Wyatt Roy

I'm a designer and researcher based at Harvard, where I work as a lecturer and researcher at the Graduate School of Design. My practice spans a wide range — from VR cinematic experiments and haptic wearables to curriculum design and institutional strategy — but most of it is in service of a consistent question: how do systems shape what's possible, and how can design change that?

Before Harvard, I worked in product design, documentary filmmaking, and community organizing. Those experiences convinced me that the most interesting design problems are at the edges between disciplines — where the tools of one field can open up something that felt stuck in another.

I'm particularly drawn to projects that have to account for their own institutionalization — tools that will be used in schools, platforms that will be deployed by governments, curricula that will outlast their authors. These constraints are usually treated as friction. I think they're the design problem.

My current research focuses on the narrative affordances of spatial media — what VR and AR can tell, and how, that flat media cannot. I'm also working on a book about how designers can create lasting change from inside large organizations.