Past event: April 26, 2022

Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor at Olin College of Engineering who explores how our bodies interact with the built environment. Furniture, kitchens, schools and city streets all require humans to engage with assistive technology meant to act as a bridge between the body and world. We rarely stop to consider the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built. 

Hendren’s book What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World, does just that — reconsiders the lived experience of disability with familiar objects and environments. She explores the places where disability shows up in design, and the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation. What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by NPR and won a 2021 Science in Society Journalism award.

The speaker series, supported through an endowment by the Carlos and Andrea Alberini Family Foundation, brings renowned innovators and thinkers in design to campus and in virtual formats to inspire students and encourage community engagement and learning.