Allison Crank

Emmy-nominated and Venice Prize-winning, Allison Crank is an interaction designer and researcher based in Paris, originally trained as an architect at Wellesley College and MIT, then in Contextual Design at Design Academy Eindhoven, and Design for Digital Innovation at EPFL and ECAL in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 2020 she launched Crank Studio — a practice designing digital, spatial, and interactive experiences for culture, research, and organizations navigating emerging technology. The kind where you don't notice the interface, only the idea.

Her work spans XR — VR, MR, and spatial computing — game design, and human-centered AI. She was lead interaction designer on IMPULSE, a 40-minute mixed-reality experience narrated by Academy Award-winner Tilda Swinton — winner of the Venice Immersive Achievement Prize and nominated for an Emmy — placing audiences inside the minds of four people living with ADHD. She was also lead on Glimpse, an animated VR experience that won Best Interactive Experience at Cannes XR and the VR Cristal at Annecy after premiering at Venice. She has also designed therapeutic games for neurodiverse adolescents currently entering clinical trials, and culture-care systems for hospitals and museums. Collaborators include Gallagher & Associates, Audemars Piguet, Dreamscape, National Geographic, Google News Initiative, Meta, and MIT. Lately her focus has extended to the human side of AI — not the systems themselves, but how people encounter, trust, and make sense of them. She is interested in AI that recedes: that serves without overwhelming, that handles complexity so the experience feels simple, and that keeps the human at the centre of what it produces.

Before Crank Studio she was Head of Digital Experiences at wowl, and a researcher at the EPFL+ECAL Lab where she worked on the UNESCO-recognized Montreux Jazz digital archive. Her research has appeared in Leonardo (MIT Press) and at SIGGRAPH, and her practice has been profiled by XRMust.

She has taught at the Architectural Association Visiting School in Melbourne (four editions), at HSLU in Lucerne, and as an expert lecturer on the MIT xPRO Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality programme. In 2022 she served as curator of Raumwelten — Germany's leading festival for scenography, architecture, and media — directing its 11th edition around the theme /imagine. She also mentors at the Venice Biennale College Cinema — most recently for the 2026 edition.

I design for how people feel, move, and make meaning in complex, hybrid worlds. Offline, I'm usually roaming Paris with PixelPixel ✦ Pomeranian, my Pomeranian — an exacting authority on nap architecture.