Austin Wade Smith

AWS, (Austin Wade Smith - they/them), is an animist, designer, ecologist, and creative technologist based in Brooklyn, New York. They are the Executive Director of Regen Foundation, a US-based non-profit designing a just transition to sovereign regenerative economics, with a principal focus on the transformative potential of decentralized technologies of governance, sensing, and ownership.

Their practice explores opportunities for social, legal, economic, and information technologies to foster greater interdependence between individuals and our living world with a focus on how the agency of the more-than-human world is expressed through such infrastructures. They work actively in South America, East Africa, South Asia, and the US.

They are an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP, and as well as in the architecture and engineering schools at Cooper Union. They received an M.Arch from MIT in 2016 with a focus on computational design systems, as well as a BA in biology from Colorado College in 2009 with a focus on plant ecophysiology.

Their work has been published and exhibited internationally, both individually, as well as through the office HELLOEVERYTHING which they co-founded in 2014. They love growing orchids, raising moths, and making kites.