We build things to help people
The Difference Engine at Arizona State University is an impact-based venture studio that builds products with and for communities to combat inequality and is based out of Downtown Los Angeles.
Our impact
In just three years, we've grown to engage over 55 Difference Engineers (students, faculty, and staff) who have helped several communities nationwide develop practical solutions to inequality while strengthening civic participation and public trust. Our flagship initiatives include the:
- Women's Power & Influence Index: The country's most comprehensive measure of workplace fairness, evaluating major companies on gender equity metrics.
- Creative Justice Lab: A collaborative initiative where students and community members design innovative solutions to challenges like food insecurity.
- Distinguished Innovation Fellows: An application-based program bringing experienced leaders together with ASU faculty to tackle complex social problems through entrepreneurial approaches.
- New Policing Project: Reimagining public safety systems through direct community leadership and oversight.
Our mission
The Difference Engine at Arizona State University is a venture studio that creates practical solutions to inequality by leveraging student innovation, faculty expertise, and community leadership. We believe that communities experiencing inequality are best positioned to solve their own challenges—they just need the right support, tools, and facilitation to launch their ideas and transform the institutions that affect their lives. As a university-wide initiative housed in ASU's Office of University Affairs, we draw expertise from across ASU's academic landscape, from law and liberal arts to engineering and business.
What is the Difference Engine?
Why the Difference Engine
The Difference Engine has a story
The Difference Engine has a story: it was the first automatic computing engine built through a collaboration between Charles Babbage (the first inventor of the modern computer) and Ada Lovelace (the first modern computer programmer). The device was well ahead of its time and led directly to the advent of modern computing. Babbage and Lovelace sought to use their Difference Engine to lessen the negative impact of the Industrial Age on a new class of “wage workers” who were often being taken advantage of by factory bosses.
For instance, one of the first uses of the Difference Engine was to create the first time clock to make it difficult for factory owners to overwork their staff. Lovelace and Babbage also used the Engine to lessen the mindless physical drudgery of factory work by automating rote tasks; and also used it to determine how shoddy structures in lower-income and earthquake-prone areas would be affected by aftershocks.
I love what the story represents
The Difference Engine was one of the first modern examples of how academic rigor, cutting-edge technology and entrepreneurship - brought together in a collaboration of equals during a time of stratified gender inequality - had the potential to transform humankind for the better. It’s a story of how the fruits of economic enterprise can be employed to better that enterprise and create an atmosphere of equity which then leads to positive change for the enterprise itself (the so-called “virtuous cycle”). The name and its story encapsulate my vision for the Center - an outfit that leverages the funds, goodwill and thought leadership of the economic, social and political sectors to discuss the structural inequality inherent within these sectors but then also DOES something about those issues to make a difference for the underlying sectors that give birth to the inequality itself.
