So Sarah Hendren was drawn to painting as a kid, studied it in college, and then began to build her body of work and career as a fine artist, really focusing on painting.
But then a series of experiences center in what from the outside looking in may have seemed like a very different direction, but from the inside, looking out was a completely organic and aligned expression of her blended passion, to see, to create, to design, and to be of service.
So now an artist, design researcher, writer and professor at Olin College of Engineering, Sarah describes herself as a humanist in tech, focusing on the intersection between disability or the perception of it, and what she calls the built world, or how the world is designed to either support or dismantle freedom and autonomy based on our bodies and our capabilities.
And if you're thinking, well, this isn't about me, you will quickly discover how well intended, yet misguided that assumption is likely to be.
It is about all of us.
Sarah's work over the last decade includes collaborative public art and social design that engages the human body, technology and politics of disability, things like a lectern for short stature or a ramp for wheelchair dancing.
She's also co founded the Accessible Icon project, co created a digital archive of low tech prosthetics, and her work has been exhibited everywhere from Victoria and Albert Museum, the Doc center for Contemporary Art, the Vitre Design Museum, sole Museum of Art and other venues, and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and Cooper Hewitt Museum.
Her new book is what can a body do?
How we meet the built world.
This was a conversation that took us deep into the intersection between how we look at ourselves, how we move through the world, the assumptions we make, the things we see and don't see, and really awakened me to so much that I think I have not seen and maybe taken for granted.
Love this conversation and really excited to share it with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields and this is good life project.
It's interesting, so much of the, sort of like the quote, recent body of work revolves around design in the context of ability, disability, and we can, we're going to dive into what all those terms are or are not.
But it seems like the much earlier in life passion for you was painting was fine art.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, that is my, my natural bent, you know, the representation of ideas in physical stuff, right?
Which actually has a pretty strong rhyme with engineering when you think about it.
But I could never have imagined that.
But that was my starting out, the making of things, you know, the.
I think really it comes from a sense that a lot of the language that we have, like the bullet point language we have to describe the world, is insufficient to how weird and complicated the world is.