Alex Haagaard

Alex Haagaard is a designer, researcher, and disability activist whose work focuses on inclusive design, health justice, and advocacy. Specializing in accessibility, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI/EDI), disability, and digital health, Haagaard integrates academic training with personal experience as a chronically ill patient to inform their approach to design and healthcare systems.

Haagaard earned a Master of Design from OCAD University in Toronto, where their research examined knowledge-gathering practices among emergency medical professionals to inform healthcare information design. This academic background, combined with firsthand experience navigating medical systems, shapes Haagaard’s perspective on how design can empower or marginalize disabled individuals.

As a founding member and Director of Communications at The Disabled List, an advocacy collective, Haagaard develops and promotes disability-led design methods. The organization treats the lived experience of disability as both creative and technical expertise, challenging the design industry to move beyond basic accessibility compliance toward genuinely inclusive methodologies that center the knowledge and agency of disabled people.

Haagaard has consulted on disability-led design methodologies with organizations including New York Times, Washington Post, Volkswagen, and Twitter. With more than 13 years of experience in user research and product strategy, Haagaard has worked with Fortune 100 companies, nonprofits, and federal agencies across technology, healthcare, automotive, education, and fashion sectors. Haagaard has co-taught a course in Disability-Led Design within the Products of Design program at School of Visual Arts in New York and served as a Designer-In-Residence in the Design for Social Innovation program at SVA.

Haagaard is recognized in design circles for co-authoring the concept of the disability dongle, a term highlighting the phenomenon of design and engineering solutions for disabled people that receive mainstream attention despite concerns from the disability community. Haagaard contributed the theoretical analysis for the academic paper on the disability dongle, framing it as an example of Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum. Their published work appears in V&A Blog, Quartz, Medium, and CASTAC Blog, and their speaking topics include accessible design history, inclusive research methodologies, and patient-centered medicine.

Haagaard’s research interests encompass the history and philosophy of medicine, philosophy of disability, crip technoscience, anarchist biohacking, and invalid futures. They design speculative access supports, infrastructure for participatory research, and tools to restore agency to patients within medical interactions. Through writing, consulting, and public speaking, Haagaard advocates for critical analysis of healthcare guidelines and a focus on marginalized patients, advancing equity in both design and healthcare systems.