2023 UX Speaker Series
Startup Stories: Designing for Self-Compassion, Play, and Creativity
Alexis will speak about her experiences leading product at focused, a technology company dedicated to helping people accomplish their personal and professional goals with daily structure, accountability, and community. Key design challenges include helping people create and commit to new habits and routines, building community among strangers, scaling personal attention, and more. She will also discuss her approach to shaping the internal design culture of a rapidly-growing, remote-first startup.
Dr. Alexis Hope (HCDE BS ‘10, MS ‘12) is a product designer and community builder who loves to create experiences that help people find joy, self-compassion, and connection with others. Prior to co-founding focused, Alexis spent a decade at MIT, where she received her PhD at the MIT Media Lab. As a designer, she has worked across a variety of domains — ranging from designing cameras for deep-sea exploration, creative learning technologies for children, artistic tools for zero-gravity environments in orbit, "hackathons" to improve breast pumps, low-cost ultrasound machines for providing prenatal care in areas with limited resources, and more. Alexis also runs a project called “Trash Club,” a community event series that invites people to come together to prototype playful objects using recycled materials. This builds on her work as the co-founder and Design Director for the “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon,” which brought together hundreds of parents, care-givers, and their children to re-design technologies for breastfeeding and postpartum health. You can learn more about her work at alexishope.com.
The UX Speaker Series is hosted Fridays in winter quarter by the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. Presentations are open to the public.
Depending on the speaker's preference, a recording will be posted to this webpage after the event. View the full schedule at hcde.uw.edu/ux.