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:

Nanna Ditzel is considered the “first lady of Danish design,” which is one of those informative yet cringe-worthy labels that just highlights the whole problem of accidentally ghettoizing designers who happen to be women by the very act of celebrating the fact that they’re women designers. You can’t win. One doesn’t want to go on about their gender, but it’s impossible not to want to, because one wants to give these groundbreaking female designers as much recognition as possible – 20th C design was a world women had to fight hard to win recognition in. In Ditzel’s case, at least, her work was and remains moderately well-known, and over her long career she did win major international awards and acclaim and her work for Georg Jensen has brought her additional attention. She was an extremely versatile designer, working in furniture, textiles, accessories and jewelry. She created textiles for the Danish firm Unika-Vœv, and the ”Stairscape” above was created in 1966 for their showroom, with her trademark split-level floor seating and low cushions. Her 1959 “Egg Hanging Chair” is now an iconic piece of modern design and doesn’t seem dated. We love her. And Eileen Gray. And Barbara Brown. And dozens of other female designers who deserve to be much better known than they are. 

Stainless steel “Swirl” money clip above is still available from Georg Jensen for US$40. More information on Ditzel here, here and here.