Antya Waegemann is a designer based in Brooklyn, NY. She has worked in a variety of mediums from museum pressed flower curation, graphic and visual design, and interaction design. With a background in urban sustainability and governance and a passion for social impact, her work often surrounds larger complex community based problem-solving.
In May 2019, she graduated from the MFA Products of Design program at the School of Visual Arts where she worked on a year-long thesis exploration titled, 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.
She most recently joined the NEW INC. incubator in New York City, part of the New Museum, to begin to prototype her rape kit and sexual assault response designs and formulate a venture around them. She will also be showing her speculative over-the-counter rape kit (Hark) at the 2019 Global Grad Show in Dubai for Design Week and was awarded the 2019 Graduate Design Award for(RNA) her rape kit designed for emergency room nurses at the ICFF NYCxDESIGN Awards.
Antya also holds a Masters in Liberal Arts from Harvard University in Corporate Sustainable
Innovation and a Bachelors of Arts from New York University.
Project: When No One Believes you
According to Rainn (Criminal Justice Statistics), in the USA every 92 seconds, someone is sexually assaulted, and only 30% of sexual assault victims report the crime.
These statistics led Antya Waegemann to create a redesigned rape kit, called When No One Believes you. The kit is a response to sexual assault and it contains six different design interventions for use by victims, nurses and police. This includes an emergency sexual assault resource app, a product that detects DNA during the exam, and a rape kit tracking system.
The product aims to increase report rates, improve the experience of having to use a rape kit, and increase rape kit testing. It also aims to reduce stigma and shame around sexual assault, and to increase accountability. Waegemann wants this project to be an example of how design can shape accessibility in governmental and bureaucratic systems.