Sara Hendren: Who Is the Built World Actually Built For?

Sara Hendren didn't start out in engineering. She started as a visual artist, then moved into cultural history, studying objects, artifacts, and what they say about the world that made them. Then life brought her into pediatric spaces filled with a new kind of object: gadgets and tools designed for a child's body, yes, but also doing quiet therapeutic work, covered in butterflies and bugs, useful and expressive all at once. She found herself asking: what is an object broadcasting beyond its user? What does it mean that eyeglasses get sold as fashion while hearing aids are hidden away as clinical? That was the moment everything snapped together, her training in the history of artifacts, the politics of disability, and the material culture of prosthetics all converging at once. In this free-flowing conversation, Sara walks us through the space between mechanical design and design for expression, why the logical and meticulous side of making art and the creative side of meaningful engineering are really the same instinct. As the world asks more and more from its engineers, Sara brings it all back to a question that feels more urgent than ever: can a designed object change not just how we move through the world, but how we see it?