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.

“At first, it was hard for us to relate to our target audience," comments Souvik. "But we quickly realized that underneath the sometimes strange behavior of denimheads—whether that was soaking their jeans in the bathtub in lieu of washing it in the washing machine to avoid losing too much indigo dye in their jeans, or participating in denim world tours where jeans would be sent around the world to be worn by different denimheads for a month at a time—there was an underlying theme of commitment to sustainability and authenticity...values that we could very much relate to.”