Access Insights · Team

Pete Denman, smiling, in his power wheelchair.

Pete Denman

Chairman of the Board • Partner • Principal Designer

He designed the interface Stephen Hawking used to speak. Thirty years of visual and interaction design, the last twenty at Intel Labs, brought to every project with the perspective of a power chair user and a dyslexic designer's insistence on clarity.

About

Design as the framework, not the decoration.

Pete is a third generation Oregonian and a graduate of Portland State University in fine art and design, with a minor in computer science. He spent twenty years at Intel, joining its founding user centered design practice and moving into Intel Labs, where he led design and research on exploratory prototypes across health, accessibility, AI, and data visualization.

His best known work came from a request no designer forgets: working directly with Stephen Hawking's team to design the complete user experience for the custom software Professor Hawking used as his sole means of communication and computer control. Pete served as Intel's spokesperson for the project and was the first to propose releasing the system free and open source, which Intel did. He still supports the software today.

Disability is not a subject Pete studies from the outside. He is disabled and dyslexic, uses a power chair, and has spent his career turning that lived experience into a research instrument: leading intern teams through designing for a user, running in-the-wild studies, and advocating in Salem and Washington for people whose access depends on decisions made without them.

Selected work

Prototypes with people inside them.

Leadership and advocacy

The work continues off the clock.

Boards and policy
  • QUAD Inc., chairman of the board (2015 to present): five apartment complexes housing nearly 200 people with disabilities and providing 100 jobs.
  • United Spinal Association, national board (2022 to present).
  • Disability Health & Employment Equity Coalition, co-founder (2022 to present): introduced Oregon SB 576, letting people with disabilities work while keeping essential benefits.
  • International Dyslexia Association, Oregon board (2019 to 2020).
  • UNESCO, technical advisor (Paris, 2015): brought design methods to two global communication projects.
Film, books, press
  • Featured in the documentaries Hawking (2013) and Road-trip Nation (2016).
  • Appears in Stephen Hawking: A Life Well Lived (Ferguson, 2019) and The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan (Foss, 2013).
  • Quoted in Interactive Design (Pratt, 2012); contributor to UNESCO publications.

pete.denman@accessinsights.net

Why it matters here: Access Insights exists to make lived experience a formal research instrument. Pete has been doing exactly that for twenty years, inside one of the world's largest technology companies and out.

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