Focused Space
Alexis Hope
Tags
Geographic location
United States
Year
Ongoing
Description
Focused Space is a membership community that helps people accomplish their goals, together. In a world dominated by hustle culture, we promote different ways of approaching "productivity" — strategies that work for caretakers, neurodivergent folks, people with disabilities, and anyone who wants to practice compassion towards themselves and others. We reject the idea that we should be able to "do everything on our own." Our members offer and receive community support to help them accomplish their most important goals (which can even include just getting the dishes done today). Our values center care, compassion, authenticity over perfection, and plurality (no "one-size-fits-all" approaches here). Our mission is to help people prioritize their own wellbeing above toxic productivity culture. We aspire to build an internal team culture that is highly collaborative, creative, compassionate, experimental, and supportive. We design our tools and resources with trauma-informed perspectives, partnership programs with mental health practitioners, and collaborative design practices with our community.
Links
Acknowledgements
Nodira Khoussainova, Elizabeth Phung, Amy Phung, and our whole wonderful team: https://www.focused.space/about-us
Biography
Dr. Alexis Hope is the Chief Product Officer of Focused Space and a 2023 United States Artists Fellow. She is passionate about designing technologies that help people find joy, learn self-compassion, and unlock their confidence and creativity. Prior to co-founding Focused Space, Alexis spent a decade at MIT, where she received her PhD at the MIT Media Lab. As a designer, she has worked across a variety of domains — ranging from cameras for deep-sea exploration, creative learning software used by children around the world, artistic tools for zero-gravity environments in orbit, low-cost ultrasound machines for providing prenatal care in areas with limited resources, breast pump hackathons, and more. Her work has been featured in Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births (MIT Press), Feminist Designer: On the Personal and Political in Design (MIT Press), Designs for Different Features, and others.