Belle Kogan

Belle Kogan (1902–2000) was a Russian-American industrial designer and is regarded as the first prominent female in the profession in the United States (Godmother of Industrial Design) as well as one of the founders of the profession itself. In 1994, she was recognized as a fellow of both the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) and Industrial Designers Institute (IDI).

Early life and education Kogan was born in Ilyashevka, Russia, on June 26, 1902, and emigrated to Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1906. From an early age, she showed an interest in art. Regarding her senior year of high school, Kogan says, "...an unexplained inspiration on the part of my high school art teacher induced her to have me study Mechanical Drawing." Kogan was the only girl in the class. During this time, she also attended the Art Students League in Manhattan. at 185 Madison Avenue in New York City with a retainer from Quaker and started designing houseware products for Bausch & Lomb, Bakelite Corp, Dow Chemical Company, Federal Glass, Haviland & Co., Libbey Glass, Maryland Plastics, Red Wing Pottery, Reed & Barton, Towle Manufacturing Co., and US Glass. She said:In plastics the manufacturer has a material with tremendous possibilities. It is still in the active process of growth and development, but is rapidly gaining its stride. It is a material which no manufacturer, if he be alert and watchful of his competition, can afford to overlook. Radios, clocks, dishes, jewelry—all being developed in plastics today—have enormous significance. Kogan believed that "good design should keep the consumer happy and the manufacturer in the black." In an interview Kogan said, "Today there is probably no one group more keenly alive to the caprices and demands of the buying public as industrial designers. The designer's viewpoint, therefore, is a valuable one from the basis of manufacture as well as from the basis of merchandising and selling. It is a broad conception of the consumers' desire." She employed a full-time staff a staff of three women designers by 1939. Kogan was the focus of the 1946 one-woman show at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. By this time, she was considered to be the 'only woman freelance silverware designer'. Social-cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai comments that "...women are forced to enter the labor force in new ways on the one hand, and continue the maintenance of familial heritage on the other." Kogan chose a career saying, By the end of World War I, women had begun to enter the world of design. The entry was not always welcome though. In a 1939 interview, Kogan said "manufacturers were quite antagonistic when a woman came around proposing new ideas–they didn't think a woman knew enough about the mechanical aspects of the situation."

Women designers took a practical approach to the design of housewares. Kogan was very much at the forefront of this. She remarked that the thing which needs most to be understood by the manufacturer—particularly at this stage of our commercial development—is that the sale of any product is greatly determined by the reaction of the feminine consumer...Thirty million women—all potential customers—constituting practically the entire buing structure of the nation—comprise a force which cannot or should not be disregarded. The tastes of the American woman, her reaction to color and form, are of vital importance to the manufacturer. Men such as Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, and Norman Bel Geddes began heading their own firms. Belle Kogan became the only woman of the time to do the same.