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When writing up your post on a design or designer, answer the following:

For a designer:

Who: Name of the designer, and some bio information. Where did they work? Where did they study or how did they learn their skills? At least a good paragraph, if not two. Please include an image if possible. Max 3 images here.

What: What sort of work did they do? Please include images and short descriptions of what the objects or designs are. Min 2 images, Max 4

What makes them important to you in the history of human designers? What did they change? Who did they influence? What were they responding to?

For an object or product:

Who: If you know the designer, name them, but if you don't try to give us an idea of the culture or people that this product came from.

What: Describe what the object is for. This should be a few paragraphs. What materials were used? What sort of tools were used?

What makes the object special or unique, from a historical perspective? What did it change? What did it cause? What did it respond to?

Please include at least two links to supporting information online. These could be:
papers (Find them on google scholar), References in books (Google Book Search is great for this), links to web pages (be careful to fact check them two places if possible). If you link to wikipedia, please consider not counting this as a source, and instead referring to one of the original sources cited on the page.

Comments

Beverly Loraine Greene (1915-1957)

Beverly Loraine Greene was born October 4 th , 1915 in Chicago Illinois. Although she was born during a time where she was not accepted in the professional world she never stopped moving towards her goal of becoming an architect. In 1936, Greene made history by becoming the first African American female to earn a bachelor of science degree in architectural engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Although she was “ amidst a sea of white male faces” at school, Beverly was known for having a calm presence that allowed her to focus on her difficult education (Illinois.edu). After graduating she began to search for a job in the industry, albeit the many obstacles in her way. Although it was difficult to find work at first due to racial discrimination, Greene’s talent and drive landed her a job with the Chicago Housing authority. This made her the first African American to be a part of the Chicago Housing authority, a corporation that oversees the housing in the cit...

Let's fix history

OK, you're down to do the work. Cool. First, let's talk about what we mean by "Design" and "Designer". Design as a formal profession has only been around for a relatively short time, during which BIPOC were systematically excluded from both higher education (where designers become formalized) and industry (where designers work). On top of this, systematic oppression of BIPOC has kept their wealth and power in the economy low, which is used as a justification not to design with or for these end users. So, we will need to expand our idea of design beyond that which is done by formally trained designers. Instead, we should think about all traditions of problem solving which try to satisfy human need with technological capability, while pursuing an aesthetically beautiful solution. These may include traditional crafts, toolmaking, architectural design or decoration of traditional buildings, traditional graphical motifs and styles, letterforms or scripts, graphic...

Althea McNish, Trinidadian Textile Designer

By Katrina Filer Born in Trinidad but living in the foggy, grey world of London in the 50s, Althea McNish brought the colorful inspiration of her birthplace to the British textile scene. She was descended from former Black slaves who had fought for the British in the war of 1812, and she was born while Trinidad was still a colony, 38 years before they gained independence. Her impressionist-style prints based in the Caribbean's natural beauty were groundbreaking, pushing the way that her contemporaries looked at fashion, interior design, or anything else that could hold a pattern. Surrounded by a culture that constantly appropriated the art of its colonies (Trinidad included) and deep in a white male-dominated field, McNish still found her place in the fashion and textile industry, wielding genre-defining abstractions of tropical and floral beauty. Angela Cobbinah. Althea McNish in 2008. Photography courtesy of the Camden New Journal. McNish's early life in Trinidad was charact...

Design History Decolonized

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