Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
After more than a decade of active participation in the International Council of Design (ico-D), and after almost seven years at its helm – first in the role of the Secretary-General, then the President and the Former President – the mandate of Croatian designer Iva Babaja in this international association has officially ended. During her mandate, she managed to thoroughly reorganize the association, to modernize it and pull it out of the biggest crisis since it was founded in 1963.
The International Council of Design – ico-D is an umbrella international design organization that today brings together about 200 professional associations of designers from 70 countries. Established in 1963, it has been operating for many years under the name of Icograda (International Council of Graphic Design Associations), then under the same acronym as the World Communication Design Council, and in 2014 it was renamed and reorganized as International Council of Design to encompass all design disciplines.
By conducting fundamental changes, Babaja played a key role in redefining the perception of design as a multidisciplinary activity, but also in transforming a single discipline organization into a multidisciplinary association, which she herself points out as the largest, historically most important change for the International Council of Design. The then Management of the association, under her leadership, is worked on restructuring the membership structure by dividing into three categories (professional practice, education and promotion), which, along with the financial recovery of the organization, enabled members to have much greater impact on the creation of the program than they had before.
Even more important is the fact that positive changes have also been noted by former members such as the American AIGA, which decided to return to membership, after it had left the organization at some earlier point due to obsolete views on the profession. Babaja’s report to the Icograda’s general assembly after the successful restructuring was rewarded with a 10-minute ovation, and these results ensured that in 2013 she was elected president of Icograda with 96 percent of the vote, placing Croatia on the map of countries that gave presidents to the association.
During her presidential mandate, Icograda finally transformed into ico-D (late 2014). With the end of her term of office in 2015, Babaja became the only woman in the Council of Former Presidents, and she is also the only woman in the history of that organization who has held her presidency full term.