Team:

Organizers: Sarah Bolivar, Adria Boynton, Shani Carter, Azzurra Cox, Sarah Kantrowitz, Chi-Chi Lin, Alexandra Mei, Ashley Thompson, Rae Pozdro

On March 8, 2016, Women in Design, a Harvard Graduate School of Design student group, will celebrate its third-annual International Women’s Day. Dedicated to empowering women designers, we propose an open dialogue on what it means to be a creative woman developing, challenging, and innovating her craft in the 21st century. In exploring conventional and potential modes of practice, we aim to cultivate radical alternatives to the dominant roles and methods of our fields. As we reflect on strides the design fields have made toward achieving gender equity, we see International Women’s Day 2016 as a catalytic platform to investigate how radical practice can re-situate—and revolutionize—our work.

Women in Design continues to challenge how women, as well as other underrepresented groups in the design disciplines, can work for equity across representation, compensation, and valuation. To mark this year’s International Women’s Day, we have invited pioneering women practitioners across the design disciplines to engage and share their backgrounds, experiences, and philosophies of radical practice--the what, how, and why (or why not). In this spirit, we invite you to join us in questioning and speculating how, both individually and collectively, we can radically transform the design field.

Funding was provided by GSD Communications the Dean’s Office, the Asia Center, the South Asia Institute and Harvard Kennedy School Women and Public Policy.