Jean Hardy
Bio
Jean Hardy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media & Information. His primary research focus is on the role of high-tech entrepreneurship and technological innovation in rural economic and community development. He also does community-based participatory design research with rural LGBTQ people to understand technology use in low-resource settings. Hardy’s formative work in rural computing has been published in prestigious venues for information and computer science, such as Information, Communication, & Society and the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, including winning a Best Provocation award at the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems in 2019. Hardy regularly collaborates with civic leaders and economic developers throughout rural Michigan on topics related to the future of rural development, and has been featured on Wisconsin Public Radio, Buzzfeed News, and Bloomberg. He holds a Doctorate and Master of Science in Information from the University of Michigan School of Information, and a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Theory from the University of Washington.