Jon Froehlich
As the director of the University of Washington’s Makeability Lab, Allen School professor and alum Jon Froehlich (Ph.D., ‘11) utilizes human-computer interaction (HCI) and machine learning to tackle high-impact socially relevant problems. Already, his work has led to improved city planning and sidewalk infrastructure across the globe, and he has developed technologies that have enabled blind and low-vision users to prepare meals, participate in sports and even engage with children’s artwork.
“Our work aims to transform how humans interact in the real world via advanced techniques in HCI and AI, such as assessing the bikeability of a city at scale using vision language models and providing personalized bike routes, determining whether a building is accessible and to whom via capability-conditioned AI agents, and allowing people who are deaf or hard of hearing customize their own sound feedback visualizations with Generative AI,” Froehlich said. “This is an incredible time to work in HCI because sensing hardware, computation, and processing have transformed how we can augment human capabilities in the world.”
The ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) recently honored Froehlich with the 2026 SIGCHI Societal Impact Award, which recognizes mid-career to senior researchers whose HCI work “demonstrates social benefit.”
