How can we leverage emerging technologies to strengthen human connections? To answer this question, our industry guests will explore different approaches to connection-building from a variety of lenses, including digital spaces, emerging media, human-computer interaction, and human-human interaction. Our panelists include Lauren Race from the former Twitter Accessibility Team/Ability Lab, Ben Swire from Make Believe Works, Deana Yu from NYC Mayor’s Office, Angela Hawken from Marron Institute, and moderator Amy Hurst from NYU Ability Project.

Lauren Race is an accessibility designer, researcher, and educator working in academia and industry. Her process combines human-centered, multisensory, and co-design methods to remove barriers to information access. She earned her master’s from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and currently teaches Multisensory Design at ITP. As the former Staff Accessibility Designer at Twitter, her process combines human-centered, multisensory, and co-design methods to craft and evaluate accessible experiences. Lauren’s design journey began focusing on the visual, attending Pratt Institute and working as an art director for over a decade. It was there that she fell in love with accessibility design, expanding the visual design to include other sensory modalities. When Lauren is not at work, she is usually at the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library developing tactile art and design techniques, teaching Multisensory Design at ITP, and researching the design of accessible exhibit interactives at the Intrepid Museum.

Ben Swire is an award-winning designer and writer, and former Design Lead at the legendary innovation firm, IDEO. The thread that runs through his varied background in design thinking, philosophy, quantum theory, cinema, psychoanalytic theory, and literature is an exceptional curiosity about the hidden factors that influence our lives when we’re not looking. While at IDEO Ben created Make Believe Time as a bi-weekly creative play date for the IDEO community. People from all levels in the studio came to the sessions to learn, create, play, laugh, and, most importantly, meaningfully connect with their colleagues and themselves. Participants walked away refreshed, energized, and ready to tackle challenges in new and creative ways. When interest spread beyond the walls of IDEO, Make Believe Works was born and now helps organizations ranging from Fortune 500 stalwarts to first-year start-ups to build the creative and emotional muscle memory that leads to a healthy, innovative, collaborative work culture.

Deana Yu is the Design Lead at the Service Design Studio, under the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity. Half graphic designer and half policy analyst, Deana works artistically and analytically to bridge the information gap in public service. It is her mission to increase the equity and accessibility of government systems through intuitive graphic design. She believes that design is a catalyst for communication, education, & social change. In Spring 2021, Deana graduated with honors from CUNY Baruch College with a Bachelor’s in Public Affairs and a double minor in Sociology and Graphic Arts, magna cum laude. In the fall of 2021, she began with the NYC Department of Transportations’ Urban Design Unit under the prestigious NYC Urban Fellows program.

Angela Hawken, Ph.D., is a Professor of Public Policy and Director of the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management. She is the founding director of NYU’s BetaGov, which supports innovation and testing for social good. Her team of research and practice scholars, along with a growing cadre of NYU graduate students, works closely with state and local agencies, schools, and nonprofits across 32 states and six countries in developing and testing practices, policies, and new technologies. She is dedicated to partnering with “pracademics” on rapid-cycle innovation and experimentation, empowering practitioners and the people they serve with a central role so that research is performed with them. She directs a community-supervision resource center for the US Department of Justice and the NYU Opioid Collaborative, which works with justice agencies in six states on designing, implementing, and testing responses to the opioid crisis. Most recently, her team is helping prosecutors to harness their own data for equitable decision-making, through analysis and decision-support tools.

Amy Hurst is an Associate Professor at New York University with a joint appointment in the Occupational Therapy Department in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and the Technology, Culture, and Society Department in the Tandon School of Engineering. As of 2019, she serves as the Director of the Ability Project, an interdisciplinary research space dedicated to the intersection between disability and technology. Amy’s work primarily focuses on working closely with end users to understand accessibility challenges and the potential for novel assistive technologies to address them. She have been working in accessibility research since 2001 and is currently interested in how we can empower others to “DIY” and build their own assistive technologies through designing accessible tools or training materials for digital fabrication tools.

Design Week 2023 is a series of events centered around Connection & Community Through Design. Today, our world is overloaded with ever-increasing digital interactions that have the potential to inhibit physical connections; we’re hoping to critically examine the ability of these emerging technologies to connect us together in new and exciting ways. We believe that engineers, artists, urban planners, social workers, and designers alike must come together to create holistic, real-life solutions across all scales and design with the future in mind. Throughout Design Week 2023, we will work to answer the following question: how can we leverage emerging technologies to help us build and strengthen human connections?

*This workshop is open to the public and will take place in person at the NYU MakerSpace EventSpace, located in the Tandon School of Engineering on the Brooklyn campus.*

Time: 6:30 PM — 8:00 PM EST

Free!

Registration