Professor & Design Practice Bios
[last updated Nov 2025]
Academic Bio
B. Ames Eagle is Director of the Design Initiative at Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering, where she directs AMES (Applied Methods in Experiential Science) Lab. Her research develops methods for translating complex information into perceptible form through sensory experience and visualization. She works at the intersection of data, sensation, and meaning-making—creating systematic approaches for making scientific research, ecological systems, and quantitative data accessible through taste, smell, and visual composition.Prior to Dartmouth, she was a professor at Brown University and RISD and Founding Director of their joint Master of Arts in Design Engineering (MADE) program. She spent a decade at Harvard, developing design and innovation courses at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and helped establish joint degree programs including Harvard's MDE (with the Graduate School of Design) and MSMBA (with Harvard Business School).
Her current work includes commissioned artworks for museums and research institutions that translate ecological transformations into edible installations, ongoing research through the Flavor Genome Project on computational approaches to flavor intelligence, and the forthcoming book Flavor Fluency), which teaches perceptual learning through taste.
She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, completed postdoctoral work in design at MIT and HCI at Stanford, and has a master's degree in architecture. Her work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and other publications, under the last name Altringer or Eagle.
Practice Bio
B. Ames Eagle creates experiences and systems that use sensory perception as a method for learning, meaning-making, and memory. Her practice spans commissioned artworks, product development, and strategic design for organizations navigating complex transformation.Example Projects:
- Ames Lab serves as both research laboratory and exhibition space at Dartmouth, hosting fellows working on projects that translate complexity through creative means—particularly work combining data with art, or making scientific research perceptible through sensory experience.
- Place-based Sensory Commissions translate regional ecological systems into taste and smell-based artworks. Recent installations include a four-work series for the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (Santa Barbara, 2025) documenting California's climate transformations through gelato, and work on Northeast forest adaptation systems exploring seasonal collapse through multi-species tree syrups.
- She co-runs an arts collective and occasional store that creates products only when inspired—working like human creativity itself rather than production schedules. It offers editions from commissioned artworks and objects that emerge from research projects.
Past leadership roles include founding team member at Piaggio Fast Forward (led design/research for award-winning Gita robot, patent holder), founding team of PPR Home/Kering's 2025 Sustainability Strategy (developed fashion industry's first Environmental P&L and €10M Material Innovation Lab), and past clients include: Uber, Microsoft, IKEA, Diageo, Disney, IDEO, Intel, and others.
Her work argues that sensory experience—particularly taste and smell—constitutes an underutilized form of knowledge and research methodology. She creates systematic approaches for making complex information perceptible, whether through art installations, science museum exhibits, consumer products, or academic research.
Contact
Academic inquiries: Dartmouth College, Thayer School of Engineering
Commissions & projects: b[at]ames.studio