Through the design of architecture, urbanism, and related processes, Elizabeth’s work joins radical pragmatism with a deep value for the culture of design imagination. Her work in practice and research aims to fill in gaps and bring meaningful design to overlooked spaces. This includes projects aimed at adaptive re-use, missing middle housing, urban design, and the creation of socio-technical systems that enable them to have greater and more tangible impact.

Elizabeth’s work in practice is currently focused through Supernormal, a design studio based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. She founded Supernormal to create meaningful and practical change through the design of architecture, urbanism, technology, and contemporary culture. The work of Supernormal imagines and stewards a better built environment through the design of spaces and processes that bring dignity and delight to more people and places. The firm works with clients in both the public and private sectors to produce an authentic, beautiful, and relevant future for the constructed world.

Supernormal celebrates the beauty of the normal, the mundane, and the basic. It uses novel analysis to figure out what makes our built environment tick and explores the power of design to translate the best parts of humanity into the spaces and systems that shape the social and natural spaces of our shared 21st century world. The practice is highly interdisciplinary and collaborative, and it thrives due to the talents and curiosities of the many designers, planners, and technologists who have and continue to work toward a moment in which values-driven design provides leadership for a better world.

In the academy, Elizabeth rigorously explores the methods, theories, and technological building blocks that hold the potential to shape the relevance of design practice, and to confront the imperatives of our time. Her research aims to uncover the potentials for scalable and self-limiting systems of design by daylighting, operating upon, and designing new socio-technical systems (design that is dependent upon a messy combination of social and technological systems, and collaboration between them). She explores design that embraces collective creativity, human-machine collaboration, and work that is equally artifact and system.

Her research is always collaborative, and never pure. She understands that building systems for humans and machines to collaborate toward a delightful, just, and sustainable future requires more than individual authorship in our contemporary moment. In her role as principal investigator of the Laboratory for Values in the Built Environment (ViBE Lab) within the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) Laboratory for Design Technologies research collective, Elizabeth’s work is grounded at the architectural scale but disciplinarily agnostic in terms of outcomes and methods. As architecture and design research opens from an artisanal and individual pursuit into a collaborative process informed by large amounts of data and artificial intelligence, she and her colleagues and researchers employ methods and techniques from human-computer interaction, social computing, and urban planning, in addition to those native to her own discipline of architecture. This includes the exploration of an emerging 21st century architectural DNA that is continuously absorbing, synthesizing, and responding to data as we grapple with the often-uncomfortable intersection of decarbonization and cultural meaning.

Elizabeth teaches architecture and design engineering as Assistant Professor in the Practice of Architecture at the GSD. She is deeply devoted to the disciplines of the built environment and thus committed to pursuing their transformation to meet the real challenges of our time. Her original coursework addresses engaged practice, systems linked design, and the changing nature of design instrumentation, all of which inspired her editorial work on Issue 52 of the Harvard Design Magazine and her curatorial and design work in the exhibition Our Artificial Nature. She also teaches a design theory and practice studio within the MSMBA program under a secondary appointment through the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Harvard Business School. Her teaching focuses upon the creation of values-sensitive design methods that balance the rigor and cultural potentials of disciplinary knowledge and technique with the critical need to pursue scalable design impact that is sustainable, equitable, relevant, and delightful.

Elizabeth designs for a future that is beautiful, impure, and messy. She aims to align quantitative and qualitative values to design a nuanced world that reflects and scales the best parts of what it is to be human, together.

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