Women of IXD

Type of Work	Writing

Women of Interaction Design

Telling the other half of the story

Women of Interaction Design tells the stories of our foremothers, sheroes, missing aunts and up-and-coming sisters.

Visual connections of women in the field of UX/IXD/HCI. Time across the top from 1960 to 2020s and categories down the right: Government & Civic, Corporate, Education, Agencies, Communities of Practice. The yellow boxes are the individuals. Green are communities created by these women. The purple boxes are agencies created by, run by or where these women worked. The blue boxes are university programs which these women created and ran or were instrumental in shaping. Pink boxes are corporate entities where these women worked and leadership positions were acquired and finally the tan boxes indicate the civic entities or programs where these women were involved in leading and changing these influential programs. This document is a work in progress and is being created as I work through my research. Visualizing the connections between women and these entities and seeing where people's careers have overlapped and crossed multiple sections helps me make sense of the information and research. I hope to create a poster of the information to go with the book and I expect I will make multiple iterations of this over the next few months. PDF version of the diagram.

The history of computing and interaction design is full of tales of the lone genius white male and occasionally gives a nod to the same handful of women we see in history book after history book. This collection looks to challenge the status-quo with stories about early interaction and information pioneers—the women of all colors who were trailblazers in male dominated areas, who created new practices and methods; the women who started programs in universities; who founded journals, magazines and professional organizations to celebrate our practices; the women who ran departments in the tech companies and became founders of agencies and Vice Presidents and CXOs or startup founders.

My goal is to highlight many people you may not have heard about before, as well as a few familiar names, but mostly it’s about women breaking ground, leading the way, leading teams, founding disciplines, starting magazines, creating professional organizations to cultivate community, and creating new programs in universities. These women are innovating the design processes and techniques of our craft, they are teaching to codify common practices, starting companies, and creating opportunities for others to come into a mature well-defined profession.

Without women, the field of interaction design would not be as rich as we find it today. While the stories we learn are usually about the men—the myth of the lone genius is strong—WORK was and still is being done by women behind the scenes. Team collaborations and research done by women is mostly unsung and often forgotten. Design done by women often times goes uncredited—we tend not to seek the spotlight as collaborators, and we like to share credit with our teams.

This collection focuses on the applied practice of women across interaction design—& ux design—and the subdisciplines that have evolved out of this practice including interaction design, information architecture, content strategy & governance, user research, information visualization and visual interface design.

Keep up with the project at womenofixd.com