The Distinguished Lecture Series at the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering brings leading experts in the fields of human-centered design to the University of Washington to spark new ideas and innovative conversations. These events are free and are open to the public, as well as University of Washington faculty, students, and staff.
The Judith Ramey and Stephanie Rosenbaum Distinguished Lecture Series
Laura Forlano
Writer • Social Scientist • Design Researcher
Professor, Art + Design, Northeastern University
Monday, May 11, 2026
3:30 – 5 p.m.
Reception to follow
HUB, room 334
Designing Consequences: On Living Well with Machines
Who will live with the social consequences of your designs? And, who will live with the consequences of the consequences? In this talk, I will consider how we might live well with machines drawing on my own “disabled cyborg” life as well as nearly two decades of research in the field of design and related fields including critical disability studies, critical computing, critical creative practice, and critical pedagogy. I will illustrate—both humorously and very existentially—the many ways of interrogating the social consequences of design through responses that allow for relational, performative and visceral engagement with the nature of data and computation. Ultimately, this talk is a provocation about who gets to decide what it means to be human, and who we will become as a species.
Dr. Laura Forlano, a Fulbright award-winning and National Science Foundation funded scholar, is a disabled writer, social scientist and design researcher. She is Professor in the departments of Art + Design and Communication Studies in the College of Arts, Media, and Design and Distinguished Senior Fellow at The Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University. Forlano is also an Affiliated Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University.
Forlano’s research is focused on the aesthetics and politics at the intersection between design and emerging technologies. She has used participatory workshops, collaborative games, exhibitions, speculative videos, prototypes and performances to imagine alternative futures for living with data and computation. Over the past fifteen years, she has studied the materialities and futures of socio-technical systems such as autonomous vehicles and smart cities; 3D printing, local manufacturing and innovation ecosystems; automation, distributed labor practices and the future of work; and, computational fashion, smart textiles and wearable medical technologies.
Prior to her current position, she was Associate Professor of Design at the Institute of Design and Affiliated Faculty in the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology. In 2019-2020, Forlano was Institute of Advanced Study Fellow (IAS) at Durham University (UK), working on a project called “Material Imagination”. In 2018-2019, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Digital Life Institute at Cornell Tech and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
She is the author of Cyborg (with Danya Glabau, forthcoming MIT Press) and an editor of three books: Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press 2019), digitalSTS (Princeton University Press 2019) and From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen (MIT Press 2011). Forlano’s research and writing has been published in peer-reviewed journals in the fields of design, communications, human-computer interaction and science and technology studies including the following: ACM Interactions, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, City, International Journal of Communication, She Ji, Catalyst, Design Issues, the Journal of Peer Production, Fibreculture, Digital Culture & Society, ADA, Journal of Urban Technology, First Monday, The Information Society, and the Journal of Community Informatics.
Previous Distinguished Lectures
About the HCDE distinguished lecture series
The Judith Ramey and Stephanie Rosenbaum Distinguished Lecture Series in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering brings leading experts in the fields of human-centered design and sociotechnical systems to the University of Washington to spark new ideas and innovative conversations. These events are free and are open to the public, as well as University of Washington faculty, students, and staff. Thank you to donors Judy Ramey and Stephanie Rosenbaum for making these events possible.