Hannah Wong

Hannah Wong is pursuing her Master’s degree in Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her research and design practice centers around the physical and social belonging of people with disabilities in the public realm. As a Cheng Fellow, she works with disabled artists to design meaningful and effective demarcation on transparent glass and other hazardous features of the built environment to increase the safety of urban communities while celebrating disabled talent and innovation. 

Hannah is the first legally blind student to be accepted to the Harvard Graduate School of Design where she founded design.able, a student-run organization focused on dismantling ableism in design through education. She is also a founding member of the Student Accessibility Advisory Group (SAAG), a committee of students that advises Harvard University Disability Resources (UDR) on accessibility-related policies and activities. She has been invited to speak on her work in disability & design for several academic and cultural institutions, including the MIT Museum, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Pepperdine University, among others. Her work has also been the subject of interviews featured in Harvard Magazine and Architecture Writing Workshop. Hannah has most recently worked for the Critical Design Lab as the project manager of the Critical Access Primer and for the Institute for Human Centered Design (IHCD) on accessibility in the architectural and digital realms. 

Prior to returning to academia, she worked in environmental engineering with Transsolar Klima Engineering on thermal comfort and sustainability and as a data analyst and DEI consultant for a social media marketing company. She holds a B.A. in applied mathematics with a concentration in civil engineering from UC Berkeley.