Ever since I was 9 years old I knew I wanted to design products for athletes.
It was a total 9 athletes and I played soccer and the uniforms that we wore were made. Living so close to New York City. About why this huge fashion industry supported women like. Please I wanted to change the. My desire for more inclusive design led me to a career in the sports industry for more than 20 years culminating in a position as innovation director.
Coming to the university of Oregon and working in color designs really gives me a platform to research what I’m passionate about I teach students how to develop performance footwear apparel. An inclusive design perspective. There are 2 things that are happening in the marketplace Thursday what the sports industry because they’re straight campaigns where we’ll take men’s products and we color them to make them smaller and call them women’s. And then there’s true performance product where we are actually looking at the science behind the female body and appliance products.
And that’s really where this has been a lot of work. The problem is when we create products for men it’s leaving out other users because we’re not considering the different dimensions of the body. For example, I work with you know firefighters and we’re just recently going through a data set around gloves. They told us they took their clothes off during a fire because they could not feel. Turn knobs because of the club’s Roach. What we found is that in all areas of the product female fighters where there are opportunities for improvement.
As a 9 year old I had such high aspirations to work at a very large sports company and it’s really influenced products for women and I feel that I I’ve done that but I feel like there’s more that I can do at the university there’s other areas I can influence. And every day you know the opportunities are there. Back. Whining and like. Back.
