Carolina Gill with Apollo-Soyuz astronaut Vance Brand in one of the NASA workshops she taught.

Carolina Gill, an assistant professor in the Department of Design at Ohio State, moved to the United States shortly after graduating from Universidad Javeriana in Colombia. But she soon traded her life as an Atlanta housewife for graduate school after deciding to obtain a master’s degree.

“I studied my master’s not only to learn more and to become part of the industry, but even more so to become accredited as an Industrial Designer in the United States,” says Gill, whose field of expertise is Industrial Design.

After graduating with a master’s degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and teaching there for 11 years, Gill came to OSU where she currently coordinates the foundation courses for her department. These are the classes that all design students must take in their initial two years to learn about basic design elements. After their second year, design students are required to focus on their chosen area of expertise either in industrial, interior or visual communication design.

Being involved in these classes is important for Gill, since a major part of her research interests relate to design in multidisciplinary environments. As part of this research, she has worked closely for the past three years with Professor Blaine Lilly (Industrial, Welding and Systems Engineering) to introduce design methods to the engineering community through courses at OSU and at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Engineering Training Program.

Gill and Lilly have taught a three–day workshop on innovation and creative thinking at all the major NASA centers. Recently, they were surprised to find Apollo-Soyuz astronaut Vance Brand in their class at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Brand flew in the 1975 joint U.S.-Soviet mission, and also was the commander on several of the early shuttle missions.

Gill says that teaching this course has been both challenging and rewarding, in part because she is so far removed from her comfort zone. Engineers and scientists in this environment are not familiar with the industrial design profession and they have difficulty seeing how industrial designers can make a contribution to their highly technical field. She says: “I am talking to top scientists in the world about creative thinking, and it’s a tough sale. I have to overcome the initial stereotype, which many engineers hold, that designers are just about making things look pretty.”

Another project she currently heads is the development of a website for the NASA Systems Engineering Handbook, which describes elaborate sequences of processes and operations critical to mission success. She is working on making it easier for users to navigate and interact with the many layers of information contained in the Handbook. “Engineers tend to optimize systems; however, they often de-emphasize the users’ needs,” Gill says.

She advises Hispanic women to be persistent, and to believe that what they have to offer is as good, or better, than what anyone else brings to the table. “Being different is the biggest advantage you can have. You need to know how to turn difference into positives, instead of forcing yourself to fit in. One of the most important things is learning to be okay with who you are.”