Emily Fischer

Brooklyn Navy Yard-based textile artist and architect-turned-maker who founded Haptic Lab in 2009. Fischer earned a Master of Architecture from the University of Michigan's Taubman College in 2005, where she began stitching tactile map quilts in 2002 after her mother's vision-loss diagnosis, exploring the idea as a wayfinding tool for the visually impaired. After being laid off from a New York architecture firm in 2008, she won a kite-design contest that led to a 2009 commission from Opening Ceremony and later won Apartment Therapy's design showcase grand prize for a textile map. The studio hand-produces quilted textile maps, quilts, apparel, and sculptural objects exploring the sense of touch, with quilts hand-stitched by fair-trade partners in India, and became a certified B Corp in 2019. Her work has appeared in Architectural Digest, Martha Stewart Weddings, and Dwell.