Beth Ames Altringer Eagle is a designer, developer, digital artist, and Professor of Design Engineering at Brown University and The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She runs her own design practice, and leads the MADE Program (Master of Arts in Design Engineering) that is jointly offered by Brown and RISD. She focuses on designing experiences and technologies that go beyond making life easy, believing that convenience by itself is a dull goal for life. She is interested in design and technology that augments human learning and our capacity to experience regular moments of creativity, meaning and social joy.
Design Practice: An architect by training, Altringer Eagle started her own studio in 2006. She then spent several years studying high performance creative teams inside IDEO and WPP and earned her PhD at The University of Cambridge in 2011. From 2011-2020, Beth cross-trained in other design fields, including product design, digital art, game design, and sustainable design. Her design studio focused on client work and designing digital and physical products and environments for specific emotions and motivations. Past clients include: Gucci, IKEA, Piaggio, Uber, Diageo, Disney, Expedia, General Mills, Swarovski, and more. In 2011, she co-developed the 2025 strategy for Kering (conglomerate that owns Gucci, Saint Laurent, McQueen, etc), which helped Kering become one of the 10 most sustainable companies worldwide and continues today. In 2015, Beth was on the team that invented Piaggio’s award winning friendly Gita cargo robot, earning multiple patents in the process. In 2019, Altringer Eagle launched Chef League, the first interactive iOS app to help novices learn to intuitively play with flavors like expert chefs.
Academic Practice: Prior to fall 2021, Altringer Eagle was faculty at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) for 10 years. She was recognized in 2016 by the Crimson as one of the university's top 15 professors, created seven courses in eight years, helped SEAS rapidly expand design and entrepreneurship initiatives during a period of 4x growth in student demand, ran the Design Lab, served as Interim Director for a contemporary art and science center, and co-created the joint SEAS+Harvard Business School MS-MBA program that is designed to train future technical leaders.
