Isabel Prochner

Dr. Isabel Prochner (she/they) is a design teacher, researcher, and industrial designer focused on socially and community-engaged design. Her research, creative practice, and service endeavors to bolster social responsibility through design, thus participating in the transition to more equitable futures.

Prochner explores sex and gender equity in design, research that recently culminated in her second book, Designing for Sex and Gender Equity. It was published in the Routledge Design for Change book series in December 2023. The book explores how design interventions can and do support sex and gender equity, as well as considering the barriers still standing in the way. It features eight case studies that cross design disciplines and focus on various human-scale artifacts. She recently signed a contract with Routledge for her third book, Human Factors for Industrial Designers. She intends for this book to be a go-to resource for industrial design professionals as well as a new textbook for students in the field. 

Prochner was recently nominated for the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) Young Educator Award 2024. She has taught design at five universities—Virginia Tech, Syracuse University, the University of Montreal (Université de Montréal), Laval University (Université Laval) in Quebec City, Canada, and Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She joined Virginia Tech as an assistant professor of industrial design in August 2023. Prior to this position, she worked as an assistant professor of industrial and interaction design at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York, from August 2018 to May 2023. She has served on 19 graduate thesis juries and mentored approximately 25 undergraduate research assistants. 

As several examples of her outreach and service, Prochner is a member of the Sciences du Design (Sciences of Design) journal editorial board. She represents the Virginia Tech College of Architecture, Arts, and Design on the university-level Office of Undergraduate Research Advisory Board. She also led an initiative to found a diversity and inclusion group at the Virginia Tech School of Design called Flourish. The group aims to support diversity, equity, inclusion, health, and wellness of students, staff, and faculty through annual projects. The first initiative is developing the Precedent Project, an open education platform that presents design work outside the canon created by diverse designers who are not typically represented in mainstream design education resources.