I am Michael,
a design researcher,
educator, & PhD candidate in
Human Centered Design & Engineering
at the University of Washington.
About
I approach design as a transformative practice — one that bridges disciplines, fosters critical reflection, and invites collective imagination. Rooted in human-centered design and informed by social theory and the humanities, my work helps teams, students, and communities engage with complex, convergent challenges — from advancing educational equity to shaping ecosociotechnical futures — not only technically, but also ethically and responsibly.
With over a decade of experience leading research across academic,
civic, and applied settings, I specialize in cross-sector collaboration that
surfaces values, tensions, insights, and possibilities. My practice draws from human-computer
interaction (HCI), science and technology studies (STS),
design justice, and more-than-human theory to guide inquiry, support
institutional transformation, and design learning experiences that
foreground possibility, collaboration, and care.
I hold a BS and MS in Human Centered Design & Engineering
and a BA in Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington,
where I’m also completing my PhD under the advisement of Dr. Tyler Fox.
Please explore my CV or portfolio below—and feel free to get in touch.
I welcome opportunities for collaboration, conversation, and new directions.
Publications
Selected peer-reviewed publications and academic writing.
Beach, Michael W., Emily Knaphus-Soran, Maryam Tanveer, Jana Foxe, and Pauline C. Dott. (2024). Women in Engineering and STEM: A Review of the 2024 Literature. Society of Women Engineers. https://swe.org/magazine/women-in-engineering-and-stem-a-review-of-the-2024-literature/.
Beach, Michael W. (2024). “Nonlocality, Nonlinearity, & Complicit Bias in Climate Diasporas.” Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA), University of Texas at Dallas.
Beach, Michael W., Christina Graves, and Tyler Fox. (2024). “Speculative F/Actors: Climate Futures – Crafting a Workshop for Collaborative Worldbuilding in Cataclysmic Climates.” In Halfway to the Future. ACM.
Gabrielle Benabdallah, Michael W. Beach, Lucy Suchman, Kavita Philip, Nathanael Elias Mengist, and Daniela Rosner. (2023). “The Politics of Imaginaries: Probing Humanistic Inquiry in HCI.” Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Beach, Michael W. and Fox, T. (2023). “Speculative F/Actors: Climate Futures – Crafting a Workshop for Collaborative Worldbuilding in Cataclysmic Climates.” Workshop WS27: HCI for Climate Change: Imagining Sustainable Futures. April 28, 2023. CHI, Hamburg, Germany.
Beach, Michael W., and Tyler Fox. (2022). “Value Sensitive Speculative Design: Exploring More-Than-Human Relations in the Age of Climate Catastrophe.” IxD&A 51
Ghoshal, Devarshi, Ludovico Bianchi, Abdelilah Essiari, Drew Paine, Sarah S. Poon, Michael W. Beach, Alpha T. N'Diaye, Patrick Huck, and Lavanya Ramakrishnan. "Science Capsule: Towards Sharing and Reproducibility of Scientific Workflows." In 2021 IEEE Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science (WORKS), pp. 66-73. IEEE, 2021.
Ghoshal, Devarshi, Ludovico Bianchi, Abdelilah Essiari, Michael W. Beach, Drew Paine, and Lavanya Ramakrishnan. "Science Capsule-Capturing the Data Life Cycle." Journal of Open Source Software 6, no. 62 (2021): 2484.
Jones, Ridley, Michael W. Beach, Melinda McClure Haughey, Will Sutherland, and Charlotte P. Lee. "Construction of Shared Situational Awareness in Traffic Management." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, no. CSCW1 (2021): 1-27.
Neang, Andrew B., Will Sutherland, Michael W. Beach, and Charlotte P. Lee. "Data Integration as Coordination: The Articulation of Data Work in an Ocean Science Collaboration." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 4, no. CSCW3 (2021): 1-25.
Collaborators, Partners, & Affiliates
Get In Touch
Interested in collaborating, learning more about my work, or just having a conversation about research, design, or futures thinking? I’d be glad to hear from you.