| Your Name | Hannah Seckendorf |
|---|---|
| Email Address | Email hidden; Javascript is required. |
| Cohort Assignment | Hybrid In-Person/Online with Intensive in Santa Fe, Winter-Spring 2025 |
| 1. What do you see as your primary work at this stage of your life? | At this stage of my life I'm focused on the work that arises within my career. At the moment, my work focuses on helping organizations navigate the design challenges of emerging mediums and emergent ideas. |
| 2. What role do you see as yours to play? | I've felt called to the role of design strategist. Within that role, I use a flexible toolkit of deep research, thoughtful facilitation, and incisive strategy to help teams traverse these moments of ambiguity with confidence. My approach to strategy is interdisciplinary and works across scales. This means the contexts in which my work shows up are diverse and range from the micro (an AR filter) to the macro (a building). With a background in Cognitive Neuroscience, my approach is grounded in a deep commitment to understanding the intricacies of the human experience and ensuring those insights make their way into design decisions. |
| 3. What goals or aims do you have in regard to the above? | My core goal is to take the ways of working in which I have served the human and open the aperture of service to the more-than-human. I want a life dedicated to designing for the needs of both humans and the more-than-human world. A life of cultivating and sharing a design sensibility that serves the broader family of creatures and ecosystems around us. This is a perspective I both want to cultivate for myself and desperately wish to bring to the clients I work for, the projects I work on, and the urban communities to which I belong. |
| 4. Where do you feel your next arenas for personal growth are? | In order to meaningfully transform my practice in this way and have the confidence to lead others towards this sensibility, I will need to deepen my own connection with the earth and restore my sense of stewardship. |
| 5. And for professional growth? | If I want to help push this space forward and bring these ideas into the corporate world, I'll need to have contributed to more projects that speak to this way of working I believe in. Through that experience, I'll also need to build the confidence to lead others in this way of working. |
| 6. What have you invested in to get you where you are? | - Undergraduate degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from Brown |
| 7. What fields of learning and which thinkers have been important in your life? | - Designing with/for Nature -- Neri Oxman / James Turrell / Janine Benyus |
| 8. Can you frame your philosophy or cosmology of life? What role(s) do humans play in it? | My philosophy is actively evolving! Historically I’ve been capitvated by the human world (I studied Cognitive Neuroscience) and my strategy work has focused on human-centered design within the digital world (websites, apps, AR, VR, etc.). But, in the last year, an unusual amount of time spent in the ocean threw me into a more animist worldview that manifested in a call to de-center the human in my work. You're finding me at the beginning of a journey of learning to design for the web of needs of the more-than-human world. I'm increasingly drawn to philosophies/cosmologies that de-center the human, although humans do weild disproportionate power in transforming that web. I'm interested in the concrete ways in which we can arm humans with the wisdom they need to meet that power with grace. |
| Date Created | February 18, 2025 |