Betty Baugh, FIDSA, grew up in San Antonio, TX and attended Stephens College in Columbia, MO for an AA Degree in liberal arts, later transferring to the New York State School of Industrial Ceramic Design at Alfred University, NY. She spent a school summer throwing pottery at the Whitte Museum in San Antonio, TX and received her BFA degree cum laude from Alfred in 1953.
She formed a partnership and moved to West Virginia, where she designed handblown glass, her own house and furniture, and taught a ceramic class at the Huntington Museum. In New York City, she designed new products for manufacturers' representatives at their showrooms and traveled to trade shows to build a solid client base. In 1963, Baugh moved to Columbus, OH, creating designs for West Virginia and Ohio glass companies, and worked with a San Francisco import company, developing designs for the many Asian manufacturers they represented and traveling to Japan and Taiwan for research. During this period, she joined what was then IDSA's Ohio Valley Chapter.
In 1972, Baugh settled in Tiburon, CA with her partner and four children. In 1986, she relocated to Mill Valley, CA and formed a one-person independent consultancy, Betty Baugh Design. She created food service product designs for Libbey Glass, L.E. Smith Glass and Grainware; tabletop designs for Villeroy & Boch and Wilton Armetale; and architectural glass concepts for USG. Other clients spanned advertising, photography, local architectural installations, and manufactured gift products.
In 1993, she moved to Kirkland, WA and continued to develop houseware products with Progressive International in Seattle. She became very active in IDSA, moving up to the national level in leadership roles. Baugh represented IDSA in the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design congresses, published articles, lectured at design schools, and juried the NHMA Annual Student Competition.
In 1999, Baugh returned to San Francisco and her one-person design practice. Her glass platter and Tower grater were shown at the 2000 Tacoma Washington Museum Show, "Fast Forward: The Shape of Northwest Design," and her designs were also shown at the Toledo Museum exhibit, "Toledo Designs For a Modern America." Her Tower grater won an Award of Merit at the 2000 Northwest Industrial Design Invitational Competition in Seattle.
In 2001, LG Electronics invited Baugh to serve as a juror for the Electronics Competition in Seoul, Korea. In 2002, she began teaching at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Industrial Design of Glass Production, and served as a juror for the Lexmark "Design of Business Printer of the Future" competition in Lexington, KY.
Baugh instructed design students at City College of San Francisco from 2006 to 2010. She worked as an industrial designer and owner of Betty Baugh Design for more than four decades.
