Founder, Interwoven Design
Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman is an expert in human interaction, wearable products and smart textiles. With a background in performance apparel and product design, she is a pioneering researcher in design methodologies and smart materials and is Professor of Industrial Design at Pratt Institute. Her work and the work she does with her students focuses on products worn on the body, and the dialogue between her practice and the classroom is her inspiration.
Rebeccah brings over 20 years of corporate designing experience in performance athletic apparel, soft goods and consumer product design and has held positions as Design Director for Fila, Champion and Nike. She is founder of Interwoven Design, an innovative product design and development studio based in Brooklyn, NY specializing in soft goods, wearable technology and apparel innovation. Interwoven is the bridge between fashion, engineering, material science and product design and has done work for companies including the Miami Dolphins, Brooklyn Ballet, HeroWear, Kontoor, VF, UTC Aerospace Systems, and Vanderbilt University’s Biomechanics & Assistive Technology Laboratory. She has developed a number of projects working with NASA, both with students and professionally, including participation in the Mars Centennial Challenge where she is a founding member of SEArch+, the winning team with the Mars X-house. She was named one of IDSA’s 20/20 for both her work promoting diversity in design and Interwoven’s design work on the APEX exosuit, which was recognized with a SPARK Platinum Design Award.
She is the author of Smart Textiles for Designers: Inventing the Future of Fabrics, has published many articles and speaks internationally on design, innovation and the future.
Statement of Candidacy
For over a quarter of a century, I have proudly served the Industrial Design community as both an educator and a practitioner. Initially drawn to teaching by my desire to give back, my career in design has been immensely rewarding, and I’ve felt compelled to share my hard-earned knowledge with the next generation of designers. As a practitioner, I’ve harnessed my design and problem-solving skills to serve clients and address their customers’ needs, often finding myself as the lone woman in the room—both the creative and the entrepreneur.
Throughout my first term on the Women in Design Committee, I achieved significant milestones. I was instrumental in launching the inaugural Women in Industrial Design Chapter in New York City, providing a local platform for women designers to connect, collaborate, and thrive. Furthermore, I took the initiative to create and curate a column called “Women On Design” in Innovation Magazine, amplifying the voices and experiences of women in the industry.
One of the highlights of my tenure was the opportunity to address the Women in Design Deep Dive conference in Chicago, where the talk focused on how including diverse perspectives leads to successful and innovative design outcomes, and happier and healthier designers.
In the next term, I’m committed to working to develop inclusive membership models, advancing allyship within our community, increasing awareness of Women in Design (WID), and collaborating closely with the planning team for the 2024 Women in Design Deep Dive, to ensure it becomes a pivotal event for empowering women in our industry.
Despite women representing the majority of design students, a stark gender gap persists at the leadership level within our industry. This incongruity calls for a renewed commitment to change, and I am determined to spearhead this effort in my continued role on the Women in Design Committee. Together, with the collective strength of IDSA, we can propel women in design forward, shattering the status quo and translating our aspirations into tangible achievements. It’s time to fuel the flames of progress and empower women to realize their career dreams in the world of design.
Building Highly Effective Design Teams through Inclusion of Diverse Perspectives
This talk will focus on how including diverse perspectives leads to successful and innovative design outcomes, and happier and healthier designers. The presentation will include case studies, product design examples and experiences from careers managing multi- and trans-disciplinary design teams for both large corporations and independent design consultancies. Attendees will learn how to attract, support and nurture a diverse design team and tricks to find designers that don’t fit into the “traditional product designer” box.
Statement of Candidacy (2022-2023 term)
For over 25 years, I have been a part of the Industrial Design community, both as an educator and as a practitioner. I started teaching to give back. My design career has been very good to me, and I wanted to share what I learned “the hard way” to help young designers get ahead and find happiness in their work. As a practitioner, I use all my design and problem-solving skills to serve my clients and to best address the needs of their customers. Whether they are a start-up or a large corporation, I often find myself the “only” in the room—the only creative, the only entrepreneur and the only woman.
Over the years, I noticed an absence that can’t be easily explained. In my classroom, women make up the majority of our students; women are studying design and doing it with incredible drive, creativity, and dedication—so where are all the female creative leaders? In design today, women and men exist in the same institution and businesses, and they emerge from the same educational systems, yet there is a disconnect with reality. I seek to better understand why this is such a challenge, so that the IDSA women in the design community can smash the status quo apart and create some real and tangible change. It is time for women in design to move the needle and the energized collective of IDSA can play a significant role in supporting women to dive in feet first to make their career dreams come true.
This year, Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman, IDSA has made great strides with her product design and development studio Interwoven Design. As Principal and Founder of Interwoven Design Group, based in Brooklyn, NY, Rebeccah combines her expertise in wearable technology and smart textiles to lead her team in producing innovative design solutions. Her clients have ranged from startups to NASA, and her studio’s varied work in 2020 includes the HeroWear Apex “Exosuit for All,” designed to fit a diversity of bodies (i.e. not just male bodies). On Interwoven’s Instagram account, she and her team post about notable women in design, past and present, alongside process videos and photos of the designs they bring to fruition, from concept ideation sketches and materials research through to the integration of electronics, and always with a “laser focus on fit, style, and function.”
In addition to running a design studio, Rebeccah is an adjunct professor and lecturer in Pratt Institute’s Industrial Design department, as well as the founding director of the Intelligent Materials Applied Research and Innovation Lab (IMARI) at Pratt. With her vast experience in the industry, Rebeccah provides her students with invaluable insights as a female design leader—and not just from her work at Interwoven, but also as a former design director for Fila, Champion, and Nike.
Rebeccah says she is inspired by creative problem-solving and loves finding the answer to really tough questions; so, in a sense, she is well-suited for uncertain times like these. However, there’s “no doubt 2020 has been a hard year for everyone,” Rebeccah says. “When business was shut down here in NYC in early March, we [at Interwoven] had to scramble to find a way to work together without losing our momentum.”
By finding and adopting multiple software platforms for collaboration, “we were able to continue to work together without skipping a beat and deliver incredible products for our clients,” she continues. “I am inspired everyday by the resilience of the incredible designers who keep Interwoven going, and who worked together with me to solve difficult problems and overcome the challenges of working remotely.”
What’s next? “Sky’s the limit!” says Rebeccah. “No, seriously—I’m working on some top-secret space exploration stuff.”
