Making Sense

On Rohan Bopanna’s spectacular win at the Davis Cup world group playoff at Chennai on Sunday, a sports journalist hailed the feat with an opening line: “cometh the hour, cometh the man”
While the Davis Cup remains a male bastion, with no events slated for women, the same line with a slight addition of (wo) man could apply admirably to a recently smashed glass ceiling situation in yet another male dominated sphere – the Indian army. On 16th Sept 2010, for the first time in the history of the Indian Army, the coveted Sword of Honour (awarded to the best all-round cadet) was presented, also in Chennai. This time, to a woman – A Divya.
Appropriately, this was a “cometh the hour, cometh the woman” moment.

As women begin to garner attention in spheres of activities hitherto the exclusive preserve of men’s, such as in boxing, which saw some more glass ceilings crash over the weekend as Manipur’s young boxer and mother, Mary Kom, picked up her fifth successive gold at the World Women’s Boxing Championship. My thought goes to an iconic woman of design, grandmaster/grand dame Anna Castelli Ferreri from Italy.
All of age 82 and physically at par in an all-male lineup of grandmasters (Bill Moggridge, Dieter Rams and Erik Spiekerman among others) at the ICSID* Congress in Hanover-Berlin in 2003, where I had the great opportunity to meet her, Castelli-Ferreri held her own by underplaying the woman angle. For those not familiar with her name, Castelli-Ferreri is credited with changing design’s landscape in the fifties by pioneering, among other things, the use of moulding in plastic as a way to expand design’s reach into every day life. Avowedly uncomfortable with being photographed, I was honored when she actually agreed to do so with me, perhaps because she had a thing for India.

Anna Castelli-Farreri’s feat remains even more spectacular considering that women have seldom been associated with innovations in materials and processes in the sphere of design, and certainly not way back then.
In the recent years, women in general have come of age to claim iconic status in banking (Naina Lal Kidwai, Chanda Kochar), technology (Carly Fiorina), corporate head (Indra Nooyi), and more.
But, to find the space in design shared with Bill Moggridge, Philip Starcke, Dieter Rams or Massimo Vignelli – one can only fall back on Lella Vignelli, April Greiman or the late Muriel Cooper, Founder, Visual Language Workshop (VLW), MIT. And, of course, a handful of others that would include. Paula Scher, Paula Antonelli and such.
That’s way too inadequate a roster to judge women’s involvement with design from across the years.

It is, therefore, important to ask why women, normally credited for being vested with creative skills, have not been perceived to reach those iconic heights. In architecture, one has the fabulous Zaha Hadid – quite a handful as a personality and veritably the equivalent of several men rolled into one, in her singular ability to influence architecture as a thought leader.
Could it be that for way too long, women designers have come to be associated with ‘soft designing’ skills – working with packaging and the perfume bottling industry, with social enterprises, with lifestyle products and the graphic design industry? Sectors considered not particularly ‘macho’ as compared to designing for automobiles, for software, for interactive systems or interactive stand-alone products, for petroleum retailing, for aircraft interiors or for bridge designing (as Norman Foster did with his aesthetics for that iconic bridge in France in the mid 2000s), or for civil works and large urban development projects such as Dubailand.
Once again, Zaha Hadid comes to the rescue when we think of her hand at converting an abandoned fire station in Germany in the late 1990’s into a museum for Vitra.

Wouldn’t it be worthwhile, then, to start a thread of conversation – with contributions from readers – on the involvement of women as designers for the emerging sectors of design not conventionally associated with women designers? If at the very least, to bridge the gap of my own ignorance!
By building such a thread of information, we could begin to share our understanding on whether women are increasingly participating in the traditionally male-driven spheres of designing. And if they are, then what’s holding the glass ceiling so tight that it keeps the world from learning about the woman designer’s contribution?

It is equally important to remember, in perspective, that we live in a post-feminist (and not a feminist/anti feminist) world where women are no longer defined by the absence of male traits as they compete at work or struggle to garner professional credibility, but in stead are increasingly defined by their awareness for what women customarily do best, such as in their ability to work with bootstrapped resources, to deal with conflict situations through EQ rather than confrontation, to multitask, and more.

At the end, the best way to breach the glass ceiling would be if women were not to position themselves as a gender proposition, but as a matter of economics. Which means, excluding women from good design initiatives could be bad for business.

In my next blog, I will raise this issue of women as a matter of optimization towards design efforts. And how, we in India have history on our side in regard to women’s role in designing our everyday spheres.

*[ICSID stands for the International Council of Societies for Industrial design – the highest apex body for industrial design, with its secretariat based in Montreal, Canada]