Ada Lovelace Day is an international blogging event instituted to draw attention to women who excel in the area of technology. Who is Ada Lovelace? From here:

Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

See also the Wikipedia entry, where we discovered Lovelace was also, oddly, the only legitimate child of the poet Byron. On Ada Lovelace Day, bloggers are asked to write about a present-day woman in technology. Since this is a design blog and not a tech blog, I’m going to arbitrarily include architecture and design under technology, since they are technical fields. As in other technical fields, woman have excelled in architecture and design but have had a very tough time gaining recognition thanks to the fact that these fields have been extremely male-dominated. When Charlotte Perriand asked Corbusier for a job, he said “We don’t embroider cushions here.” Perriand convinced him to hire her anyway, and went on to become an important figure in design whose star is now rising long after her death. (By the way there is nothing inferior about embroidering cushions, and the textile arts ought to be angry about that remark.) Recent evidence shows that women need female role models much more than men need male role models, and that is why this blog is jumping into the fray. Please also see previous posts on Eileen Gray, Charlotte Perriand, Nanna Ditzel, and many other women designers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Charlotte Perriand:

Eileen Gray:

And finally, I love this recent Annie Liebowitz photo of SANAA architect Kazuyo Sejima holding a model of her New Museum design:

Cynthia Maxwell, who is not only a mechanical engineer who has just finished a PhD on “Sound Synthesis from Shape-Changing Geometric Models” at Berkeley and has been part of the audio group at Apple and has worked for NASA, she also has a great eye and a sense of humour. Her blog, on her website House of Bits (she’s in computer science so that’s apparently a double entendre) is called Some Bits: a decent way to waste time) and it’s an interesting and informed compendium of design – fashion, interior, graphic, architectural and many others. She is obviously busy. How did she have time to find things we hadn’t?

Aladdin chairs by Claesson Koivisto Rune; Casa en los Tuliperos, Chile, by architect Gonzalo Mardones Viviani;  knitwear by Tim Ryan; sideboard by Formstelle; Chinese porcelain crumpled beer cans; meh flask. And if you want to know what’s in her personal cacti collection… here.