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Public Lecture Title: Prosthetic Futures: Ethics in Disability and Design

Thursday, November 9, 2023, 5:00 pm, Stackhouse Theater

Sara Hendren is a humanist who works in technology. She taught design for disability at Olin College of Engineering and her collaborate public art, social design, and writing projects reframe the human body and technology.

At Olin she led the , which is a technical and social laboratory that explores the encounters between humans and the built environment-especially when there’s a mismatch between standardized design and the atypical body or mind. It asks critical questions about the future of the body: What counts as normal?

Hendren’s work has been exhibited widely and is held in the permanent collections of MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt design museum. Her writing and design work have been featured in The New York Times and Fast Company and on NPR. She is the creator and host of the podcast, a 6-part series addressing how perspectives from the arts, humanities, and social sciences shape the “why” and “should” questions about the technologies we build. At Olin, she was the Principal Investigator on a four-year project supported by the Mellon Foundation to bring more arts experiences to engineering 91´«Ã½ and faculty.

Hendren’s book WHAT CAN A BODY DO? was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and LitHub.

Hendren earned a B.A. in Studio Art at Wheaton College, a M.A. in European History at UCLA, and a Master of Design Studies at Harvard University.

Visit for more information on Sara Hendren.