Wishful Thinking
An interdisciplinary professor teaches students to exceed people’s needs and design for their desires.
By Beryl Lieff Benderly
Who is the world designed for? That’s the question Sara Hendren examines in her Olin College course Investigating Normal. The associate professor of arts, humanities, and design guides her students to think beyond solving well-defined problems. Instead, she directs them toward using technology to explore and support a broad range of human experiences.
Hendren’s course explores assistive technology and prosthetics from a humanities-led perspective. She expands the scope of rehab engineering as it’s usually practiced—that is, focused on “the clinical model of what people need.” Rather, she asks what people wish and hope for.
Hendren’s background exemplifies STEAM, the addition of art into STEM. She earned her undergraduate degree in studio art (painting and drawing) from Wheaton College in Illinois, before moving into the realm of the abstract, studying the history of ideas. While pursuing historical scholarship for a PhD, however, Hendren found that she “really started to miss making things.” She felt pulled toward furniture building and journalism.
Then her first child, now 16, was born with Down syndrome. “Disability was not on my mind at all at that time,” she explains, “and certainly not engineering.” To support her son’s needs and find resources, Hendren turned to physical, occupational, and speech therapies. “A whole world opened up to me that I had never had any experience with,” she says—the world of prosthetics. “The little ankle braces and tiny little glasses and all the sensory chew toys to help children with low muscle tone in the body and mouth” fascinated her. So did the pediatric gyms and padded toy-filled spaces, “very cleverly designed to get kids to sit up straight and use their muscles to balance.”
Hendren became interested both personally and professionally in building “a world that makes room for a nonconforming body.” She enrolled at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and earned a master’s degree in art, design, and the public domain; the degree explores the role of design in public spaces.
At Olin, Hendren teaches at the intersection of disability and technology, illustrating for students that merely addressing physical challenges is not enough—their designs should allow people to fulfill their aims. In one project, for example, students provided a portable lectern to a scholar and lecturer who, because of dwarfism, stands under four feet tall. The lectern fits her stature, unlike those that suit speakers a foot or two taller. In another project, students worked on ramps that a disabled choreographer and dancer uses in wheelchair dance performances.
Hendren calls these “interrogative designs,” because they both “perform a function and ask a question.” As she explains, “viewers see them and think, ‘I’ve never seen that before. What is it like to be the person using it?’”
Projects like the lectern make people notice design decisions such as the height of light switches, seats, and tabletops, she continues. The dance ramp introduced students who had studied physics and the mechanics of wheelchair use to the unfamiliar idea that a wheelchair user might have a “wish rather than a need” to use the chair for something that is not a “diminished form of walking” but the creation of beauty.
In her teaching and with her 2020 book What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World, Hendren aims to provide an “on-ramp” to toolmakers. She wants to help them understand the need to not only provide pragmatic tools but also to check in first with people “as the protagonists of their lives and experts on what it is they’re trying to do.” Asking provides engineers with evidence-based data to help build better products, she says.
Last year, the National Association of Science Writers awarded Hendren’s book its Science in Society Journalism Award. Hendren’s work helps people “see the world in a fundamentally new way,” the judges wrote. She views disability “not as a problem to be solved, but an opportunity to envision a built world that has finally shed the stifling constraints of homogenous designs.”
Beryl Lieff Benderly is a Washington-based freelance writer and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
© Freddie Hendren Funck / Olin College of Engineering