5% Against The Odds: Small products to big ideas, Seven Canadian Women shine in Industrial Design

Helen Kerr leads product and system development with a focus on research and strategic innovation. From the complex realm of healthcare, to relevant sustainability issues, and the intimate study of how we eat, her insights and design direction guide clients to realize business ideas as fully integrated solutions. For more than 20 years, Helen has collaborated with her team to deliver complete brand experiences. She is an Associate Professor in graduate studies at OCADU. She has applied her foresight capabilities to government policy both federally and provincially and is often sought as a lecturer, juror and conference speaker. She has been recognized at the highest level by IDSA and Phaidon Press.

Patty Johnson is a Canadian designer who is interested in the interchange between research and design, and, commerce and culture. She operates worldwide with partners, enterprises, manufacturers, communities, governments, and designers creating new kinds of design programs and product collections. Her mobile studio network looks to combine the strengths of complimentary groups to build new linkages, new cultures and new ideas.

Diane Leclair Bisson was born in 1960 in Montréal, where she lives and works. She has studied design, humanities and social sciences, obtaining an M.Sc. in Anthropology, an M.A. in Museology, and a Ph.D. in History of Design (RCA). In keeping with this multi-disciplinary path, she explores spheres of creation where design and anthropology meet, establishing a research methodology which takes into account the everyday experience of material and social environments. Her work draws attention to the question of sustainability in the broadest sense. Already recognized for her furniture design work in the 90s, since 2000 she has been probing the world of food, more specifically the factors and behaviours that affect our lifestyles. Her work has been the subject of numerous international exhibitions, including the 2005 World Exhibition, Aichi, Japan, where her prototypes for edible containers were presented, her Food Nest project as part of the “Taste, No Waste” collaboration in Milan at the 2011 Salone del Mobile, and in Gwangju, China at the Design Biennale 2011. She has been practicing and teaching design for over 20 years, and is an associate professor at the School of Industrial Design at the University of Montreal, where she founded the Design and Food Lab, and co-founded the research group Design+Society.

Dianne Croteau earned her Masters in Design from Milan’s Domus Academy, and her bachelor degree in Industrial Design from Carleton University, Ottawa. She is a founder of Studio Innova (Toronto) with Richard Brault and remains an active partner. Croteau’s design career has taken her across a wide professional spectrum - from principal designer, to project manager, from design entrepreneur to college faculty. Her interests reach all stages of the design process – and is equally comfortable with the theoretical as the technical.Her experience spans several disciplines and sectors: healthcare, emergency rescue, education, furniture, architecture, community gardens, renewable energy and human powered transportation. Her projects and products have received several patents and awards, her work has been published internationally.Croteau presently divides her time between Studio Innova projects and teaching at the Ontario College of Art and the Institute Without Boundaries (George Brown College). Board positions have included: The Association of Chartered Industrial Designers (Ontario), Evangel Hall, The Alex Wilson Community Garden. Croteau has served on the jury of several design competitions.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in Toronto,Ontario, Canada, Rachel S Dacks has been immersed in the field of furniture design for almost twenty years. Throughout her career, Rachel has distinguished herself as a visionary thinker withan iconic aesthetic, keen professionalism, and insatiable drive. She was traditionally educated at the School For American Crafts at the Rochester Institute of Technology, receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1996 in Woodworking and Furniture Design, with a minor in Industrial Design. Upon graduation, she embarked upon a career in the contract furnishings market, enabling her to gain a wealth of specialized knowledge, and the opportunity to move 6 times in 7 years. She has been lucky enough to have her work shown widely, with debuts in premier furniture shows such as NeoCon in both Chicago and Los Angeles, Interplan in New York, and Orgatec in Koln, Germany. In 2001, she returned to educational pursuits and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Furniture Design from the Savannah College of Art and Design. She has since added to her list of professional accomplishments with stops along the way in college-level teaching and mentoring, and is now focused on design for mass market retail, honed by her experiences working as a Designer for both Target Corporation and Joseph Mimran’s President’s Choice line of Home products for Loblaws. Her design consultancy’s body of work is primarily characterized by excellency in branded, private label products in the juvenile furnishings industry, as well as lighting, decorative home, andoutdoor goods. Her industrial design-based focus on user-centered research, advanced design methodology and brand development has resulted in fruitful relationships with high profile brands such asCarter’s, Disney, and Summer Infant.

Michelle Ivankovic was born in Toronto, Canada, where she also grew up. In 1998, she graduated at the top of her class from Ontario College of Art and Design's Industrial Design program. Out of design school, she worked as a fine woodworker, making furniture, and then went on to work at Umbra as a creative visionary, responsible for the pioneering art direction and cohesive product language of Umbra's U+ Collection. She currently works out of her studio in Amsterdam. She states "My designs are a reflection through visual communication on the findings of my studies and contemplation of people, society and culture. I strive for social and ecological responsibility. In my creation of forms, ideas, functions and images I aim to understand the end user without judgment."

Cynthia Hathaway is a designer, born in Canada, trained at the Design Academy in Eindhoven and works and teaches in the Netherlands. She states: "I document what people do and how they behave mostly in their daily routine and in what some would consider mundane environments. I mean this in the sense of a 9-5, day-to-day grind… where nothing spectacular seems to happen. Office environments, streets, grocery stores, parking lots, subways, even people’s basements and garages, are terrains I love to be in and learn the focus of people’s attention. Where they play, eat, walk, shop and work; where they spend 99 % of their time. These are not the glitzy or intentionally designed spheres. These are the practical places. The places where things get done. It’s where I find my inspiration, and what feeds my designs."