Alexis Hope
She // Her // Hers
[ID: A woman with lavender hair looks upward and smiles; warm orange light bathes her light skin. Behind her is a backdrop of hand-painted clouds floating over a body of water.]
Portrait photo by Sands Fish.
Seattle, WA and Cambridge, MA
2023 USA Fellow
This award was generously supported by the Barr Foundation.
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Dr. Alexis Hope loves to create playful experiences that help people find joy, self-compassion, and connection with others. Hope’s practice centers on designing spaces for artistic freedom, experimentation, and community support.
She spent a decade at MIT, where she received her PhD at the MIT Media Lab in 2021. As a designer, she has worked on projects across a variety of domains including 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 prenatal care in areas with limited resources, and more.
She organizes a community project called Trash Club, a series of gatherings that invite people to come together to prototype playful objects using recycled materials. This builds on her work as the cofounder and Design Director of the Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon, which brought together hundreds of parents, caregivers, and their children to design technologies to support breastfeeding and postpartum health.
As a musician, she sings and writes songs for the bands Calico Beach Party, Double Bitch, and Deeper Sleeper.
She is also a cofounder of www.focused.space, an online service that helps people reach their personal, professional, and creative goals in community with others.
When she is not doing the above, Hope works part-time as a barista at her local neighborhood cafe and record store.