Describe the women who have most influenced your life and the formation of your character.

I come from a small family. I have a sister and my mother and father and one aunt. My aunt was an editor at Vogue. When I was seven, she was an editor at Glamour magazine. I remember going over to the CondŽ Nast building and seeing the art department there. Right away, I knew that was what I wanted to be. First of all, there were a lot of women. Editorial departments at that time were predominantly run by women.

My aunt's story is rather typical for her age and social group. She was born around 1925, grew up in Manhattan, went to an all-girls school, and then went to Mt. Holyoke for college. When the World War II broke out, all the men were gone, and the editorial jobs that were left vacant went to women. She made great strides and was accomplished at what she did.

Going to her art department, and just seeing the markers, the white Formica, the photographs, Avedon's photographs on the table, it was just fascinating, a sort of Modernist vision of working women. My aunt was an independent woman - a woman who never married, who was very comfortable in her career. In a way she was a role model, because she gave access and permission - because she was in our family - for me to pursue art. I really think that it was an advantage being female and having a talent in art, and a talent really at that time, and still to this day somewhat, was defined by whether you could copy something. I could make a vase look like a vase and my parents nurtured that in me.

Do you consider yourself a feminist? Why or why not?

Absolutely. I would say that I am feminist. I don't really think that I would have had it in my character to have fought as hard as one would have needed to fight prior to this point in history. There was a nice road laid ahead for me. It's so much a part of who I am. I was fourteen years old at the time of the women's movement and it was everywhere. You embrace a radicalism at that juncture, when you're a teenager, with vehemence. Any kind of cause you get on the bandwagon with. Because of that, I definitely realized the inequities that existed between men and women at that point. I realized that women did have a voice about the inequities in marriage, in the work place, and in relationships.

I can't imagine any woman that wouldn't say that they subscribe to the ideals that allowed them to be where they are now. It would have been a harder road than what I've experienced. I was very lucky to have been born in this period of time. People often ask, what other period of time would you have liked to have been born in. I say, "No better time than now."

What would you most like to tell your daughter, son, the next generation about your hopes for women of the future? How would you advise a young woman to go about finding her own voice?

Be visible. Being visible doesn't mean trying to get a publicity machine going at all, but be visible. You can be visible in a number of ways. You can be prolific. As a designer, our profession allows for many ways to be visible. We have numerous design competitions that are well-judged and juried. We have a way of getting one's work out. If you are talented, your work will be seen by other designers. Those other designers are then going to chair a conference· In this way, it all comes about. So be prolific with your work. Nothing's ever given to you. Everybody has to work extremely hard to basically get what makes you happy, whatever that may be. And learn to articulate your thoughts. These two things.

How do you define success for yourself? How would you define success for the next generation?

I try to make myself visible in that I teach. We, as a general populace, have a responsibility to go and find women who were icons in any period of time because they are invisible. They were not written in history. Once the 70s came along, then there was Gloria Steinem, Kate Millet, Susan Sontag, all the influential people that started to write about sexual politics in some way. I think it's our responsibility to find women like that. At the same time, women I don't think are encouraged, girls are not encouraged (and I hope this is changing within the system) to be public speakers. The nature of design is, "It takes two." Pose the problem. We will solve it. We will solve it within our own vocabulary. We will solve it according to a number of different criteria. One has to be able to articulate the thought process of a design critique, to be able to talk about that in some way. Women, in general, are not encouraged to do public speaking so they become invisible. If they're invisible, then they're not put in the press. If they're not put in the press, then they're not asked to participate. So I encourage women to teach as a starting point because that does give a forum for perfecting and being comfortable with a group of people and articulating your design manifesto in some way. I remember being in a design conference probably about four years ago and there were no women on the major platform. They were on the panels but not on the major platform. I questioned the director of the conference. I said, "It is your responsibility as the head of this organization to find those women." At the same time, it's the woman's responsibility to step up.

What made you decide to pursue a non-traditional occupation?

I grew up in New York. My parents got the New York Times and on Sundays, part of the ritual would be to go through the newspaper. At seven or eight, I wasn't really reading it, but I was looking at the pictures. Of course, what were the biggest pictures in the paper, and a black and white paper at the time? The advertisements. And I remember the Orbach's ads, and that typography, and illustration. This was pre-photography in advertising, and it all appealed to me in a great way.

I grew up in Manhattan. I was born in 1955. It was a really wonderful place to grow up for a number of different reasons. We had access to venues that other people didn't have access to, such as the Museum of Modern Art and The Guggenheim. As a designer, they were both very formative to me.

My mother and my father were well versed and both college-educated, but they didn't know what design was. I think that design, even to this day, is an invisible occupation, in that it touches people's lives. Literally with everything they touch, a designer probably has had something to do with that product, that page, that experience, whether it be in matters of space or the web, both two-dimensional and three-dimensional and virtual experience.

Growing up, I remember one of my first cognitive experiences was going to the Guggenheim and seeing an Andy Warhol show there. I must have been about seven-years-old. For a child, that was fascinating, as a museum for viewing art, it's the most perfect place because you have a ramp. You're interacting with the architecture there, which is a wonderful way of absorbing architecture. You're interacting with architecture so you're getting to know it. And as you're running down this ramp, here's Warhol. It was graphic design and advertising, and yet once again, graphic design wasn't really apparent. And yet, I related to Warhol's pieces because he was talking about, the human condition in some way, shape or form, in the present day society, in the 60s. The electric chair, Kennedy's death, there were so many evocative images, let alone the color and traditional forms of composition that he exploited in ways that spoke effectively to me.

What challenges have you dealt with at work or at home due to your gender? What benefits?

I went to college and studied conceptual art for three years at Hartford Art School, which is part of the University of Hartford, and then got my degree in graphic design at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. Because I was female, I wasn't deterred from going into art, because they didn't think that I necessarily had to be the breadwinner in the family. That gave permission to explore that talent.

If I had been a man, perhaps it would have been engineering, architecture, who knows. I don't think that design is any more behind the scenes than architecture. The difference is that architecture is big, and it is relatively permanent. There are implications inherent in architecture; if it is not working, it will be life threatening. Those three things confer a stature to architecture that design does not have. General design is ephemeral. We design books, the printed page. They often times never go away, but it is up to a certain point, and to a certain extent this will worsen the further we go into the virtual environment; it's temporal. Those change on a daily basis. In general, we design video, furniture, space, posters, fabric, and music. All these things we actually do as designers, but if we're going to take a very traditional definition of designer, it's going to be paper, and two-dimensional. And so, therefore, the ephemeral goes away.

I also get asked the question why there isn't a larger number of women in the profession. Women have to make a decision at some point in their lives, whether or not they want to be a mother. In my life this was not by design, but just happened in my life. I had my children when I was 40, about a year apart from each other. I had already established my studio for fifteen years. My studio was my baby for many years and I could devote an extreme amount of time and care that it takes to develop your own personal vision, your own visual vocabulary. It takes time to develop that. I know that I would have had to make a sacrifice to one or the other. At the time I began, I wasn't interested in having children at that age. I wanted to be doing this work. It was what was important to me.

I think it is extremely difficult if you are juggling motherhood and trying to run a business, or are a professional in some way. When I'm with my children, I want to be 100% with my children. The way that I do it is that I'm able to come into the office, usually around 10:30am. I spend time with the kids in the morning, get them off to the park, and to school, and I don't have to work extremely late anymore. I'm usually home by 6 o'clock. I'm able to still be extremely satisfied with what I'm doing here and feel like I'm not really compromising on my parenting, or enjoying my children.

What woman (living or dead) would you most like to have dinner with and why?

So many people come to mind. Madame Curie, her life as a scientist and what she went through. Gertrude Stein in the 20s and being a part of her soirees and meeting Picasso, to meet everybody else who was there.

Eileen Gray, also, a designer from the 20s and 30s who created architecture and furniture and carpets and materials and was prolific. Her work remains contemporary today. She's recognized somewhat today.