Ari Melenciano is a designer, creative technologist and researcher who is passionate about exploring the relationships between various forms of design and sentient experiences.
She is a creative technologist at Google’s Creative Lab, professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Graduate Program, and founder of Afrotectopia, – a social institution that is imagining, researching, and building at the nexus of new media art, design, science, and technology through a Black and Afrocentric lens. Her award-winning work has been supported and exhibited by a variety of institutions including Sundance, The New Museum’s New Inc, The New York Times, and The Studio Museum of Harlem. She is often guest lecturing at universities around the world.
What brought you to community design? Where are you based? What’s your story?
Honestly, purely by accident. I grew up loving to create environments and spaces, as an artist. And as soon as I started living on my own, one of my favorite things was to host people I love in my home. The biggest community I’ve made, Afrotectopia, came out of my experience in being Black in the tech world, as a graduate student. I grew up in a Black hometown (Prince George’s County, MD) where Blackness was the norm, and where there was an abundance of opportunity and access (as far as my limited understanding of the world and its offerings, at the time). So to leave that space and enter an entirely new academic world where it seemed like Blackness was so foreign, and always an add-on. It was frustrating. I was exhausted by being one of so few within my program with the racial and cultural background I had. I was also recognizing both technology’s incredible opportunity to expand Black expression and it’s immense ability to negatively impact Black livelihood. And, I was very inspired by my program’s seamless ability to merge so many fields and practices into one space. Building off of all that, I wanted to create a beautiful environment for Black people of a variety of backgrounds to see their reflection in technology – see it as a place for them, and to celebrate the people already in the space that look just like them. I’m deeply thankful for my graduate program’s support from literally day one. Afrotectopia has been really successful. It’s a space a lot of people need. It has been beautiful watching more spaces pop up that are hoping to fill in these gaps, because they’re so needed.
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