Annie Chen is a designer, scientist, and socio-technical researcher based in the United States.

Her work explores how environmental technologies encounter human and living systems across the climate transition. She develops artifacts and systems that make these encounters legible, enabling new forms of collective sense-making across science, technology, and community life.

After graduating from the Brown|RISD Dual Degree Program, she co-founded BEAM, a research-led creative studio for people & planet. She is also a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Lab’s Community Biotechnology Initiative and a member of NEW INC, the New Museum’s design, culture, and tech incubator, in the Year 12 Creative Science cohort.

Her work has been supported by NASA Ames Research Center, MIT Media Lab, Science History Institute,
New York Foundation for the Arts, Brown University, EY Intelligent Realities Lab, and more.

CV


Selected Projects

🌀1 ASILOMAR
🌀2 TIDELANDS 2100
🌀3 CIVIC BIOTECHNOLOGY
🌀4 EATING THE WHOLE FISH
🌀5 NASA AMES
🌀6 BEACONS

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BEACONS

Designer
Providence, RI | NYC
2025Installation

Collaborators: Zoe Lee, SPOLIA, Luke Henderson
Curator: Remina Greenfield
Exhibition: NEW INC Demo Festival, WSA NYC

BEACONS (2025) is an environmental installation translating deep-sea data from the Clarion-Clipperton Zone into immersive sound and light. Exhibited at New Museum’s DEMO Festival, the work uses sculptural speakers to emit frequencies tied to ecological change, allowing audiences to experience an otherwise inaccessible ecosystem. By transmitting environmental signals rather than representing them, BEACONS reframes the deep sea as a fragile, interconnected world under increasing pressure from extraction.

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