Beth Ames Altringer Eagle Portfolio – Beth Altringer is a designer, professor, entrepreneur, and artist whose work combines design, technology, and sensory and perceptual learning.

Design

I work with clients where behavioral science meets design, doing research, development, analysis, visualization and implementation.

Education

I lead RISD and Brown University's joint MA in Design Engineering. Before that, I built design and engineering programs at Harvard.

Technology

I look for ways that technology can speed up effortful but intrinsically rewarding things like sensory and perceptual learning

Art

I explore the incredible diversity of human sensory and perceptual experiences through manual and code-driven methods..

Design

Featured
Projects

All Projects

Design + Technology + Education

Sensory Learning Lab

Unknown opportunities and major jumps in innovation can emerge from making unseen experiences accessible. Chefs, musicians, and architects learn to use their unseen senses to achieve fluency in flavor, music, and spatial reasoning. These are just three of many senses in nature that we have much more to learn about. Gaining sensory empathy and fluency can take years, making it inaccessible. My lab explores how technology can fast-track sensory learning, helping us transcend routine interaction and discover unimaginable inspiration from the natural world.

FLAVOR FLUENCY FILMS & Chef Umwelt

A short film series featuring celebrated chefs in the Boston area that explores what it means to develop the ability to read, write, understand, and create with flavor. Funded by Harvard's Office of the Provost and premiered at the Cambridge Science Festival.

Flavor Fluency iOS Game

Chef League's flavor challenges help teach you to improvise with flavors like the pros. Train your tastebuds with quick quizzes, learn flavor mechanics and how to fix recipe flaws on the fly from the AI chefs, and enjoy friendly creative competition with other players.

Designing Sensescapes in Italy

Three sensescapes (sensory experience stories) of Monestevole. An art residency in Umbria, Italy. This project is about deconstructing and reconstructing the hard-to-describe sensory experience of being in a place. The approach was to tell the narrative from three perspectives, such as the first-person perspective of those who live there and the perspective of the stories, plants, and animals on site.

Flavor Genome Project API

The Flavor Genome Project explores how components of flavor combine to create multi-sensory, emotional, and cultural experiences. In 2019, it grew to millions of data points that include recipe data, qualitative and quantitative flavor and texture perception data, ingredient data, flavor compounds, nutrition information, chef learning and decision making, ingredient adjacency data for global recipes, and more.

Kering's 20-year Sustainability Strategy

Our founding team, then dubbed PPR Home, developed the conglomerate's 20-year sustainability strategy and set a new standard in sustainability and business practice in the Luxury, Sport & Lifestyle and Retail sectors. This included developing the first Environmental Profit & Loss (EP&L) statement and a 10m Euro Creative Materials Sustainability Lab.

Piaggio's Last Mile Cargo Robots

When Piaggio Fast Forward created Gita, we built it with a fundamental premise: to extend human mobility, by which we mean enabling greater freedom, pleasure, and efficiency of human movement. Gita is designed to follow its owner, carry heavy loads and navigate intuitively through indoor and outdoor ADA-compliant spaces. In the future, our robots might help humans with additional tasks that free our hands and enable us to extend our cognitive and physical functionality.

Design + Technology

Higher Education

Designing research, courses, and programs to train the next generation of collaboration-oriented design and technology leaders.

Master of Arts in Design Engineering at RISD + Brown

I joined Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) as Founding Executive Director of their Design Engineering joint-degree program, in which students learn to merge visionary and pragmatic thinking, qualitative and quantitative methods, and creativity with technology to produce and refine work with the goal of improving lives.

Master of Science in Engineering and Business at Harvard

This project began with a mission to come up with a new graduate program to train the next generation of technical leaders. I joined the four-person founding team to co-develop the new degree and teach in the program. This involved building and strengthening bridges across the engineering, business, and design schools.

Research on Innovation Teams

This longitudinal project began at Harvard University and tracked common cognitive decision-making shortcuts and factors that supported versus inhibited progress on 300+ professional team-based innovative projects. The full dataset includes projects from 176 companies, 23 industries, 8 countries, and 5 continents.

Talks and Workshops

My talks and workshops for executives cover a range of topics, such as: human centered design, design and behavioral science, research on effective collaboration, design teams as motivational systems, flavor fluency, design and internal decision-making, advancements in design and engineering education, and designing for delight, social joy, and creative confidence.

Technology + Art

Art + Technology

My art explores the intersection of perception and creativity. I’m interested in what we gain from reconnecting with the messiness of reality and the diversity of human sensory and perceptual experiences. I tend to combine manual and code-driven methods.