Beyond Ray - Women Led Conversations on Industrial Design

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...

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. S...

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...

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...

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 imp...

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...

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 categor...

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...

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...

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 w...

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. W...

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 thr...

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 movin...

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 eng...

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 bond...

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 m...

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 t...

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 u...

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...

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 deva...

Angela has the perspective of not just one designer, but hundreds. She has helped countless creatives identify where their core talents and values overlap and has helped companies grow into workplaces that actually foster creative work. With her unique combination of an intimate look into each person's process and bird's eye view of industry trends, she is remarkably qualified to teach us...

Brittany grew up with an intuitive, inherited, and practical sense of design. She is a Navajo woman, so weaving, building, and creating were in the day-to-day existence of her community and when she officially became a designer in title, it was an external label for a way of problem solving that had always been core to her identity. With her, we discuss the sometimes backwards way that design emph...

Jackie is a master storyteller because she understands the emotional impact of every detail. Through her lens, we learned the way materials dictate the color and color dictates connection. Starting as an engineer, Jackie gained a technical foundation of materials that she now uses to form the precise experience customers will have with the products she touches. Our conversation with her showed exa...

From getting her start in competitions such as Electrolux Design Lab to launching her business, Fuldende, on a different continent, Fulden stands out for her fearless approach to design and career. In conversation with us, she explains that this mentality is possible because she breaks big moves down into temporary or short-term goals and prioritizes her creativity as though she were her own clien...

For our first guest episode of the new year, the WID Seattle team digs into design education with Kiersten Muenchinger - Founder and Head of the Department of Product Design at University of Oregon. Kiersten’s path began with a mechanical engineering undergrad degree and ranged from blue sky R&D Imagineering to launching her own business in the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial boom before she re...