I recently started working on a very exciting, unfortunately top secret, project with an amazing company called Goldie Blox. While I cannot get into specifics, it tackles several issues very close to my heart. Goldie Blox's mission is to encourage young girls to be engineers through designing a way show girls their potential.
Young girls today are told that they can be anything that they want. This is the message I grew up with, the message that inspired me to work hard and pursue my dreams. It is an incredibly positive thing, and one that should be a given. The problem is that while girls are told they can be anything they
want to be, we are not always inspiring girls to look at the broad array of things
that they could be. This is particularly troubling in comparison to the things that boys know they can be and the things that boys already have role models in place to admire.
How does this relate to design? The messages that girls receive are typically subtle and unintentional. Even when the decision was intentional, the resulting message was unintentional. For instance, think of the books you were assigned in school. Many of those books had male protagonists. Teachers know that girls are able- perhaps through conditioning- to relate to male characters, while young boys have difficulty relating to female characters. As a result, girls read stories in which the male characters achieve much more than the female characters. Design is a process of recognizing a problem and working to create solutions. We can design products, stories, and educational systems that change the message that girls receive. That adapt to the differences in development and learning styles in young children without dividing. Or defaulting to pink and purple.
What excites me most about Goldie Blox, other than its massive big mission, is the consciousness of the founders to the role of design in the process- from the details up to the big picture. I get to play a teeny part and am so excited to watch this project grow.
