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Beck Tench is a wife, daughter, friend, teacher, gardener, cyclist, kind stranger, and PhD candidate at the University of Washington Information School.  She researches how public space and technology can be designed to restore attention and facilitate contemplative experience. Through her work, she hopes to help us develop skills and a greater capacity for accessing personal wisdom, connecting with others through compassion and friendship, improving the quality of our lives through awareness of life as we’re living it, and mitigating or minimizing the harms of attention-driven digital culture. Beck was formally trained as a designer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and spent her career before returning to academia helping museums, libraries, and nonprofits embrace risk-taking, creativity, and change through technology and personal space-making. Her work from that time was mentioned in the New York Times, National Public Radio, Scientific American, and several books and blogs.