Last week I moderated a panel as part of the Interaction23 week in Zurich. The panel featured Lisa deBettencourt, one of the original 12 who defined and created the organization; Molly Wright Steenson, educator and co-chair of the Interaction awards from 2016-2019; and Ana Domb who began her work with IXDA running the student challenge, and is now the new Vice President of the organization.
We had a lot of good conversations over slack and in the greenroom and during the panel we talked about the history, why each of them became involved with IXDA, what they see as the future of the discipline and the role IXDA should play in that future, or as Molly put it, in those infinite number of futures that will come from all the people in the organization.
We also talked a little about archiving the history as our history as makers, as designers and creators, especially those who came up in the early web, is disappearing. Sites are overwritten, redirects overwrite what was collected by the Wayback machine and flash.
We tried to point out the ever changing landscape and the hope that as IXDA grows, the center focus will stop being US and European white male centered and will look to the many cultures of the emergent discipline as it rises across Asia, Africa and Latin America.
For those in the audience, I started the panel with a quick slideshow of 20 years of women involved with IXDA. The slideshow was in keynote, but most of the images are also here in this gallery on Flickr. (the gallery is missing the tiny images of the first women on the board that I took from the IXDA website from 2005.)
And here is a timeline chart of all the women who have served on the board, co-chaired the conference, the IXD Awards, ran the education summit and student challenge. I left the originating men in the lists for historical purposes. This information was collated from the IXDA websites accessed via the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. Apologies if any information is incorrect (I know sometimes people's roles shifted and it wasn't always captured on the site) Please send corrections to erin [at] womenofixd.com.
