“The Women and Girls” project for Allan Chochinov’s Industrial Design class in Fall 2009 was inspired by Half The Sky, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s sobering but ultimately optimistic chronicle of the plight of girls and women around the world.

It is now a website created by Alexej Steinhardt, Lillian Lee and Jennifer Glaser: WOMEN+GIRLS

Chochinov writes: “For the project kick-off, the class screened videos such as The Girl Effect and Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, and guest Elizabeth Scharpf, founder of Sustainable Health Enterprises, presented her work around creating sustainable, affordable, locally-produced sanitary pads.

At the end of the three-hour class, students were asked to commit to a topic for the remaining four weeks of the semester. The only constraints were that the subject had to concern itself with girls and/or women and that it had to be personal in some way. After research, prototyping, and branding, 23 projects emerged, each refracted through the student’s point of view, and each informed by investigation and making.”