that Rhinoceros can, we wondered how we could take the visual code further to fully realize each surface into a solid part. Using parametrically defined part shapes, we were able to dynamically trim and solidify our generated surface into our desired part shapes for our lighting console.

Adding another block of code applied an additional branding aesthetic to the part. This worked by segmenting our part body into striations, extruding them at varying angles, lofting to protect draft angles and merging the new solids to create a single solid part. All these trims, angles and extrusions are fully parametric, which allowed for changes to happen in real time, as well as down the project timeline.

This sketch-to-CAD process (SKAD) allowed us to distill our ideation process into almost impressionistic sketches, saving tons of time while increasing tenfold the speed at which we could get ready-to-render or 3D print solid-model concepts. We were producing hundreds of compelling and meaningful concept models a day.

ID EATION

From here, we worked closely with our key stakeholders, presenting concepts at a rate that was previously never seen. Once we demonstrated that we had full control over our algorithm, our stakeholders thoroughly enjoyed being part of the design process. More importantly, we designed a tailored solution for them while maintaining creative control.

A New Tool for the Future of Design While our industry continues to evolve, it is important that we as designers not only dynamically adjust to our surroundings but also trailblaze. If the last leaps in methodology were CAD and rapid prototyping, our next leap forward will be leveraging computational design to increase our reach. Recent architectural design has proven to us that computational designs can be bespoke, unique and fresh, a hard find in this information-overload and copycat-filled era. It is time that this new form of design reaches the masses via consumer industrial design.

As the trend of computational design and the technology grow, we might have to question preconceived roles of the designer and the consumer, because mass-scale customization is quickly becoming a reality. This could be a new renaissance of design that involves the user to the highest degree. Computational design will bring an explosion of new patterns, textures and forms, akin to the organic design era of the 1930s–1960s.

Designers will always be learning how to better harness the power of computational design. While we do so, it’s important that we remind ourselves it is OK to automate a portion of the creative endeavor if it opens doors for further growth in other portions. Tools like Grasshopper not only greatly increase the rate at which we can generate complex concepts, but they also give us the opportunity to spend even more time diligently critiquing our own work and honing our designs’ quality and details. With designers able to iterate faster and further on designs, the growing importance and appreciation of properly industrialdesigned products will only continue to grow.

We are early in our careers as industrial designers, and while we value tradition, we strive to innovate our own processes and embrace emerging technologies. Industrial designers have always championed the user, studying their problems and solving them using superior design solutions.

What if we as designers need to redesign the industrial design process?

We believe computational design can be one of the new tools we leverage to better fulfill our function as designers. Computational design allowed our small team of two to increase our productivity tenfold. We feel a significant shift in the way our company approaches design and how design is approached globally. If a new era of design is quickly approaching and bringing unknown challenges, we need to keep asking what new tools are at our disposal and how can they help us improve as designers.

—Jon Rasche, IDSA, jon@jonrasche.com Zack Zlevor, IDSA, zack@zlevordesign.com Jon Rasche has a Master of Science in engineering from Imperial College London and a Master of Art from the Royal College of Art in innovation design engineering.

Zack Zlevor has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in industrial design from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

They currently head up the industrial design department at Electronic Theatre Controls (ETC) in Madison, WI.

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THE WOMEN IN DESIGN DEEP DIVE: CREATING A FUTURE WE BELIEVE IN

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s an organization, IDSA has the unique opportunity to innovate within our industry by paving the way for thoughtful conversations and disruptive dialogues. We spend our careers building a better future for those around us, and the Women in Design Deep Dive, held in San Francisco on May 3 offered us the chance to build a better future for ourselves too. The designers gathered in San Francisco were rehearsing the future of the industry—an industry of diverse perspectives and lived experiences, with a powerful passion for bettering the world.

Part of what made the event so powerful was how open and honest the speakers were with their stories.

They shared their flaws, mistakes and struggles, and revealed how their journeys molded them into the powerful examples of female leadership they are today. I found a richness and authenticity to the conversations held at the Deep Dive that enabled open and candid conversations among the designers in attendance. But women continue to be under-represented in the design process, especially in leadership and decision-making roles. The reality is that there is so much work to be done to create a more balanced future for our industry.

A Diversity of Voices To create this future, we must look first to the past. Vicki Matranga, H/IDSA, the design programs coordinator at the International Houseware Association, is an advocate for the secret histories of women in design. She shared with us the legacies of the unseen women who have been shaping products for half a century. Matranga shared a quote from designer MaryEllen Dohrs (of GM and Sundberg Ferar) that captured a sentiment I heard echoed in talks and conversations throughout the day: “I still resist calling me and my type WOMEN designers— unless writers preface others as MEN designers.”

The women at the Deep Dive are not just great female designers. They are great designers—period.

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As attendees settled in absorbing Matranga’s lessons from the past, Suzanne LeBarre, editor of Fast Company’s Co.Design, chatted with Victoria Slaker, the vice president of product design at Ammunition. Ammunition and Slaker’s work with Beats paved the way for her to create an organization empowered to take risks and to take control of their work. But many women in design, myself included, cannot shake the recurring question that sometimes rises to the surface: How would things change if we were free from fighting for a place at the table?

When LeBarre posed this question, the women around me nodded, listening intently. “If I was a man, would my career be different? I don’t know. Maybe. But I don’t frame my career like that,” Slaker responded. And she’s right. In framing our work through a lens of resentment, we lose the focus of thinking about what our work means for the future. Yet it would be short-sighted and frankly damaging to ignore the repercussions of the status quo.

Laura Silva, the vice president of accessibility technology and UX design at Bank of America, offered us guiding principles that helped to reframe our understanding of the work we do and understand how to engage in actively promoting inclusivity in the design industry. Silva asked the audience to examine the intersecting identities that shape our experiences as human beings, introducing the theory of intersectionality as developed by civil rights advocate and scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. As designers, we can leverage our understanding of these intersecting identities to create experiences that embrace everyone equally. When we break the habits we’ve developed over years of practice, we can become more inclusively disruptive. Silva urged us to hire and promote diversity in talent, lending our platforms to those who would speak about their experiences. “Listen,” Silva said when I asked her how to better support women of color in our communities and organizations. “Don’t try to tell her story for her.

Use your privilege to step back, hand her the mic and let her speak.”

2019 is the year we stop talking about the gender gap and start doing something about it. Isabelle Olsson, the design director of home and wearables at Google, reinforced the importance of embracing diversity in our organizations. Our cultural perspectives change the work we do, and she reflected upon the industry culture that led to the homogeneity of consumer electronics. The aesthetic uniformity of these products comes from a lack of diversity in the experiences that led to their creation. But by enacting inclusion in its teams, Google was able to create a radical shift in consumer electronics (and a series of seriously successful products) by bringing designers with a wider range of experiences to the table. This is the kind of shift that makes a difference, and it’s what made the Deep Dive so invigorating—to see the incredible effects of enacting this vision for the future, in both our industry and in the products we design. Seeing the positive outcomes of Olsson’s action inspired me and my fellow Deep Dive attendees to become more proactive in our organizations.

The visionary futurism I heard throughout the day came to life perhaps most eloquently in the presentation by Katharine Hargreaves, a self-described culture alchemist whose FEARLESS Workshop inspired attendees with her transformative journey. Hargreaves asked the crowd to look within to examine our challenges and tensions and

to vividly imagine a version of ourselves one year from now.

“What is your vision asking of you?” Hargreaves asked. “Our world is the story we tell ourselves. And we can change it.”

Toward a Better Future What does our vision for a diverse and equal industry ask of us? We have the power to shape our world through our narrative and our actions going forward. If we can imagine each step as a call to action toward this vision of a better future for design, we become empowered to enact the lessons we learned from Women in Design.

So I ask you to envision a future for our industry of inclusivity and diversity, embracing the perspectives and experiences that make our lives and our work meaningful. A single day is not enough: We must live these lessons 365 days a year. And in doing this, we will create a future we believe in.

—Caterina Rizzoni, IDSA, c.rizzoni@designcentral.com Caterina Rizzoni is an industrial designer at Design Central, a design and innovation consultancy in Columbus, OH. She is passionate about leveraging co-design and humancentered design practices to better serve the needs of the end user. Rizzoni is also the vice chair of the Central Ohio Chapter of IDSA.

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This is an autostereogram.

In order to perceive the shapes in this image, viewers must overcome the automatic coordination between focus and the angle of their eyes.

These types of illusions involve stereopsis: depth perception arising from the different perspective each eye has of a three-dimensional scene.

Autosterograms require viewers to actively engage and alter their perspective in order to receive the fullest extent of the image.

So too does IDSA. It’s only through regular and sustained engagement that we fully experience everything our community has to offer.

Once you see it, you’ll believe it.

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INTERNATIONAL DESIGN CONFERENCE August 21–23, 2019 Chicago, IL