CodeLikeAGirl 2016

The Challenge: Young girls do not get enough encouragement to pursue STEM fields.

Solving for: Daughters of GE employees in grades 6-8.

Role: Visual designer (and Harry Potter consultant) on a multi-disciplinary team.

In 2016, the CodeLikeAGirl initiative provided a day-long event for 70 daughters of GE employees to learn about STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) through Harry Potter themed activities. For example, we taught 'Defense Against the Dark Arts' cybersecurity, and 'Muggle Studies' UX persona creation. This event is close to my heart because of the huge lack of female representation in the tech industry – I wanted these girls to feel that STEM are not only accessible to them, but also exciting and fun!

My first job on this team was to design the pre-event poster (above), to make parents aware of the event and give them a way to sign their daughters up. The original idea for the Harry Potter crest was to represent each house with a historical woman famous for her work in each of the STEM fields - Chien-Shiung Wu (science), Evelyn Boyd Granville (technology), Radia Perlman (engineering), and Ada Lovelace (math). We decided that the young girls probably would not be familiar with those women before the event, so instead we used icons to represent each of the STEM fields. The team hung these posters around the office in kitchens, elevators, and desks, resulting in full signup weeks before the event.

My next task in this project was to design sweatshirts for the girls so that they would have a memento to keep from the event. During the activities, the girls would be broken out into houses that corresponded to each of the STEM fields, and taught about the women who represented those fields. My first idea was to design sweatshirts for each house, with silhouettes and names of their house 'founder' on the sleeves. Due to budgeting constraints, we decided instead to create a single design to use for girls across houses.

Image used for the back of the event sweatshirt, designed with Adobe Illustrator.

Working within the GE Brand Guidelines which state that we could only use pre-approved GE icons on apparel for external use, I pasted together a representation of Harry Potter's glasses from a sideways left-parenthesis, two circles, and a lightning bolt from GE Current's approved icons. We used this image (left) for the backs of the sweatshirts, and added the GE logo onto the right shoulder.

Recording the CodeLikeAGirl podcast episode. Pictured: Me (left), producer Megan Jones (center), and colleague Hannah (right).

Producer Megan Jones recorded a story for this event, which was then taken on by Lauren Schiller of NPR's 'Inflection Point.' Listen to me talk (albiet a bit nervously) about how coding is like magic from minutes 1:00-2:00 on the 'Inflection Point' soundcloud.

My colleague Diana, who lead the 2016 CodeLikeAGirl event, was kind enough to leave me this comment after our work together:

“You were the ultimate professional when it came time to critique your work.”