EP 115: Designing the Built World for our Bodies | Sara Hendren

Design Lab with Bon Ku

In this episode, we talk about what a body can do and how we meet the built world.

Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, professor at Olin College of Engineering, and the creator and host of the Sketch Model podcast. She is the author of What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World, published by Riverhead/Penguin Random House. It was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by NPR and won the Science in Society Journalism book prize.

Sara is a humanist in tech. Her work of 2010-2020 includes collaborative public art, social design, and writing that reframes the human body and technology. Her work has been exhibited on the White House lawn under the Obama administration, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, The Vitra Design Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art, among other venues, and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper Hewitt Museum. She has been a National Fellow at the New America think tank, and her work has been supported by an NEH Public Scholar grant, residencies at Yaddo and the Carey Institute for Global Good, and an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. At Olin, she was also the Principal Investigator on a four-year initiative to bring more arts experiences to engineering students and faculty, supported by the Mellon Foundation.

Episode mentions and links:

https://sarahendren.com/

Sketch Model Podcast

Engineering at Home

AccessibleIcon.org

When The World Isn't Designed For Our Bodies via NYT

Restaurants Sara would take you to: Clover Food Lab

Follow Sara: LinkedIn

Episode Website: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/115