Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor at Northeastern University. Her book What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World explores the places where disability shows up in design at all scales: assistive technology, furniture, architecture, urban planning, and more. It was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by NPR and won the 2021 Science in Society Journalism book prize.
Her art and design works have been exhibited on the White House lawn under the Obama presidency, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Vitra Museum, and many others, and her work is held in the permanent collections at MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt. She has been an NEH Public Scholar and a fellow at New America, and her commentary and criticism have been published in Harper’s, Art in America, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere.
More About Sara Hendren
"In her lab at Olin, she and her students have built things such as a ramp for wheelchair dancing and a lectern for a little person—personalized designs that suit a particular situation while simultaneously raising questions about the standardized dimensions of any space. These are exactly the sorts of projects Hendren loves. 'If you squint at that obituary I wrote in 2005, it looks like I was destined for a career in an engineering school,' she told me. 'But I never would have thought that at the time.'"
(Gutting, 2020, emphasis added)
A six-episode podcast series that "delves into the engineering classroom and looks at how perspectives from the arts, humanities, and the social sciences shape the 'why' and 'should' questions about the technologies we build."
Created, hosted, and produced by Sara Hendren and edited by Brian Funck.
