Rethinking rape kits| Antya Waegemann designs solutions for sexual assault survivors
Designer, creative strategist and entrepreneur Antya Waegemann is good at complex community-based problem-solving. Her academic background could have propelled her into academia – she holds a Masters in Liberal Arts from Harvard University in Corporate Sustainable Innovation – but her passion for helping others has seen her throw her weight behind tackling pressing gender issues.
In 2019, she graduated from the MFA Products of Design programme at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she worked on a year-long thesis exploration entitled ‘When No-one Believes You: Redesigning Rape Kits and Responses to Sexual Assault’. As part of this exploration, she has become a sexual assault advocate at the New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City and has designed six different products, services and apps that aim to solve the problem of how the US and other countries respond to sexual assault and sexual assault survivors.
Her ingenious products and services include Hark, a speculative over-the-counter post-rape health kit and rape kit service, and RN Advocate (RNA), a rape kit for emergency-room nurses, for which she won the 2019 Graduate Design Award from ICFF x Interior Design magazine during NYCxDESIGN Week. Her SAFE is a ‘911’ app for sexual assault; Code, is a DNA-detecting medical device; and Redesign the Kit, is a public exhibition of the rape kit; while Allay is a rape kit-tracking app.
She presented her work in the 2019 Antenna Conference as part of Dutch Design Week and showed the Hark rape kit at the 2019 Global Grad Show in Dubai for Design Week. She has joined the SVA Ground Floor Incubator in New York to begin to prototype both the rape kit and sexual assault response designs and formulate a venture around them.
She has worked in research at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and designed for companies that include frog design and Johnson & Johnson. She recently founded her own company, Redesign the Kit.
Follow @waegemann on Instagram. For more information, visit www.antyawaegemann.com.
Antya Waegemann is one of the young global graduates selected to present at #DI2020. Design Indaba curates the selection of global graduates together with the heads of more than 40 design institutes and colleges (and beyond) around the world. The selection has been guided by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Each change-maker must demonstrate social or environmental impact, engagement with global challenges, project feasibility, and/or an exceptionally high level of innovation.
Tickets for the Design Indaba 2020 are available through www.webtickets.co.za.
For more information:
www.designindaba.com | Facebook – @designindaba | Twitter – @designindaba | Instagram @designindaba
Issued on behalf of:
Design Indaba (www.designindaba.com)
Contact:
Scout PR & Social Media
+27 21 685 0169
