Sara Hendren - Healthy relationality, how we meet the built world, and the curriculum of the future

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Sara Hendren is a humanist in tech. This may seem like a strange statement, but it may be a perfect place to pick up Sara's trajectory. It both describes her well as someone who makes a life defying categories and is at the same time too small for her expansive presence in this world. She is a brilliant designer, an affecting educator, and just might be the source of language that will transform the way you witness the world.

Sara is an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor at Olin College of Engineering. Her collaborative design projects of the last decade reframe the body, technology, and the conditions of disability. She is the author of What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World and a steward of ideas about how and where disability shows up in design. In her elegant and wonderful language she furnishes an inventive tradition of remaking our everyday tools and environments that also carries the highest human stakes. It was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by NPR and won a Science in Society Journalism prize.

Her art and design work has been exhibited around the world—on the White House lawn under the Obama administration, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, The Vitra Design Museum, Seoul Museum of Art, and other venues and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and Cooper Hewitt Museum .

She has been a Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good and a Public Scholar grantee from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a fellow in Education Policy at the New America think tank, where she is researching the future of work for adults with cognitive and developmental disabilities.

Sara holds a Bachelors in Studio Art from Wheaton College, a Masters of Arts in European History from UCLA, and a Masters of Design in Design Studies from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is the mother of three.

Sara's writing and thinking are exhilarating and it is with the deepest excitement that we welcome her to Origins.