Molly Wright Steenson is a designer, author, professor, and international speaker whose work focuses on the intersection of design, architecture, and artificial intelligence. She is the author of the forthcoming book Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT Press, Fall 2017), which tells the radical history of AI’s impact on design and architecture and how it poured the foundation for contemporary digital design. A web pioneer since 1994, she’s worked at groundbreaking design studios, consultancies, and Fortune 500 companies for 23 years. Dr. Steenson is an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design and holds a PhD in architecture from Princeton University, a master’s in architectural history from Yale, and a BA in German from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with honors and distinction.
From 2013–15, Molly was an assistant professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she taught data visualization, digital studies, and communications courses, and led Mellon-funded research projects in the digital humanities. She was a professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Ivrea, Italy, where she led the Connected Communities research group, and an adjunct professor at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in the Media Design Practices Program.
Molly began working with the Web in 1994 at a wide variety of companies including Reuters, Scient, Netscape, and Razorfish. She cofounded Maxi, an award-winning women’s webzine, in the 90s. As a design researcher, she examines the effect of personal technology on its users, including projects in India and China for Microsoft Research and ReD Associates/Intel Research.
