Women (not) In Design
The club that once was
3.30. 26
Back in school I was one of the event coordinators and then eventually co-president of our Women in Design (WID) club. The club was a subsidiary of our Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA) student chapter, dedicated to amplifying female designers. While the club was open to all departments and genders, most of our events were focused on industrial design including guest speakers, portfolio reviews, and a mentorship program.
I remember attending the meetings with my friends back in first year. I loved the speaker events and hearing designers share their candid experiences of navigating gender inequalities, work-life balance, and their advice for students. I used to picture myself up there one day, giving back to the community that once supported me as I shared about my own career journey. I loved hanging out and getting to know the female upperclassmen and I was so inspired to be like them by my final year. WID also gave me my first opportunity to show my work publicly, through the Women in Design gallery. It was such a cool experience and the last big event for WID before the pandemic hit a week and a half later.
In our second year, my friends and I essentially took over the board filling the positions of event coordinators, social media, and marketing. I knew by this point that I wanted to be WID president one day. What I didn’t predict was that it would happen during a pandemic. Despite being at home for a year and a half, we continued to host virtual events. One silver lining was it allowed us to expand our speaker pool and we were able to invite designers from around the country. While we tried to keep the club active it was harder to incentivize underclassmen to join a Zoom meeting rather than an in person event with free food. Professors often seemed reluctant to help us advertise when we asked them to send a message out to their students or let us come in and give a couple minute spiel. There always seemed to be more emphasis on the importance and encouraged involvement in IDSA over WID. Something we see within the larger industry as well. There’s always seemed to be more promotion, respect, and resources given to the International Design Conference than the Women in Design Deep Dive.
When we finally returned to campus our senior year, there were so many restrictions in place that most of our events remained virtual. Between limited access, burnout and our workload events became few and far between. This made our search for the next president even more challenging. Normally at this point we would be training the next board and overseeing the club rather than executing everything ourselves. Likely as a result of the pandemic no one wanted to fill our position or any position for that matter. With essentially the whole board graduating we were getting nervous about the future of the club. We ended up handing off the presidency to a 4th year graphic design major as our last hope. At this point I knew things would change and the sole focus would no longer be industrial design, but I had faith that the foundation of the club would remain.
While we technically had a faculty advisor the club was completely student run. We never met with our advisor to talk about goals, opportunities, or promotion strategies. The success of the club relied solely on students. I sometimes wonder what it would have been like if we had someone to help advocate for the importance of the club, not just as a social event but as a career tool. I’m not sure any of the faculty even noticed when one of two industrial design clubs slowly began to disappear.
Two years after graduating things really shifted for the club. I remember the day the WID Instagram account name changed to “The Artist Collective”. My friends and I rushed to our group chat as we watched our club become unrecognizable. To their credit, a couple days later the name changed again to “Art and Design Society”. While I appreciate the inclusion of design I highly doubt they are thinking about industrial design. In their official statement on the name change they said it was “more inclusive”. What they didn’t know was why it was named Women in Design in the first place. In school the gender split for industrial design is around fifty-fifty, but in industry the number of women drops to around twenty percent. Given this the name Women in Design was the inclusive part, a space for women in a male dominated field.
Along with this there were no longer any industrial designers on the board and the events became bracelet making, shrinky dinks and zines. What once was a resource for career development is now a club for arts and crafts. It still makes me sad when I see their posts as I mourn what once was. In all honesty, I feel a sense of responsibility for the end of WID and I often wish I fought harder to keep the club alive. I used to hope that the club would one day make a resurgence, but at this point the current students don’t even know it once existed.
This story is about more than the loss of a school club, I think it mirrors larger issues within the industry. It reminds me of the fragility of organizations like this. It highlights the need for support and mentorship starting in education. Imagine if we had a mentorship program built into the program rather than student run. One of the biggest questions among industrial designers is about the steep decline of women once they hit industry, maybe clubs like this is the answer. WID was a support system, a place for inspiration and aspiration, and something I was so honored to be a part of. Supporting spaces like this is vital not just for students but for who stays in the industry.
