Participants

Our guest speakers bring expert perspectives as designers, users and innovators in the space between architecture and deafness.

 

  • Jeffrey Mansfield

    Design Director, MASS Design Group

    Jeffery Mansfield.

    Jeffrey joined MASS in 2015 and is based in the Boston office. Currently, he is involved with several U.S. projects, publications and research initiatives, including a proposed Center for Deaf Craft and Culture at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC. Previously, Jeffrey initiated 202020, an urban design and research initiative with Adam Sokol Architecture Practice in Buffalo, and worked at Kennedy Violich Architecture in Boston and HHF Architekten in Basel, Switzerland. Jeffrey also collaborates with Council, an issue-based art collective in Paris, and his work has been shown at the Sharjah Biennial, Sao Paulo Biennial, MoMA PS1 as well as published in several journals and edited volumes including Coronagraph, ArchitectureBoston, and Tacet. As one of a small number of culturally Deaf designers practicing architecture, Jeffrey believes that architecture must do more than accommodate varied sensory realities—and ought to imagine, enrich, and celebrate these ways of being. Jeffrey received his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Princeton in 2008 and Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2014.

  • Hansel Bauman

    Campus Architect, Gallaudet University

    Hansel Bauman.

    Hansel Bauman is an architect currently serving as the Gallaudet University Campus Architect. Over twenty years, Mr. Bauman has developed a diverse, international portfolio of projects that enhance cultural and sensory experiences within buildings for academic, civic, industrial, and residential uses.  His work also includes urban and campus planning projects in the United States and China. 

    In collaboration with the ASL Deaf Studies Department at Gallaudet University Mr. Bauman founded the DeafSpace Project in 2006-a research and campus design project leading to the development of the “DeafSpace Design Guide”.  Since 2006 he has served as a design consultant on a range of projects serving the deaf community including the Rocky Mountain Deaf School, DeafHope, a transitional housing community for abused deaf women and Deaf Village, Ireland. While at Gallaudet University he has overseen the development of the 2022 Campus Plan, the design and construction of the university's newest student residence hall and consulted on the design vision for the redevelopment of the 6th Street corridor adjacent the Gallaudet campus

  • Michael Chorost

    Author and technology theorist

    Michael Chorost wearing glasses will small hearing aides visable.

    Michael Chorost is a technology theorist with an unusual perspective: his body is the future. In 2001 he went completely deaf and had a computer implanted in his head to let him hear again. This transformative experience inspired his first book, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human. He wrote about how mastering his new ear, a cochlear implant, enabled him to enhance his creative potential as a human being.

    Dr. Chorost earned his B.A. at Brown University and studied computer programming, Renaissance drama, and cultural theory on the way to his Ph.D. at UT-Austin. He doesn’t draw sharp lines between programming, science, writing, and art; to him, these are all profoundly creative human endeavors.

    After graduate school he worked briefly for Scient, a dot-com in San Francisco, and then spent 4 1/2 years doing research in education at SRI International in Menlo Park, California.

    As a freelance science writer he has written for Wired, The Washington Post, Technology Review, and The Scientist, among others. He sits on external advisory boards for neuroscience research at Northwestern and Brown. He has given over 150 lectures at institutions such as Google, MIT, Stanford, Brown, the Brookings Institute, and the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco.