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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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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