CARA is a menstrual product and waste carrier designed for use in multi-day trips outdoors. Designed by recent grad Alexia Cohen as part of her thesis, DARE + DEFY: A Woman’s Place in the Great Outdoors, CARA—from the word carapace, meaning the shell of a turtle—features an expandable waste collection container at the center, with two separate dry enclosures at the top and bottom to keep unused menstrual products, toilet paper, and/or wipes clean and ready to use.

Antya Waegemann’s thesis, When No One Believes You: Redesigning the Rape Kit and Responses to Sexual Assault, proposes six different design interventions for sexual assault victims, nurses and the police, to increase report rates, improve the experience of getting a rape kit, and increase rape kit testing, as well as to reduce stigma and shame around sexual assault and increase accountability.

As part of SVA Products of Design’s partnership with Veterans Affairs (and held through the Design Research and Integration class taught by IDEO’s Lawrence Abrahamson), designers Smruti Adya, Bernice Wong, Lassor Feasley, Juho Lee, Christopher Rand, and Kuan Xu designed a number of solutions to improve women veterans’ experience in three different areas specific to visiting the VA Hospital: Transportation to the hospital; Wayfinding once in the building; and Pre-appointment communications.

Building on the findings of over 20 first-person interviews with VA staff and discharged veterans, the group surfaced three principal insights: The first is that there is an opportunity to facilitate better communication between veterans—veteran-to-veteran. The team learned that information around the transition to civilian life, and around the available veteran services “is perceived better when it comes straight from a veteran,” the team argued. “Veteran-to-veteran creates a much stronger bond, and the ‘young veteran’ is more likely to pay attention and communicate interest when the information comes directly from the source.”

As part of SVA Products of Design’s partnership with Veterans Affairs (and held through the Design Research and Integration class taught by IDEO’s Lawrence Abrahamson) , designers Jiani Lin, Alexia Cohen, Teng Yu, William Crum, and Antriksh Nangia used design to examine gender and the military—creating two design proposals aimed at changing the way people “see” women veterans.

With over 2,655 bike share stations in 65 cities and 90,000 active commuters across the United States, bike commuting is an undeniable trend—but the market caters almost exclusively to men. Versi is a fashionable, durable, and versatile piece that can go "from wheels to work" in an instant.

Design strategist and storyteller Roya Ramezani did not feel gender issues in the tech industry before she started working in Silicon Valley—where she found herself in a male-dominated environment in which women were not communicating their ideas. In contrast to the statistics, she joined a diverse team. After a month, however, she discovered something that changed everything: Even when they were equal number as men in the room, women weren’t contributing to the discussions equally. They were being quiet, and she thought of them as “not being present in the meeting room.” Roya’s thesis, entitled Exponent: Amplifying the Female Voices in Tech Discourse, attempts to address these issues using product design, service design design, and platform design.