The Lost Women of Interaction Design History

This poster shows through three main visual diagrams, the women who have contributed and moved forward the field of Interaction Design from its nascent stages in the late 1960s through the development of the Graphical User Interface and creation of interface design as a profession through the emergence of the world wide web, the dot com boom and bust and the rise of the social web following the bust.

The poster’s first two diagrams show the connections of women to key, important companies and annotate their key contributions. The diagrams do show many of the men involved as well but they are not highlighted in order to keep the attention on the women who most people have never heard of. In the few histories available about computing and design, the men are featured and with the exception of one or two, the women are invisible and written out of the histories.

The third diagram shows the women involved in creating and shepherding the related community and professional organizations that offered space and connections for this field to coalesce from different disciplines, emerge with a unified perspective, become defined and spread as the web evolved and finally fracture into many sub-disciplines and intersectional sub-communities.

The timeline of each diagram is positioned against the different waves of feminism and the cultural changes happening at the same time which brought more women into the workforce and in technology specifically.