Rachel Updegrove

Rachel Updegrove graduated from Thomas Jefferson University with a B.ARCH in 2019, and currently works at HERA laboratory planners. Before her sophomore year of college, she was diagnosed with severe OCD, and after recently graduating from college was diagnosed with Autism. In college she struggled to relate to people and coped by reading and listening to others’ stories. She explores narrative, unique individuals and their stories, in order to find ways to translate their stories into designs or another form of communication. Always feeling like an “other” or outsider, reading, researching, and listening felt like the only right way to possibly design for someone that is not herself. Being on the spectrum, while she desires a binary and explicit world to understand, she finds the “other” to be where she fits in the most. She uses her differences and experiences of “othering”, to see that every individual is unique and their own experiences are valid. Every experience and “other” exists within its context. In order to design, we must listen to the whole spectrum of narratives.