To close out the season, Ginger and Kate were interviewed by Joe Gonzalez, our typically bts teammate, and Fran Wang, founder of Yona Care and previous pod guest. We all reflected on standout moments of our conversations this season and how well we answered our question of how the designer's identity shows up in their work. Joe and Fran lead us into a conversation about where we hope the field goes and how to keep driving good change with the cohort of amazing people we are building this community with.. and of course we added to our new list of design rules.
Huge thank you to everyone who played a part in season 3 of the show. We were really touched by the level of care and intention you all bring to your work.
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Designing in the beauty space is delicate because we can have so much impact for better or worse when it comes to approaches that encourage self expression or ones that make us feel flawed and in need of improvement. Angie Kim understands that and has a track record of getting to work intimately with women on products that touch many aspects of their lives from breast pumps to hand crafted bags. She opened up with us about the way beauty was discussed growing up and how she hopes to hand her own message down to her daughter. We explore the ability a designer has for impact in different company sizes and structures. She tells us how she sees the industry making changes for the better bit by bit to be more inclusive and encourage versatility and options so that everyone can explore what makes them feel authentic. Even with the nuance needed to do it well, Angie really believes in helping people feel good and this conversation was a window into her thoughtful approach.
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Christine Risinger joins us in this episode to shed light on the complex and well researched world of game design. In her over 10 years at Wizards of the Coast, she worked on everything from packaging to company direction and strategy. We discussed how rewarding it is to work for a consumer base that is incredibly enthusiastic and passionate about the product you create, the opportunities that lie in working in the fantasy space, and designing an item that helps people connect and build community. This product category is made to bring people in and every detail matters. The packaging lives as long as the game, acting as storage and enhancing the experience. Magic decks are built painstakingly by players, meaning that every new card introduced has gameplay research behind it. Christine was new to this world when she joined the company and stayed because the relationship between the game players and makers had so much exchange. The cyclical nature of game design helps us understand how a designer's identity shapes their product and vice versa.
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Today we dive into the world of design judging with Shu Bertrand, founder of Aplat, Chair of ID at California College of the Arts, and an experienced judge who has been a jury member and chair internationally. Joey Zeledón returns to the podcast as our guest host having also been on their first jury this past year. Design awards have the power to shape our industry and we wanted to learn how those decisions are made. As is often true, the people in the room, their personal stories and values of the judging cohort are a big part of how we celebrate our work. We discuss the benefits of the relationships built in this space, how it is an opportunity to bring focus onto sidelined categories like sustainability and some of the challenges to overcome concerning financial accessibility. Learning about this opaque part of our industry from a veteran and a newcomer was eye-opening and continues to center the question of how much the designers’ identity matters in shaping our impact.
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If you get into a conversation with industrial designers about our impact, it doesn’t take long for sustainability to come up. We work in a field that produces a lot of physical goods and as such, our role in products entering the waste stream is a challenge. Luckily, Dr. Prochner, our first guest of the season, helped us see that challenging areas in design have the greatest room for positive impact if they’re addressed. Our guest Baillie Mishler has shown that to be true. At the firm PROWL that she co-founded with close friend Lauryn Menard, they help clients dig deeper into their product development to understand details like end-of-life for products, social impact, carbon impact and how to make smart manufacturing choices with the help of material scientists. Baillie shares with us how she made the decision to start PROWL, the alignment with values that running your own studio provides and why she still wouldn’t rush into that before working in industry for a while. Joined also by guest host and podcast favorite, Lindsay Malatesta, we have a vulnerable chat about the challenges we face and why all of us still believe that design is the best tool we have.
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Dr. Glover is an educator, a leading researcher on sexual pleasure and access for people with disabilities, and a designer who has been innovating in the sex toy industry for over three decades. She is a wealth of knowledge taking us through the history of women with “hysteria”, to sex toys dictated by the porn industry, to today where the internet has enabled people to find their niche customers and the sex toy market has grown to imagine options far beyond phallic representative dildos. Originally a metal worker, Dr. Glover transitioned into industrial design after recognizing a significant gap in the market for well-researched, thoughtfully designed sex toys. She discusses how the industry has long overlooked this need and how the landscape might have been different if companies like Braun or Apple had engaged with it. Our conversation explores how societal discomfort and restrictive attitudes toward sexuality, women, the queer community, and people with disabilities have hindered the development of products that meet their needs, and how much we stand to gain by addressing these gaps.
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We have a very motivational first guest, Julie Henne, to dive into the designer’s impact. She has had a career for over ten years at Garmin and in that tenure, she’s explored every angle of what a designer can do. She’s been there to see product cycles through many evolutions and watched the brand expand from its main driver being the high performance athlete to a broad health and wellness category with a much more varied customer. She speaks about how to stay engaged with your work by changing perspective often and on how her steady presence in the company has gained her the trust to be a stronger advocate for the voices of women and customers generally. She learned early on that she couldn’t be the voice of every woman and actively brought more perspectives into the company. She has seen great success when projects and communication can break out of siloed company thinking and believes that designer’s ability to zoom out makes us instrumental in being part of innovation teams. Realistic and optimistic about our agency, Julie is a great person to learn from. Our guest host for this episode is the fantastic Monica Broder who was our first ever podcast guest in the episodeNot your traditional Outdoorsman.
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Dr. Prochner is the reason we set out to explore our season 3 topic: how do design and society shape each other and how does the designer’s identity, choices and intention show up in the product lifespan? She calls for us to think about the responsibility of the designer and the opportunity in each of our hands. As an educator at Virginia Tech, Dr. Prochner teaches her students to interrogate this question. She enables undergrads to join design research projects, teaching them how to interview and avoid leading questions. She has published two books, one on gender sex and equity and will soon release a new human factors book to replace the now outdated data in Measure of Man. When there is a gap in product she finds in her research, she is able to step in and create what’s needed, but always moves with intention and care for what she puts out in the world. This season we’ll talk to designers throughout our industry about how they factor in their impact and hope you’ll join us in pushing ourselves to think more intentionally. More show content: https://www.beyondraypodcast.com/
Fran Wang, an engineer, will be the first to tell you that she isn’t an industrial designer, but her experiences sound very familiar to us. Now driving the Yona Care speculum forward as a solo project, we ask Fran how she manages to support the project with help from advisors, how she wears so many hats to fulfill project needs, and where she finds the motivation and consistency day in and day out. We learn where small victories and experiences outside work keep her balanced and in it for the long-haul of product development. True to her words, Fran is a conduit of learning, and knowledge -bombed us about the speculum and its history. Some 200 years after the speculum was invented under cruel circumstances, Fran is making the long bet on a better solution for patients and providers designed with empathy, inclusivity, and curiosity. More show content: beyondraypodcast.com
Most professions have standard behaviors, expectations and dress codes, but designers have a particular challenge of living their own brand or even being the visual representation of a brand within a company. We explored what this tie to presentation does to designers' internal identity and social pressure. How we feel we have to dress, what hobbies are “better” and even what products we can work on to meet this standard. This pressure competes with designers’ curiosity and space to venture out into less explored or less glamorous products. How do we celebrate taste, style and trends for the fun explorations they are without pigeonholing designers into a uniform facade and losing our range?
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This episode with Caterina Rizzoni is a how-to manual on all things to do with volunteering and advocacy work. Cat has an extremely compassionate way of showing a single person or a whole company how harmful the gender gaps in our profession are. She talks candidly about the pros and cons of sticking your neck out to make change and how regardless of the outcome, this work is core to who she is. We discuss practical ways to get involved with organizations that excite you, how volunteering often opens up new doors into leadership and how to stay motivated and create longevity in a volunteer career. Caterina’s self-possessed belief in the value of work she does is a buoy to anyone who is dedicating their time and energy towards community development. More show content: beyondraypodcast.com
Today our episode is a little unconventional! One year ago in Chicago at the Women In Design Deep Dive we had our first Beyond Ray live episode with guest Jillian Tackaberry, Design director at MINIMAL. We bring you that live audio complimented by a current interview session with Jillian, rehashing some of the experience on stage and going deeper into her thinking. Jillian has learned to lead through her powerful capacity to observe and pay attention to the experiences of others. She prioritizes full team involvement and shared wins and losses ensuring that everyone pushes each other's concepts forward. Since Jillian thinks of herself more as a listener, this conversation is a special opportunity to hear the process details behind finicky dry shampoo bottles, Theragun iterations and Eomykota, Jillian’s work as an artist. More show content: www.beyondraypodcast.com/
Our conversation with Clare is a call to action for all designers to zoom out and navigate our work with more adaptability. We talked about the importance of process, discovery time and learning over simply getting products to market. Clare shared her experience being let go in Peloton’s many layoff rounds and how intentional she was about taking time to evaluate where she wanted to land and moving through that process with integrity. As someone who has done the hard work of looking inward and finding areas of personal accountability, Clare is well positioned to recognize the inequities in the larger structure rather than internalizing them. She’s learning constantly how to be more effective in enacting change through curiosity and shares some ways to try this. This chat is the healthy dose of nihilism and anti-capitalism that we needed and we learned a great deal from Clare’s even keel approach. WID book club coming soon?? We might just have to start one to catch up to Clare.
In today’s episode, we’re changing up the structure a bit and handing the reins over to Katie-Gray! She leads our team through exercises focused on building our community beyond the podcast. Katie-gray is a strategist and has years of experience leading all sorts of teams through light hearted and highly impactful workshops. Currently at Lenovo, she knows how to bring values to the surface and engage with professionals across disciplines so that any group can be part of the conversation. We hope that listening to her methods will give you the tools and confidence to engage your team in new ways.
Listeners- we just want to say a big thank you! Here we are, a year into this rewarding adventure and while we are still learning and sometimes still surprised we exist, we can’t deny what a source of growth this podcast space has been. In a hosts only chat, we share highlights and lows of the year, how the relationships with guests and you all have impacted us, and our goals for growing more bonds in this community. Also sprinkled in are some typical anecdotes about Margaret’s job prospects sans visa, Kate’s recent bra making obsession and Ginger letting us behind the curtain of how she always sounds so damn put together.. you may even find out someone’s favorite color.
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What if your main questions to spark career transition were- “Where can I have the biggest impact?” And “Where are the people I really want to learn from?” For Zab, this is true. She recently left Rivian, a dream company for many and a place where she had great experiences because they have all the talent and support they need. They no longer need her energy, drive, curiosity and evangelizing as much as regenerative food systems do. Zab came to talk to us about what it’s like to be someone with a host of design skills applying them to industries that design has barely touched. Becoming a beginner again in many ways so that she can learn what she doesn’t know from farmers and find ways to get the average person more engaged with their world. There is a disconnect right now in the way many of us know to care for our home and there are people with this knowledge and practices who need their voices amplified. Zab is working to bridge this gap, to make eating more fun and sustainable, to make our connection with plants and even worms more joyful. Her capacity to follow her intuition and her very generous core motivations are a beautiful north star to hear.
Join the WID team and our guest Joey for a powerful conversation about identity informing our designs and how our design work in turn shapes us. Joey moved through the world with certainty for years - from finding and sticking to a career path in the third grade to applying to one perfect college- but it took acknowledging an underlying feeling of dissonance in their work and life to come out as trans. This self acceptance has had profound effects on their creativity and given them a new perspective on the role of identity and ego. We discuss how stripping away all our titles and accomplishments can make it possible to identify creative mashups or design better for the users you don't know. Design confines, just like gender, can be a limiting box if left unexamined but true, unfiltered expression is an ongoing source of inspiration.
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This month, our team had the special experience of recording a live episode at Western Washington University with alumni and Seattle powerhouse designer Sena. Sena has had a nearly three decades long career spanning both industrial design and interaction design disciplines and has spent the majority of her working years at Fluke Corporation where she is now the UX Design Manager. She shared with us and the students how she has made important career pivots, who she looked to for mentorship, how she grew to take on more leadership and why evangelizing design is worthwhile and will likely always be part of the responsibility of people in our field. The end of the episode includes a Q&A with the students that also shows what a wealth of knowledge Sena has to share. She’s a real leader in our industry and as she mentions - it’s so special to have women with as much experience as her to look to and is only now starting to become possible
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For Jessie, art is not the opposite of science but instead a necessary storytelling device that she’s used to problem solve throughout her career at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and now as Microsoft’s Director of Design for Sustainability. As the first industrial designer at NASA, Jessie unabashedly used cheap, available materials to encourage play and help her colleagues prototype and understand the hands-on nature of design thinking. She created the first design team and upended the company’s approach to creative strategy saving them time and money and diversifying the way the group could tackle new mission proposals. A self described eco-geek, part of the focus on outer space also intensified her concern for our planet. She now works to ensure that sustainability is more than just a checkmark companies can tick off. To her, designers have a crucial role to play in making companies sustainable as we are early enough in the product innovation cycle to set parameters that matter and insist on them as constraints. Listen to hear Jessie’s advice on making design span the micro to macro, why NASA has an extra terrestrial building, and how you can do an at home science experiment that will forever justify your love of the color black.
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Bias and its impact has been studied in STEM fields now for several years, but design, a discipline that places less emphasis on degrees and academic research, has had a gap in this same conversation. Kristi, our guest this week, is tackling that. Her projects so far have uncovered flawed research parameters in spatial reasoning tests, prioritization of men’s voices in the podcast space and a devaluing and partitioning of women’s skills that both shuffles us into certain areas of design at higher rates and demotes the significance of the work then done in those fields. Understanding the impact all of these subtle sexist undercurrents have had in our field is crucial not only for the professionals in our industry but for the countless consumers who are being potentially harmed by less effective products. We hope everyone who learns from Kristi can help us undo these narratives and build towards equity.
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