CMU’s Molly Wright Steenson Will Feature at CanUX 2018

The renowned Carnegie Mellon professor joins our 2018 lineup.

 A short talk on the long history of AI & design
} Nov 3, 2018   4:00pm

With all the talk about about AI today, you’d think it’s brand new. Yet the history of AI goes back some 60+ years—and that history has always included designers and architects. In fact, AI has influenced the very way that UX designers do their work. In this short talk, I’ll look at that long history, touching on the work of Christopher Alexander, and Nicholas Negroponte, and underline the stakes for today.

 Speaker Bio: Molly Wright Steenson

Molly Wright Steenson is the K&L Gates Associate Professor of Ethics & Computational Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University. A designer, writer, and international speaker, she is the author of “Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape” (MIT Press, 2017), which traces the radical history of AI’s impact on design and architecture, and the co-editor of the forthcoming book “Bauhaus Futures” (MIT Press, 2019).

Molly cut her teeth on the Web in 1994 and has worked in many capacities as a UX designer and strategist, design researcher, writer and geek at groundbreaking design studios, consultancies, and Fortune 500 companies. She built the first news-delivering website at Reuters in 1995, managed the second most-hit page on the Internet—the Netscape Search page—in 1996, worked on some of the first web-based online communities, and co-founded a groundbreaking pop culture feminist webzine, Maxi. She was was one of the very first content strategists and user/customer experience architects, and worked on complex digital platforms at companies like Scient and Razorfish. She continues to study how technology and interactivity fit into our contemporary cities and lives. This interest has sent her to India to study mobile phones, to China to study social networking sites, and to the 1960s to study the effect of artificial intelligence on architectural systems and interactivity.

Molly holds a PhD in Architecture from Princeton University and a master’s in Architectural History from the Yale School of Architecture. In her academic career, she was an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication from 2013–15 and a professor at the groundbreaking Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy from 2003–04, where she ran the Connected Communities research group, and an adjunct faculty member at Art Center College of Design in the Media Design Practices master’s program from 2010–12.

For more info, you can follow Molly on on Twitter @maximolly

*Image credit: Molly Wright Steenson & Ross Mantle