 Good evening. I'm Vasa Genopoulos, Manager of the National Design Awards and Transformation Programs at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and I'm thrilled to welcome you tonight. We're delighted to be back in Detroit for our second year celebrating our National Design Awards. Thank you to the College for Creative Studies and Design Corps of Detroit for hosting us during the Stimulating Include conference. Cooper Hewitt is America's Design Museum. Located in New York, our mission is simple but powerful to inspire, educate, and empower through design. We want everyone to discover the importance of design and its power to change the world. The National Design Awards is our largest education initiative, and this year marked the 20th anniversary of honoring the timeless legacy of preeminent design leadership in America. With the generous support of Target and countless friends of Cooper Hewitt, we're celebrating these brilliant designers and inspiring the next generation through our NDA cities programming here in Detroit and across the country. This week, we've been training educators and introducing students to design and design literacy with our very own National Design Award winners. We learned about empathy, prototyping, and problem solving at the Charles H. Wright Academy of Arts and Sciences, Luddington Magnet Middle and Honor School, Stephens T. Mason Academy, and two Boys and Girls Club. The future is in good hands. I have the privilege of working closely with our National Design Award winners throughout the year. They are fantastic designers but also amazing people, and I'm thrilled to introduce three of them to all of you tonight. Pinar Guvench, Chief Strategy Officer at OpenStyle Lab, our inaugural Emerging Designer Award winner. OpenStyle Lab is dedicated to creating functional wearable solutions for people of all abilities without compromising on style. Derek Lam, Fashion Design Award winner, who's known for a calculated simplicity and thoughtful detailing in his work. And Patricia Moore, Design Mind Award winner, an industrial designer, gerontologist, and leading authority on consumer lifespan behaviors. A big round of applause to all of you. Thank you for all that you do. It's my pleasure now to turn it over to our moderator for the evening, Ruki Newhold Ravi Kumar, Director of Education at Cooper Hewitt. Thank you, Vaso, and thanks everyone for coming. Congratulations to all of you. You are truly incredible people, and I think we could chat for hours, but I'm going to try and be a good moderator and get to the point. So with the rise of the Chief Diversity Officer in companies, it seems like inclusion is at the top of mind for everyone. But it's been at the top of your minds for a really long time for some of you since you were born. Will you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got ahead of this curve? I'll start with you, Patty. Well, I consider myself very lucky because I was raised with my grandparents in our home. I learned from observing them with love and respect that as they aged, there wasn't anything wrong with them, but there was a lot wrong with the tools and the environment, our home, our community, because they failed to meet my grandparents' physical and cognitive needs. And so when I went away to university, I didn't even know about industrial design or product design, but when that piece of the puzzle was fitted in, that's when the magic happened. Thank you. Derek, what about you? So growing up as an Asian American, I had the identity of being a minority, but I grew up in San Francisco, which is a very multicultural place. You can almost say it's a bubble that I grew up in, where being Asian was not considered a minority, actually. It was a very large part of the population, but being part of the American culture, I recognized that I was not the typical American, so to speak. When I moved to New York, I felt more keenly what it meant to be a minority because I saw very few faces in my environment, even with going to design school and hanging out in nightclubs in New York and all that fun stuff that you do as a student. And so my sense of identity really comes from this dichotomy of knowing that I'm part of a community, and yet I'm separate from a community. I think that informs my work in some respect. Thank you, Canar. Well, on my day-to-day, I manage an architecture and design studio, and accessibility is always part of our design agenda for built environments, but for wearables and garments, it actually was not too long ago that I came to a big awakening. A few years ago, Grace, who's our fellow board member, and I were speaking at another conference, and when I listened to her presentation, I sort of was shocked in how much, even though I was sort of in the design world, how much I didn't think of what we put on our body should also be accessible and inclusive. And I grew up in Turkey, and I grew up very close to my grandfather as well. And I witnessed him in his last two years of his life suffering from ALS and slowly not being able to wear his wardrobe. Back then, I never thought it was a design fault. I was thinking, oh, maybe because he's sick. And once I came to that awakening a few years ago, I felt a huge responsibility. I mean, if we don't raise awareness around this here, or if we don't do anything about it here, how is it going to reflect to the rest of the world? And in a developing country, maybe, I mean, forget access to style. People are talking about access to food or access to a wheelchair or something like that. But still, access to your own personal style shouldn't be a luxury, and this conversation should start here. So I was immediately drawn into it, thinking it was like a responsibility. I have to do something about it. Pinar, you've also said that sometimes the simple things get very complicated when you have disabilities, but the solution doesn't have to be very complicated. Will you tell us a little bit more about that? I mean, I think there are small details in our lives that make us happy or gives us ease, and recognizing those and finding design solutions for those is actually not that difficult. It does take a collaborative team, though. At OpenStyle Lab, we hold a summer program every year where we do an open call for engineers, designers, occupational and physical therapists, and we co-create with people with disabilities to create custom solutions for them. And for example, in 2018, we teamed up with Riverside Rehab Center, and we had this client, Belda, who's loved music. But she was not technologically savvy, and she didn't necessarily have access to music at the facility at all times, so that was making her sort of unhappy. So we actually designed a brooch in this form of her favorite flower, and each pedal would play a song that she really loved, which would help with her mental status at the time, or any, like, depression or whenever she felt lonely. So that was a really simple solution, but we really had to co-create with her to come to that solution, and we really needed a designer, and we needed an engineer, and we needed the occupational therapist who helped us to communicate to Belda. So, like, those type of details really, what makes life meaningful in the end. Every time you tell that story, I get goose bumps. Patti, you've often described yourself as an ambassador of dignity. What does that mean? Well, if design doesn't fill your day with precisely what you need to fulfill the lifestyle that you wish for and dream about and deserve, then something's wrong with the dignity of my work. So in looking at my role as someone who provides for equity, someone who provides for the dream-making, both the desirable and the necessities of life, then at the very least, everything I do should be about dignifying one life at a time. You've also said something about how we've gone from a technology revolution to a technology revolt, and now suddenly we're all focused back on people. Why do you think that has happened recently? I'm crediting it to Gen Z. I'm not sure when it happened in terms of academia, but I'm seeing it in middle school and high school and in the youngest students in universities around the world. They come to me wanting to talk about people, not products. And I'm delighted by that. So I think I'm going to be busy for another couple of decades holding their hand. That's good to hear. Derek, you talk about fashion in a way I've never heard about before, because everyone wants to make a statement, but you like to have conversations. Tell us about that. I never really wanted to be a fashion designer with their own name on a label. I wanted to be part of a group of people, thinking up of ideas and solutions and being creative together. But what I saw, what made me want to start my own brand, was I thought there was a lot of noise in the fashion arena. There were a lot of big egos, there's a lot of circus and a lot of entertainment. And while none of that is bad, I felt that that was not my purpose as a designer. My designer was, at me to be a designer was to promote a culture, perhaps a tradition, to look at a new way of looking at what luxury, or how something should feel in your body, and let that be my calling card. So I guess that's the point of where I felt I was more of a conduit than really cleach lights. I never say to somebody, this is what you need to wear. This is what I believe. This is the lifestyle that I promote. It's more important for me to be reflecting what's happening in the world and who I come in contact with. And it really is through conversation, and it's so important to me. So in the beginning, I wanted to be a creative person amongst other creative people, and that was my safety zone and my pleasure zone, my sandbox. But I realized the conversation had to be broader. And then it had to include the clients. It had to include demographics. It had to include all aspects of how people live. And the only way I was able to access that is to be open to it. And being open to it is removing myself from the ivory tower of design, which we can very much easily close the door, throw the lock away, and never escape from that ivory tower. But actually come down from that tower and just meet people and talk to people. And the first accessibility for me as a creator was to just speak to my clients. I understand the American desire for fashion, meaning what do Americans need clothing for? And what did they need fashion for? But especially when I go to foreign countries and foreign cultures, I ask that question because it's so imperative to me. I'm like, what does a woman want? I do women's wear. So obviously I ask about women. I don't care about the men. You can just wear black and go on. Just be the backdrop to women's life. That's what we're here for, right? Yeah. But I go to China or I go to Japan and I wonder and I ask them, what do you want? What does fashion do for you? Sometimes it's very simple. It's like, do you have a social event? What does your social calendar look like? What is obviously your occupation? What are the parameters about how you should dress for your occupation? Just how do you envision style as part of your lifestyle? And that to me is the most important question I usually ask. So I'm finding it hard to believe that someone who has the kind of name recognition that you have gets to just go out and talk to people. What kind of a business model do you have that allows you to have that kind of conversation so freely with your clients? I would say just a parallel. I find it very strange that people want to know everything and everything about actors. Because I feel like the more you know about them, the less you realize them in a role. And I sometimes, I really do appreciate the actors that say, not to be coy and not to talk about their work, but not talk about themselves. And I've always kind of had that. Here I am talking about myself, yeah. But I pick and choose those moments. And again, that's part of the circus atmosphere that I don't appreciate. And I also, the kind of star atmosphere that I'm definitely withdrawn from. So that it gives me the opportunity to be just a fly on the wall. That's ultimately what I love to be able to do. I just want to be a fly on the wall and listen and hear and then design into it. Then you've said similar things about how you like to listen. And at OSL, you really do make the end user, the expert when you co-create. What does that process look like? Well, we can't really create without them. I mean, not listening is really not an option for us. People with disabilities, they're the ones who hack their environments on a day-to-day basis. They are the innovators in our minds because they come up with these crazy solutions because the environment that they're in will not just allow them to live a normal life. So when they come into the conversation, how they approach even the design process and where they start to have the conversation or by just showing us how they dress during the day, that is already, you know, we're 70% ahead of where we started because without that information, we don't even know how to start. So I think in any field, there is really no solution to anything without being in touch with the end user. But I think what we do is imperative. We don't have any other option to do so. Speaking of options, Patty, you didn't have a lot when you started out. You actually said you felt like you were not wanted in the firm that you started your career in. And yet you really were a trailblazer. You raised your hand. You were asking important questions ahead of your time. So for people in the room who often feel like people don't want me here, what is your advice and what was your pathway like? Well, the issue wasn't mine. I was surrounded by 350 men in Raymond Lowy's New York office in 1974 who said they didn't need any blankety-blank broad taking a man's job. What they didn't know is I'm Irish and that's sort of like waving a red flag in front of a bull. So then the game was on. And by game, I mean quite seriously, I see that kind of silliness as something that has to be addressed. And the vulgarity of any bias and prejudice is something that we all face in different ways. But to be criticized because of my gender and not be looked at because of my mind and my heart was surprising, but I was prepared for it. Mr. Lowy told me when I was hired that it would be difficult. But he also desperately wanted a woman to succeed in his business. But he left it to me. So I did what I learned as a little girl watching my mother manage my father. I baked. And it's a true story. I went to, laughingly, what was HR? A sweet little woman who kept paper files and licked her finger and flipped through things. I found that so elegant. She'd lick and lick and lick. And I wrote down all the men in my division and their birthdays and their wives' names and their children's names. And I baked birthday cakes and anniversary pies. And I acted all sweet and adorable and ditzy. And they just didn't understand why I didn't get that they hated me. And it took about two years, but we all became friends. I think basically what we're saying is you do carry on with your dream. You have to face adversity no matter what. Even today I walk into a board room where I know it's an uphill battle. I still hear a refrain, Patty, we don't design for those people. It's what we face all the time. I try really hard to communicate to industry and governance today all over the world that no one is really disabled unless we create the roadblock. And that giving someone capacity is a matter of design. And it's still something we have to sell, but I'm not... You've also talked about how just being people-centered instead of profit-centered is the smart thing to do. Can you give us a little bit of insight into that? Focusing on individuals and then those unique natures of snowflakes, the glorious nature of each of us being different, but thereby all the same, has always worked well for me and being able, again, to talk to industry to say, you really have to worry about the person with arthritis. Earlier this week I was talking to students and I did a spin and I said, what do you see in what I'm wearing? And none of them saw it because they really weren't observing my point, which was I don't wear clothing with closures. I have no buttons, no snaps, no zippers, and it's deliberate. And when I got them talking about that and they understood, oh, someone with arthritis or someone who doesn't have fingers or someone who doesn't have an arm, how do they get dressed in the morning? How do they maintain their dignity, their joy to step out and say, this is me? It's all about taking care of one person one day at a time. So if we're embracing diversity, Derek, I know in the fashion industry a lot of people criticize it for stereotyping people, for stereotyping what size people need to be. How do you address that? I think the fashion industry has always taken the easy road out in communicating what we do, meaning there are a lot of technical reasons and business reasons why we try to make a uniform body as the idealized body because then it's just easier, more commercial, more business-minded to just create for this idealized body. And we've done it and it's part of the tradition of the industry, I would say, since probably it's amazing to me, a lot of times I read biographies about actors and actresses and Ingrid Bergman said that, and this was in the 50s, and she said that, what was the most memorable thing about your time in Hollywood? And she said, I was hungry all the time because she had to meet the standard being on the screen. So I guess I'm preferencing as saying that it's just been something that's easy to just pick this idealized. And now, but what I love about fashion is because we're dealing with very immediate output. We don't have five years to come up with a new collection. We come up with a collection every four years. And so we become a very, we can be a very keen mirror to what's changing in the world. Fashion doesn't change in terms of the industry is so intractable, but then when there's enough commitment to change, fashion can do it in a season, from one season to the next. And I find that part of the challenge of being a designer, the good challenge, is that we have this ability to reflect what's happening in the world, and with a better mirror, and we're able to activate it. When I had a dinner, I sat next to a writer, and I was like, oh, like a gog, and totally idolizing this writer, and I'm like, why are you at this fashion event? You know, like, why am I in the fashion world? I'm like, yawn, right? He's like, no, it's really exciting to me because he's like, I'm a writer. It takes me years to come up with, you know, to do the work, and he says, sometimes you find out after five years, your work is not, you know, what you thought was relevant isn't long relevant. And he's like, I'm fascinated by people in fashion because it's so immediate. And we're constantly, hopefully now, when people are holding us to be better designers, that we can do more immediate change. Speaking of immediate change, I think one of the other challenges with just taking inclusion on is scaling up ideas. And I know that Pinar, that's a challenge you've been working on. Would you want to tell us what you've come up with more recently? So just because of the nature of our process by working with people, obviously all of our solutions that has come out, it was very quick to work, right? Like as customized to that person's needs, and, you know, everybody has not only different body ties, but different disabilities, so you can't necessarily mass customize anything. So when we started to realize, okay, a full outfit may not be scalable, but the parts of it, the enclosures, the details, how you stitch, how you zip up, how you button up, like those type of things can be hacked. And this past summer, we teamed up with NYU Langons Initiative for Women with Disabilities, and we worked with teenage girls, ages 13 to 21, to co-create an accessible toolkit that will allow them to hack and alter their own wardrobe. Christina, who's on the board with me, she, her both of her arms are paralyzed, and I remember this so vividly from her saying, like, once her arms became paralyzed, she couldn't wear almost all of her wardrobe. First of all, that's not sustainable, right? You don't want to throw away your clothes right away just because suddenly you can't wear them. So the idea with the toolkit is that, okay, let's have accessible tools that will, you may not know how to sew, but maybe you can glue on pockets because a wheelchair user doesn't need pockets on the size or the back, they actually need it on the lap. Or you need loops on your clothing because you want to be able to put it on easily. Maybe you have some dexterity issues, so you can hold on to a zipper, so you actually need to pull it up with a loop. So all these, like, mini solutions came into one box, and we actually launched the first prototype. And I think the outcome was amazing, and it's definitely not only like a scalable product, but also an educational opportunity because we saw these girls making, creating, like, comparing the time that we started the program with them, and by the time we're ending, there was so much more self-confidence in terms of, like, we knew it was going to bring greater independence to people just because you have control of your wardrobe. But, like, using those skills and realizing that they can actually design and make, like, bad self-confidence was priceless. And we talk about awareness, but awareness has to also need to be among people with disabilities or aging because, you know, sometimes we are in denial ourselves. So we saw moms being shocked, like, they didn't even think of it before, even though they spend every day together. And I don't blame them. You know, we have these workshops every now and then with, like, people 85 years and older and, you know, we ask questions like, how do you dress? Do you dress easily? And they're like, you know, I don't like buttons. I don't like slippers. I don't like putting on shoes. So one time I asked, so do you have any problem putting on your jacket? And all of them said no. So I asked them, can you take it off and put it on for me? It took almost 10 minutes for them to put on, take off and put on their jackets back, but we're so used, I think we're so, we're forced to settle just because of our environment and the options we have that we accept that as a normal and stop thinking it's a problem where it actually is, you shouldn't be, you don't have to spend 10 minutes, you know, putting on a jacket. So all like this co-creation opportunity also really helped us to make them become more aware that they can actually have more control of what they wear and really of their own personal style. So we're really excited about that product. We can't wait to see what the toolkit does. I know, that sounds so fascinating. That sounds so amazing. Derek, are you going to? We're happy to hack Derek. I'm clothing up. Well, I did a, I participated in a program called Design for Disability. A great, an amazing organization who goes to the schools like Parsons and FIT, the design schools and outside of New York and gives the project and they align the student with a person with disability and they design an ensemble for them and they do a runway show and it's really fashion, but when I was observing was that the population of people who are looking for clothing that works for them was so diverse that it was almost kind of like, well, we were designing for individuals, but we were designing for a kind of type, whether they were on a wheelchair or they had Lou Gehrig's, all these different types, but we weren't really capturing the individuality of the person. So that's why this toolkit, I think it's so amazing because it is important, it's customization, but then to add the input of, no, you customize it yourself because you know yourself the best. I think it's brilliant. It's just a brilliant idea. Thank you. We all agree it's brilliant, right? Speaking of brilliant, Patty, you pioneered some research methods to date. We remember when we think of your work, what comes to mind is the picture of the woman hunched over and you really got into character and I thought, wow, I'd love to know more and then you said, well, it was serendipity. So tell us how this all happened. Well, after I finished baking birthday cakes, no, seriously, I was at one of those obligatory New York parties and inching towards the door and almost there when someone said hello and that person was Barbara Kelly who was one of the makeup artists at Saturday Night Live. So she was doing Chevy Chase and Baluchi as cone heads and other prosthetics and when she explained what she did for a living, I remember hearing someone who sounded a lot like me say, can you make me look 85? And literally two weeks later, I was on an aircraft going to Ohio State University for a conference of architects who claim they were convening to design the home of the future for the quote, Elder Lee. And I always pay a lot of attention to language I designed for my elders and Elder Lee is a medical moniker. So I'm very careful about the words. At the conference in character, I was ignored. People let doors swing in my face. No one asked if I'd like a tea or a coffee and I was isolated and alone. I was thrilled because I had been dismissed by professionals who claim they knew what they were doing and it was that level of serendipity. The next day I came as myself and everyone was greeting me warmly. Where were you yesterday? You missed a good day? And the conversation went on and then finally on cue, one of the conveners held up my wig and said she's still here and the whole conference tenor changed. We talked about what we had just experienced, the prejudice of not dealing with the individual right in our midst and I was encouraged to go forward. And four years later, I had been to 116 cities throughout North America and as nine different elder women discovered the good and the bad and the sad and the glad of being an older person in a youth oriented culture. So despite all of that, you are still pro people and your work is very human centered. Where does all that motivation come from? I just can't be wrong. I must be right. No, as you were speaking and at this time of year, I'm reminded of the love of my parents, Patricia and Ivan James Moore were married 62 years, never should have made it as a couple. Daddy got his GED in the army. My mother was a PhD in mathematics. They used to cuddle on the sofa and coo and make their daughter sick. And I just look at them now in memory and I'm so thrilled that they were my role models. Daddy worked as an electrician in the steel mills in Buffalo. And he raced from the mills one night before the stores downtown, the fancy lady store closed. So he was in his work clothes with his hard hat and his lunch bucket. And he was almost kept out of entering the store because he was the wrong kind of customer. But he had preordered a lovely coat for my mother for Christmas that year. Jekyll and Kennedy had one. And my mother was salivating for this coat. It was lamb's wool with a white mink collar. And I remember it so fondly. And so Daddy was meant to pick it up so that my mother would have this grand surprise on Christmas morning. And I remember him telling me with tears in his eyes how mean it was and how he almost couldn't get my mother's present because he wasn't allowed in the store until he just a fit. So I think that's where I get this be right. I know language has been really important to you. And you were in several Detroit classrooms with us for this past two days. And you were talking to middle schoolers about how to appropriately talk about the age of a person. Walk us through how you explained it to them and why all of us maybe need to think about our language a little bit. Well actually years ago the New York Times called me in with a group of sociologists to talk about how to describe people realizing that they were getting a lot of letters and editorials were being written that people didn't like being called bed or wheelchair users or disabled or definitely handicapped. They didn't like comedy that talked about I've fallen and I can't get up. There's nothing my mother died fall. And so we came together and we talked about the power of language but also the brutality of language. And it seems like a simple thing but when you say to someone how old are you in some people's hearts it's like skipping a beat at aches and it hurts. So you simply talk more cleanly. So I am 67 years of age or I'm age 67 or I'm simply 67 even if they need to put my age in the story. And the editorial board talked a great deal about that. And they were the first paper in the United States to change it. Most cultures ask what is your age not how old are you. And so in talking to the children about it they really liked it. I think there was only one child who in making their presentation said that their consumer was something years old. The other kids got it immediately. And it will become part of their fabric and I think it is an important change. It's part of getting past our delusions our dismissive nature and the deliberateness of discrimination. I know we were having a good laugh about how the kids in class had an odd sense of age where for them someone who was 45 was hunched over and had no teeth. So that was interesting. It was this really precious wave. I had said to one work group of children just three or four little ones. Well how do you think someone who's 45 would eat because they were designing cutlery. And he started thinking about the attributes of 45. And I left the table and then by the time we had our presentation all the work groups did something immersive and role playing and they were all actors. It was really brilliant. And they don't do it out of disrespect but rather out of empathy and and communicating. I understand or I think I understand or I want to understand style. Audience I'm going to turn to you soon for questions but Derek you were in a classroom to this morning and what was your experience like what were some things you learned. I think the greatest thing I learned was the capacity for children to just be very open. We were in a difficult school. The library didn't have a librarian which was so surprising to me. I think the statistic was 50 percent of the student body wasn't going to graduate high school which was very shocking to me because I was meeting these young kids and you just had to tease them not tease them like make fun of them but tease tease out the initial shyness. And I think what the national the Cooper National Design Awards what the program that you guys put together really allowed them to kind of come out of their shell without like physically shaking them like no you need to you need to do this project. You it was remarkable that I was like you can really with just a few simple tools you can tease out the personality of the child and I kind of felt like if and if even only one child remembers this moment that I spent with them and I own a wonderful group of people that it's it's going to be life-altering and I'm you know I'm kind of humbled by that that moment. I was talking to Caroline and it just came to me that when I was a child I had written there was a magazine for children called highlights and I had written to the magazine as a I guess I was nine eight or nine years old don't remember what I wrote but I wrote something probably like how much I love the magazine blah blah blah and I'm a kid and blah blah and and two people came from the magazine to my house with my parents they had pre-arranged with my parents I guess to come to the house and to actually recognize that I had written this letter and that they were very happy to receive this letter and that I got a one-year subscription you know for that reason and that's so buried deep inside me that I forgot until I think two nights ago and it just dawned on me in the advent of this participating in this program it dawned on me and I'm like that stayed with me and then made such a difference to me as a child to be noticed or to have that special moment that was really important to me yeah and I hope that today is equally important to some of the students we saw and worked with. I'm thoroughly enjoying this conversation but I want to bring our audience into this as well do we have any questions and if you do if you'd raise your hand someone will bring a microphone to you and we'd love to hear from you as well I can keep talking to them all day so please do this is your shot. Hi my name is Dr. Marilyn White I am a Detroiter I just want to say I welcomed you into the ladies room and when you walked in I immediately noticed I said wow she's really stylish congratulations on your award thank you thank you it's not really a question thank you thank you because boarding the plane I came in from Phoenix and I'm wearing a mandi coat that I bought 30 years ago and I've been especially sharing with students as I go around the world you know they they say oh I really like this and I say well I got this before you were born and you know and it's it is about sustainability and it's about taking care of your things and and coming from that great wealth really respecting my things as well but as I boarded the plane I heard a woman say oh my goodness my mother had that coat and I just love those moments because of the connectedness and it can happen with any kind of design or architecture space product and I um I said well um I'm sure she did and I said I got it you know 30 years ago and she said I can't wait to go home and tell my mother I saw a lady wearing her coat but I think also this this multi-generational bit is so important my niece is my my fashion police my advisor and she comes into my closets and flips and flips and flips this has got to go on this I don't ever wear that again and I think I'm here my work oh she's brutal and um so she comes in seasonally and she says this is back in because it's this hot pink black plaid see you later and with a great lining so she said auntie they're wearing this now you gotta wear this gotta wear this so um I I just like that design elementally is in our lives just like the sunshine and and the birds singing and the flower and and it connects us but it definitely shouldn't be dividing us and that's certainly what keeps us very busy Derek I know a lot of your collections have multi-generational women featured and talk to us about why that decision and how you go about doing that and you make a very deliberate attempt to show that diverse audiences would love your clothing I have to say like so I started my brand 15 years ago but I've been in the industry for about 30 years and I always thought and I'm I'm guilty of it the same thing is that when we had our shows and we would be casting models over the 15 years it became the models became younger and younger and younger to the point where there were 13 year old 14 year olds and then you would make them up and they would look like timeless beauties you know you couldn't tell if they were 20 or 30 or 40 and I thought that was so bizarre to me because you'll have the young the model that comes in will be all gangly and and just you know like a like a a calf like you know just a small horse and then you whip them and and then they turned into this prize you know goddess and I was like if only people realize the backstage that these are very young women who are the opposite of sophistication and yet we make them into what we expect a woman of means should look like and that was always one of the I would say the night before show it would always be my crisis it'll be I can't believe we have these young girls why are we in the system why are we telling women that they have to look they have that the skin and the legs and the body type of a 12 year old but they're they have to be made up to look like our client age which is you know 30 to 60 I was like and I always had this crisis like I can't I don't know why we're doing this it's so fake now there's much more regulation internally with the industry to be at least 16 which is still crazy 16 18 the the the BMI body types have to be more realistic and there's now more just to select from in terms of who we use as our spokespersons to communicate the work that I do so you see older models models of different figures models of different races much more selection I would say 10 years ago there was every season there was one African-American model who hits the scene and everybody wanted her because she was the only one that was put in front of us as designers and it was bizarre it's like there was only one now you get a plethora of models coming in and I thank the the agencies I thank the scouts who are looking for models and but just being having this conversation having the conversation so that it really reaches people who are can make a difference and then pointing it in front of our eyes and saying you can't look away you can't go back as a designer I can't go back and say my idealization is a 16 year old girl who looks like a 30 year old woman who is quote-unquote perfect it's just not it's just not it doesn't feel good it doesn't feel good to be in my role and I'm glad that I can feel better about the work that I do you're giving me warm fuzzy feelings Derek any other questions in our audience we have one in the back there oh I've actually got the mic over here so sorry for hijacking your question my name is Kelly Murdock hit I'm an assistant professor of design at the stamp school of art and design at the University of Michigan and I have a question which may be a two-part question for you all or you could like handle them individually but my first question is what advice would you give to current design students and the second question and or follow-up is what's on the horizon for you all looking ahead feel like you've done a nice job rookie especially of giving us a like asking questions that give us a sense of like present and past for all three of you but I'm curious about what's next really encouraging students to go into NGOs and not-for-profits and working internationally considering that they can have a career where they combine social science and psychology and medicine that the needs there are the greatest that they don't have to go to Apple or IDO or Samsung they can they can have a wonderful life and make a good living and really affect change in people's lives and for me I'm about to undertake a rather major grant to look at what I'm calling dementia and design perhaps the biggest tsunami awaiting us in the world today is cognitive decline globally and we will none of us no country will be able to support financially the needs of all of us who will develop Alzheimer's and dementia's design has got to be part of a solution it's got to be holistic and systemic and so I'll probably be doing that the next 10 years or so I'm really excited about the opportunity I would simply say exposure I think traveling goes far in terms of exposing yourself to different cultures people in general if you can't travel just get into different groups of people like having friends of all abilities almost makes me feel like a superwoman you know it's just like oh you know I know a solution to that and you know I have access like I'm a new mom I didn't know how to access around in New York City with a stroller so I would ask my friends okay which are the accessible stages like I have just you know the power of knowledge now thanks to them and they make me think really and you know think of collaborations think of new design opportunities or new strategies just because of their like creativity and like hacking and innovating so being with them I think has been so eye-opening to me is so that I would just say you know expose yourself to different groups for us on the horizon I think you know we talk about hacking clothing always and now that I guess with the award comes more responsibility right so we we decide to like do bigger hacks so we actually recently announced a our first prototype of an inclusive body form for the fashion industry so not only being you know gender or race neutral but also representing different abilities or disabilities so it can be an amputee form it can be seated it can be standing it can be a hunched position to represent aging or other upper spine curvatures that might come with other illness so and we're also using wood just to sort of point out the you know sustainability need for the industry so um we really announced it as a call to action to the industry no one responded yet so I think you know what we can you know I guess talk to museums and talk about doing exhibitions there and then go talk to the industry so like I feel like we've been you know and you know Patricia's been battling the battle for like years and we're at the beginning maybe but we just have to keep pushing and like until somebody responds to us and also we call it keep dating being a non-profit organization obviously we you know rely on sponsors too so we often date with sponsors um and it's a long-term relationship hopefully sometimes it's not really so it's just keeping at it and that would be another advice I would give really because there's really no shortcut to anything I mean she you know started it she's still talking about it and she's still amazed like how some people are so not aware of things so um you just have to keep going do you have something to add um I think that the what I would tell tell most uh you know designers uh new designers is um you have to think much harder much harder than I had to think when I wanted to start um I think it comes down to I'm not just saying that you have to be you're going to be a better designer because you think harder but I think your audience the audience in the world will only will migrate towards those designers to think hard that if it's just a celebrity moment or it's very superficial uh or artificial that's not where the collective mind is headed towards so it's a tougher job to tell new designers that uh or they have a tougher road ahead of them but I I say to them think harder in the beginning so that you don't get caught in the undertow just to be aware um I think for me for the future I always wanted to make luxury that was accessible luxury to me was what I knew as a craft what I knew as my tradition what I knew as my technique that I've acquired over time but I never wanted to be rarefied and even when I started 15 years ago um it was an easy moniker to be just a designer a high fashion designer and um then I started a secondary club I don't like to call it secondary I just started another collection was called Derek Lampton Crosby which was definitely much more accessible in terms of price point not fast fashion um so I started then 2011 and then now in 2019 I actually closed my main collection and I just am staying with my uh the Derek Lampton Crosby the reason being is I wanted I wanted to be a designer that reaches more people I didn't want my brand to be known as elitist I didn't want to service a small customer base um I you know again I wanted to hear what people want and desire in their life and fulfill it and I feel I am kind of a conduit to what is the moment uh the what they want and then what they can have um so that's really been important it took me this long from 2011 to 2019 to feel very sure that the product that I make at Derek Lampton Crosby has all the qualities that I wanted to have it has to have amazing quality has to have the tradition has to have the integrity that I expect from a product um and in this moment I think I can do that at a much more accessible in a much more accessible way and so it's been incredibly satisfying to reach that point and then to make the switch Tark you whenever you talked about advice to people you also talk a lot about the importance of curiosity I've heard you mention that a few times I'm just a really curious person I was one of those kids that I'm for all of us were those kids that always ask why why why and finally my aunt and uncle got me a set of encyclopedia Britannica of you know and I went through not every issue or every you know copy but um so I've always been a curious person and I've always my favorite classes were um sociology history um I'm so honored to be part of this panel as well as the broader all the winners uh landscape design interior design architecture um anything that has to do with how we live is intriguing to me and I'm just one part of the bigger picture of of that any other questions we have one back there yes um we heard about the past of Derek and Patricia a little bit and then I should have asked this question before her that she asked about the future but rolling back a little bit um I want to hear about Pinar's background because open style lab is um quite new um studio launch in 2014 and I want to hear about a little bit more of what were you doing before and how what's the story on how did you decide to go into um opening opens or being part of this foundation so I I guess going back to curiosity all right um and I call myself a little bit of all I wear like many hats so I studied industrial engineering and um my entire family is academics like everybody has to have a phd um so I when I was growing up okay I'm gonna have to have a phd but I don't want to be an academic so maybe I can do a phd in business and then I can get out of it after the phd and then just be in business so uh and I always tested my parents sort of like can I not be an academic and they're like you should have your phd just to be on the safe side so um so that's or is like I was born here but we moved back to turkey when uh when I was five and I grew up there and I think it's also like these you know and I'm sure you know this as well from like Asian moms uh you grew you grew up like race horses right like okay next graduate school and then or you go into the big corporate work there you know this put like this pressure is on you and if you're a smart student you have like a only a certain selection of like like disciplines you can pick like you can't study a light topic ever like forget if you're interested in psychology who studies psychology so um I was like okay I'm gonna do a phd so I got into Colombia that's how I moved back to New York and I started uh doing my phd in business and the only quant state of person who went into the business school at and there were 20 people selected into the program I was 20 years old and um the second youngest person in the program was 28 and knew what they wanted to do research about because you should know what you're gonna do research on if you go into phd and I didn't know what I was doing there it was I was going crazy it was very theoretical and then uh my dad at the time um he was in the beginning he was like Panara you're you look miserable I'm like thanks um if you're really not happy about this you should just quit in the beginning because you're if you're staying a little bit you're gonna stay and then you're not gonna be able to quit and then you're gonna be like unhappy and you're gonna go into this like oh loop that you're you know you're gonna grow out and then and um I didn't realize I was just waiting for green light for my parents so the minute we had that conversation I wrote an email to my advisor and I quit and it was the best decision of my life I was terrified because there's no entrepreneur in the families and I had so many ideas so but I what I realized and I think that was um a little learning curve I had when uh I was trying to do the study because I grew up in Turkey the entire econ finance language was so foreign to me and I'm like okay if I want to be in business and if I want to be smart in like strategies I have to understand finance better so um I did a master's in finance instead of a certain Illinois and then uh being that being a cultural shock I had to move back to New York right away I wasn't consulting briefly and then um I have I have an industrial designer friend who uh from RIT who was starting an e-commerce on functional furniture because um most of the furniture like quality furniture stores are not accessible necessarily in terms of price point and also we live in such tight areas in you know New York or Boston or San Francisco that it was a great need that he identified and he said but I don't want to deal with people or I don't want to deal with numbers so can we do it together um so um that's how my like business partnership moment started I guess this was 2013 and um we I wish I met you in 2013 so I I so we wanted to do a soft launch because we were scared of what we're doing it was called NYFU because we were simply saying FU to all the other furniture uh brands and um we started we started the website it went nationwide on the third month and then we opened up a store in Chelsea in New York in uh year and a half and then it got acquired by our main vendor and I think that sort of became my master class like real a real MBA that I've we did so many mistakes like crazy mistakes we lost money on things but I think it was such an amazing learning curve and it gave me confidence that I can actually be pushy in business and um and I can do this again so I um in the meantime my partners who are both architects were sitting up there in New York office and they were like telling me for a year we need a managing partner we need a managing partner we need a managing partner I'm like well yeah but I have my own company um so when this acquisition happened I joined them as the managing partner which sort of was the design role 2.0 for me so we started with the furniture and I understood manufacturing side of it so well and that was my background anyway like being studying industrial engineering I always expose myself to you know manufacturing facilities and um so I my role was really building the supply chain overseeing procurement overseeing logistics and that really gave me the opportunity in the architecture studio to what I coming as an outsider to the industry I was frustrated with so many things uh first of all the lack of exposure that architects like they're also in their ivory tower right and they don't come down and everybody has big egos and you're designing for the people but you're not necessarily talking to people like it's I was so frustrated with so many things and I saw that price point or budget like construction budgets um became an excuse for the industry too to not really be creative um so that manufacturing background really uh enabled me to set up workshops all around the world really to help us do custom manufacturing for all the architectural interior projects that we did um so that we didn't have an excuse like price point is your excuse we can manufacture there we will oversee it so uh that entire system really carried on to this and it also helped with like creating our own products but also we realize you know we have to expose ourselves new materials and we have to do inclusive research in order to make our projects more meaningful which at the time sort of got us into like a wearable technology research because we were doing this uh we're doing this collaboration with University of California Riverside on a carbon-based material that they developed that repelled water and absorbed any oil-based contamination so we were fascinated by the material to apply potentially in construction and how this could be a very light and cost-effective insulation material but because we're curious and because we do design competitions and try different things and collaborate with different disciplines we were like why don't we test a product in a wearable technology and the idea came up to clean as you swim and uh to sort of create more awareness on how polluted our beaches are also getting and all this pollution is sort of trickling down to our beaches and through collective wearing maybe we can do an environmental impact and all of that uh notion of just like how can fashion be more a collective mindset through simply wearing can we actually be environmentally proactive so we were questioning all these things and it was our exposure to the fashion world and it went viral like in a week we were giving interviews on Fox news we didn't know what we were doing we were like we're not fashion people and you know we would have fashion brands calling us saying we would like to include this in our line and we're like this is a new material you probably need to do r&d on and they would be like awesome and then the conversation would never last again and we quickly understood fashion industry does not do that much r&d um but that obviously that being our sort of marketing awareness project got us invited to so many conferences to just talk about environmentally proactive wearables and having wearable technology not for personal convenience only but for public benefit and that's when I met Grace who is the CEO and my fellow board member at open style lab because she was talking about the work they started MIT as a social service project by seeing you know how going into hospitals trying to help people they were trying to find all these like medical solutions but people to begin with couldn't even dress themselves and nobody was looking at that angle to it so um we met and we clicked immediately and like I told rookie like I was fascinated that I never thought of it before like I felt so dumb and so excited at the same time and she was saying you know being in Boston is not enough like we need to do things I'm like look I founded multiple companies that are doing well or have done well and I think we need to scale and I think we need to be in a city that we raise awareness and she was moving to New York at the time I'm in New York and you know let's be our own entity forget being associated to school only and um let's be in New York and so that happened in end of 2016 and we are a very lean team at open style lab we're three people on the board and we're actively leading all efforts together so we call it our Batwoman job because everybody has their like day-to-day jobs too but it's you know once you're exposed to it you can't unthink it and you can't unsee it it almost is like a curse that you keep noticing people's what they say how they act or what how they move or did they say the right thing like those things even like it's always in your head so that's a very long answer to what you've asked but that really was how it all ended up making sense and how my entire background came together so basically it's a really long journey to being an emerging designer winner of a national design award you are setting quite the bar here 15 years entire life you know I think what's intriguing about when anyone says well what do you do as a designer it's not what I'm just doing today but it's also what are the opportunities that I can do tomorrow because we can have these conversations and then we start to activate our minds and say we're used to using our hands we're used to using our brains you know I don't have to always do the same thing you know why don't we just keep moving um like what you've done you know it's just so right and talking about those self-confidence moments too like starting from childhood which is why I think it's super important to work with young minds or like even get these ideas as they like I was saying like I was so upset that I didn't even think of it when my grandfather was sick like I wish I had this moment that then and I could have helped them in so many ways but instilling that gives so much hope that you can see that they have so much up to is just I think that goes back to even way younger than well the question I always asked evidently as a child was not why but why not it it truly bothered me not to understand why things were the way they were so I was always curious about how we could change it if I felt it needed to be changed I remember my first client was in 1982 I was flown into a city on a corporate plane I wasn't told who the client was what we were going to do which intrigued me I liked that we did stuff like that at Lowy it was comfortable and I got into a large factory table 20 men and me also comfortable and then product on the table and it was a continence device incontinence is the number one reason for us to lose independence and autonomy it's the number one reason our family and our loved ones take us from the home we love and put us into skilled care so again 1982 it was huge it was ugly it was ridiculous it wasn't designed it was material science and engineered and what we did was the 20 men were let out of the room and they each came back in wearing the prototype which is a vision I will have till the day I die because darling since you have no menstrual care history you don't know how to walk in heavy padding and what it did do was to without any argument give me the time in the budget to make a product because at the beginning of this meeting they felt it was efficacious and therefore people could get used to it but when I made them wear it themselves they became converts so I really do believe empathy and immersion and role playing in the first person are the most important things to your point I'm so amazed to hear how many clients haven't even used their own product it's just galling so it's it's basic it's worked for decades now and I'm sure I'll get to do nasty things like that in future I'd say as a as a man designing women's clothing I've never put on my clothes that I've made no I have but I I'm always asking you know like in my office because most majority of the people now how does it feel you know what is it like to wear that um what's the problem with it that's also you know not always just asking for the positive but what can I do better and um recently just over the summer I started making my own clothes not me physically but I had the sample room make my own clothes and using some of the fabrics that I've used and I was like oh these are nice fabrics and so now I'm going and testing I said to yon who's my business partner I'm going to have pants made out of this fabric that is really doing well for us because women just love it and they tell me that it makes them feel great it holds everything in you know I don't it stretches they can move they feel great and I'm like so intrigued and I'm like I want to put on one of those pants and now I have the opportunity to say I'm gonna have pants made for myself in that fabric so I can truly be in her not her shoes but in her pants no that doesn't sound good either not not in the arm but uh how did we put that yeah it came it went out usually we kind of wrap up on something very philosophical but I feel like we'd set a new bar right so um the three of you have such inspiring stories and I want to thank you all for joining us here and of course one our audience to mix and mingle with them and we have she's dying to ask a question okay it's just been lingering on my mind since morning and uh I just wanted to ask like we've often been told that you cannot make everybody happy in life you know you just have to like let go a few people and you know just move on so when it comes to design uh being you know just at the beginning of starting this career in design when it comes to inclusive design how do you think like what what things do we should we keep in mind or how should we face those challenges in you know trying and fitting everybody in because as we know there are so many people with so many different needs so yeah well there isn't one size fits all that's for sure um and so it comes down to choice we have to give people as many choices as possible across all realms of uh price point and accessibility and usability and where they live and what their gender is all the choice and then they can make the selections that are most appropriate but if I don't have something that I can choose that really fits me then there's the problem so that's the role of design is always to provide choice and how we try to I mean that's something that we always faced uh as a question so like each summer program we see having themes too like we focus on spinal cord injury for example or like uh do we focus on aging do we focus on um you know cerebral palsy so it is always very niche in that sense but uh how I was saying you know there are opportunities within details we talked about you know not liking buttons like magnetic enclosures you can be very you know uh convenient for people with dexterity issues or for your toddler is one onesie you know because you don't have the time to button all of those so I think those details could give you opportunities of that but there is really like you can't please everyone but you can create your sort of lanes in terms of like what you're focusing on and empathy I think what Patricia was saying was very important too like I think there are all moments of inclusion that you don't realize that really actually are part of our everyone's lives like when I was pregnant I um so many of the stuff that Christine it sorry when I was pregnant so many of the stuff that was uh that we were trying to research around for any you know after people have breast cancer or any operation um the garments that we've designed uh for women actually started to make sense for me for like okay this would come in handy for breastfeeding or if you don't want anything you know tied on your body that comes in handy when you're pregnant or when you have a baby anything Christina was using I was using because I needed to be hands-free all the time because I was carrying her all the time so and you know we keep saying aging aging we're all going there you know we're like there will be moments of disability in our lives here and there that I think is trying to find life state seeing in certain life stages how you can build those empathy moments and have that reflect in your divine and also putting yourself in somebody else's shoe either by having a very extreme makeover or just you know have a conversation with a diverse group of people those will help you think you know more inclusively anyway so I would just say have a collaborative I think what just add really quickly is that designers are not machines that a problem is given to us and then we solve the problem not all designers people are intrigued by the story we can tell which comes from our tradition with the walk that we've walked so it's really important if you want to communicate to an audience that you bring your personal to the far forefront as well so I always say there's the I feel like sometimes I'm a microscope sometimes I'll dial out and I look at the bigger picture whether it's anything society my business who I work with what's going on in the world and then I go in and I said okay this is my take on it so I'm filtering my experiences but I'm creating product that is filtered through me and my culture and my tradition my life and I think that's where the storytelling comes in and that's what draws people in you might not have the answer for everybody but a lot of people will be intrigued to say what do you have to say what what's your point of view that's intriguing I think it's it's more self-assuring to know that if you have that that you might not have the answer but you have your story to tell and that's what gives you confidence now that sounds like an ending to the conversation so thank you to the three of you thank you to all of you as well