From the Nike swoosh to the apple logo: the women wiped from design history
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Why are women’s contributions to design history often overlooked?
Many of us may not realise how big a role women have played in shaping the modern world, from buildings and furniture to logos, road signs and the way we use computers. That's because many of those women remain far less well known than the men they worked alongside. Dr Linda King is a Senior Lecturer in Design and Visual Culture at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology. She joins me now. Morning, Linda. Morning, David. When we, that's, it's curious, isn't it? When we think about the history of design, so many women seem to be missing from the story.
Not really, because I mean, as a historian, you know that history is quite male dominated. A lot of historians are male, they tend to amplify male figures and It's no different in the world of design. And as an educator, every year we just started back in IDT and you're sitting in a class and it's mostly women studying graphic design and then the workplace, it ends up being mostly men working. You know, so it's... Why is that? I think there's a variety of different reasons. I think some of it is just if you... We make the humans. We have to
step out of the
workforce
for a
while. Sometimes it can be hard to get back into the workforce. So while we're incubating the next generation, our male colleagues are pushing ahead. So I think that's a large part of
it. OK, but a path has been made by women before. And let's start with an Irish woman, Eileen Gray. Who is she?
Eileen Gray. So Eileen Gray is from Wexford. She actually came from a very wealthy background. So I think she was amazing in terms of design, but she had the money behind her to be able to indulge her kind of interest in design. So she moves to London in 1900. She's about 18, I think, at the time, then moves on to Paris. I had to study lacquer work.
What factors keep women out of the design workforce after university?
But while she's there, she opens a gallery under a man's name, Jean Desart.
Under a man's name?
Under a man's name, because she didn't think that anybody would take her seriously. And apparently James Joyce used to frequent her gallery and Sylvia Beach and all the kind of... intelligentsia of Paris at the time. And so she starts working on furniture like other modernists at the time, very simple shapes. Think of kind of, you know, the really reductionist shapes of Ikea where everything is paired back to very simple
forms. Sort of like Bauhaus.
Bauhaus, exactly. She would have been very influenced by the Bauhaus and they would have been influenced by her. But her work was incredibly functional and incredibly innovative. So, you know, I often think that when we're looking at somebody like Dermot Bannon and he's talking about, you know, lots of windows and opening the outside to the inside and having these spaces flow together, you know, that's very much an Eileen Gray kind of idea.
And she had her own house. She was self-taught as an architect, was
she? Self-taught as an architect. She designed a house for herself and her then lover, a Romanian architect called Badovici, in the south of France, down near Nice in 1929. And they only stayed together for quite a short period of time. But in that house, which I got to visit this summer, it's absolutely incredible. If anybody wants to go and see it, E1027.
Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it?
No, no.
No, but it was an acronym for their names, E for Eileen, 10 for, oh gosh, I'm blanking now.
It
was an acronym for their names. But she rehearsed a lot of her ideas there in terms of the furniture, in terms of the layout, very cleverly concealed storage, very practical things like, you know, a shaving mirror with satellite mirrors. you know, mirrors that came out that you could see your head from completely in the round or side of your face. So, you know, it was just really innovative and so much so that she was very influenced by Le Corbusier, the Swiss designer, but he was madly jealous of her work. And when she moved out and she moved to another part of France and created another home for herself, he was very friendly with Badovici and he came in and he put murals all over her house in a defacement, like a really aggressive act of defacement.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
Why are women’s contributions to design history often overlooked?
0:00–1:49
2
What factors keep women out of the design workforce after university?
1:49–4:25
3
Who was Eileen Gray and how did she break into early‑20th‑century design?
4:25–6:24
4
How did Eileen Gray’s E1027 house showcase innovative furniture and storage ideas?
6:24–8:29
5
When and why was Eileen Gray’s work rediscovered by modern architects?
8:29–10:17
6
How did Caroline Davidson create the iconic Nike swoosh and what was her compensation?
10:17–11:56
7
What role did Susan Kerr play in designing the first graphical user interface for Apple?
11:56–12:13