Invited Speakers

Valerie Fletcher has been Executive Director since 1998 of the Institute for Human Centered Design, an international educational non-profit organization based in Boston, Massachusetts founded in 1978 as Adaptive Environments. The organizational mission is to advance the role of design in expanding opportunity and enhancing experience for people of all ages and abilities through excellence in design. Fletcher writes and lectures internationally. She currently oversees design projects ranging from the development of a global, web-based collection of case studies of universal design in ten categories of the built environment to renovation of an historic public building for a school of architecture and research on universal design in classrooms, workplaces and homes.

Fletcher's career has been divided between design and public mental health and she is the former Deputy Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health where she oversaw the largest participatory planning process ever undertaken in a state mental health system.

She is a Special Advisor to the government of Singapore and to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Fletcher has a master degree in ethics and public policy from Harvard University. The Boston Society of Architects awarded her the Women in Design award in 2005. She's a Trustee of the Boston Architectural College.