Design writer and brand strategist Chauncey Zalkin curates What Women Make at Designersblock during this Festival, showcasing emerging designers from around the globe. Exhibits include these dolls (above from embroiderer, fabric designer and artist Shuyu Lu) and this tableware by Japanese team On Za Line (below).
Is what women make different from what men make?
The proposition is not that women make things that are different from what men make, but I would conjecture that, yes, women tend to bring a different set of cultural, social, emotional antennae which would influence the outcome of what they make. Exactly how, I'll leave up to the social scientists and gender experts. I just want to see and share more of it. And put it to use beyond design in design thinking and problem solving. Women are good problem solvers. Designers are good problem solvers. Women designers are under-utilized and women who are designers are under-represented.
When people come to Designersblock to see the designers and products you've assembled, what do you want them walk away with?
That the work is excellent, thoughtful, relevant - strange or humorous in some cases, but above all substantive. That what women make is a go-to place for high level creativity and thinking and a useful addition to the design and business landscape.
Though a huge number of women work in the design industry the big names tend to be men. How is that going to change?
I think the issue is that in my hunt for women who are superb and thought-provoking, the groundbreaking work that is shown is often, but not always, by men. The women are out there though and largely untapped. In our increasingly lateral world of networks and blurred lines, a shift to a definitively more female cultural paradigm, and with more working women out there then men, more women graduating from universities then men worldwide, the viewpoint of the female is essential. Not just in design, but business, science, art, politics. The change is here. It needs to be visually represented.
You first made your name over ten years ago setting up girlonthestreet.com. How important has the web been in changing the ground rules of the design and fashion industries?
I stepped away to go work in the advertising world for four years as a senior brand strategist at U.S. agencies. When I came back to the web, blogs had power. They didn't even exist when I created girlonthestreet. I hand-coded everything. I think the magazines in fashion have lost a lot of authority. It's still hard to not want approval from the big media names but without the approval of the most trusted independent voices, nowadays, you just don't exist. That's one. Second, I had a network of 100 women who I was in constant contact with in 2003. They were great but they were mostly friends or little sisters. They had various talents and infinite chutzpah - but I would have never been able to find ten designers of this calibre and arranged a show through Skype and email - of ten designers all the way from Japan to Canada and lots of places in between, across languages, and alphabets, without the kind of connectedness and searchability we have now. It's a miracle.
Do you have any tips for anyone wanting to show at the London Design Festival for the first time?
Email me! (If you're female.)
Coming from Barcelona via New York, both immensely creative cities, what's your take on London?
Okay this is where I gush about London. I never had any romantic notions about the city. It didn't interest me very much at all when I moved from New York to Paris in 2007. It didn't seem to have the vibe of New York, or the charm of Paris. You're either a Francophile or an Anglophile and I was a Francophile. I'm not now. When I started whatwomenmake last year I'd already been to the London Design Festival and Frieze and the fact is that every design road, anything of interest in retail or aesthetics or ethnography or cultural organizations, all the things that I'm passionate about, they all led me back to an address in London. We are desperate to move there.
Is there a single object that you couldn't do without?
Can I be trite here, oh so trite, and say my MacBook? But it's true. What else.. my €50 bicycle my fiance bought off Loquo. It's what you'd call 'perfectly good.' It's not slick, it doesn't fold up like a Brompton and store in the hall closet, but it locks just fine to the gate outside and it whizzes me through the streets of the Borne creaeting a breeze and takes me down to Barcelona to go swimming in the pool. There are a lot more objects that I could use but for a life in a place like Barcelona, you don't need much.
What is it that makes a great designer?
I'd say an innate aesthetic sensibility, an innate sense of symmetry, intuition, skill, strategic thinking, strong empathy and listening skills.
What Women Make runs from 23 - 26 September
More about What Women Make at Designersblock
More about Designersblock at the Bargehouse
