Since May, I’ve had the pleasure of reading and writing about great female designers for Core77’s Designing Women series. With this biweekly column, our idea was to highlight the achievements of lesser-known and underappreciated female design pioneers—and also, along the way, show off a bunch of awesome and beautiful work that we’re guessing many readers won’t be familiar with. As part of Core77’s 2015 year in review, I thought it would be fun to call out my own personal favorite objects from the first eight months of Designing Women, presented here in chronological order.

Marianne Brandt’s 1924 ashtray

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Brandt was the first woman to join the Bauhaus’s metal workshop, where she strived for the “simplest of forms” in a series of chic household objects, including this brass and electroplated nickel-silver ashtray.

The Quacker

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Belle Kogan’s irresistibly cute 1934 alarm clock was made of an early plastic called Plaskon.

Aino Aalto’s pendant lamp for the Villa Mairea

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Aino Aalto didn’t design as many products as her more famous husband, Alvar—her biggest impact was as the creative director of Artek—but the pieces she did design were remarkable. This 1936 adjustable metal pendant was custom-made for Alvar’s experimental Villa Mairea in Noormarkku, Finland.

The Cobra Lamp

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Greta Magnusson Grossman’s snakelike lamp has become so familiar that it’s easy to miss just how innovative it was in 1950. Grossman incorporated functions that we now take for granted, including a flexible pivoting arm and a metal shade that can be rotated 360 degrees, allowing the user a simple way to control and reflect light.

The Saratoga Sofa

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When they couldn’t find a sofa they liked for their own home, Lella and Massimo Vignelli designed the 1964 Saratoga Line for Poltronova (still in production today). The modular elements allow for a variety of seating combinations.

Componibili

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The first Componibili storage system, released in 1967, was square—Kartell cofounder Anna Castelli Ferrieri introduced the round version two years later. It’s still the brand’s best-selling product.

Due Più Chairs

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Now 79 years old and still working, the Italian designer Nanda Vigo has been honing her unique brand of sleek, space-age (and sometimes shaggy) furniture and interiors since 1959. These tubular-steel-and-faux-fur Due Più chairs are from 1971.

Hisako Watanabe’s springy, butterfly-winged sofa

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It may not be the most practical seat, but the Japanese designer’s 1988 Papillon sofa is a perfect example of her whimsical, almost surreal style, which she once described as “a dream for the long, but all too short journey to 1999.”

The Butterfly Chair

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Speaking of butterflies: Danish designer Nanna Ditzel used them as inspiration for her 1990 chair, cut from two-millimeter-thick folded fiberboard and supported by six insect-like legs.

The 1993 Ford Probe

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Yes, the Probe. Automotive-ergonomics pioneer Mimi Vandermolen designed the second generation of Ford’s compact sports coupe with a eye toward the driving experience of women—even asking her male designers to don fake fingernails and threatening to make them wear skirts while getting in and out of the car. She once told her boss, “If I can solve all the problems inherent in operating a vehicle for a woman, that’ll make it that much easier for a man to use.”

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More from Core77's 2015 Year in Review

• 15 of Your Favorite Posts from 2015

• The Coming Age of Automobility and What It Means for Designers

• 10 Clever, Innovative or Bizarre Design Processes from 2015

Material News You Can Use

• 10 Brilliant and Beautiful Objects from Our 'Designing Women' Series

• 12 Projects to Inspire Future Living

• Design Entrepreneurs Were Killing it in 2015

• The Year in Furniture Designs, Part 1: The Beautiful, the Innovative and the Unusual

• The Year in Furniture Designs, Part 2: Design/Build Techniques and Learning from the Past and Present

• 15 Tools and Tool-Based Projects We Loved in 2015

• 8 New Types of Digital Fabrication Machines

• 17 Random and Amazing Phenomena We Saw This Year

• The Best Product Design GIFs of 2015