...for her data sonification work ‘Datascapes’ developed with the Ibermática Innovation Institute. The project was the winner of the “Potential Innovation” category, which awards outstanding proofs of concepts and will represent Spain at the international final of QI Award which will take place in Moscow in February 2022.

The sonification project uses sound instead of visuals to alert operators of SOC on incoming anomalies, detected by AI technology. It not only helps reduce operators’ visual information overload but also allows any person with a visual disability to access a fast-growing market; for example, monitoring cybersecurity systems.

The hope is that in one or two years, the project will be in its commercialization phase, so that any person with a disability may be able to interact with AI and access any job they should choose. This is a great step towards a more equitable, just, and accessible future through design innovation and we are so very proud that Sara has helped make it happen!

new approaches for how we design systems, environments, and services with a focus on how humans experience concrete situations.

Every day, the way we construct our environment changes the way we experience our world in profound ways. The most advanced technologies thrive when they connect with people’s experience in everyday life. Experience is active, participative, imaginative and creative and the Experience Design Lab at Northeastern University explores new approaches for how we design systems, environments, and services with a focus on how humans experience concrete situations. In this way, people’s experience and actions, rather than technological capability, become the guide for innovation.

We are always interested to hear from designers, researchers, students, as well as organizations in the public and private sector that are interested to explore together with us.

Learn more https://xdlab.camd.northeastern.edu/

What affordances, opportunities, and challenges emerge when interpreting data through the body using dance? The Data Dance team has been working with a contemporary dance company in a series of workshops which guide participants through activities aimed at creating space for embodied engagement with data. From these workshops, the team is designing a toolkit to guide other researchers, practitioners, and communities in using movement as inquiry, approaching data together, and fostering data curiosity. Data Dance is part of the larger Data Moves project at the Co-Laboratory for Data Impact that explores participatory embodied data practice more broadly including dance, theater, and other somatic approaches.

Team members: Laura Perovich, Ilya Vidrin, Nicole Zizzi, Rahul Bhargava, Jesse Hinson, Amanda Brea, Victoria Palacin

Partners: Co- Lab for Data Impact, Evolve Dynamicz Dance Company

This project imagines user-centered design processes where the latent needs of myriad users are automatically elicited from social media, forums, and online reviews, and translated into new concept recommendations for designers. This project will advance the fundamental understanding of if and how AI can augment the performance of designers in early-stage product development by investigating two fundamental questions: (1) Can we build and validate novel natural language processing (NLP) algorithms for large-scale elicitation of latent user needs with cross-domain transferability and minimal need for manually labeled data? (2) Can we build and validate novel deep generative design algorithms that capture the visual and functional aspects of past successful designs and automatically translate them into new design concepts? Our convergence research team is well-positioned to undertake these questions, with expertise across four disciplines of engineering, computer science, business, and design.

Team members: Mohsen Moghaddam, Lu Wang, Tucker Marion, Paolo Ciuccarelli, Estefania Ciliotta

Partners: Northeastern College of Engineering, D'Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern, University of Michigan

While there are many resources for service design professionals, there is rarely any mention of relevant service metrics. Most often, when metrics are referenced, they are high-level that capture the overall experience, such as NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), and Customer Effort Score (CES). Furthermore, there lacks a comprehensive inventory of relevant metrics for service design professionals. Therefore, the goal of our work is to build a comprehensive inventory of service design metrics that are relevant as part of the service design process, as well as the validation of a service experience.

Team Members: Miso Kim, Houjiang Liu, Estefania Ciliotta

Partners: William Albert – Bentley University

A foundational element to design courses is an iterative design process. Students understand this process easily and intuitively and can apply it to projects and challenges they encounter. For many students, the iterative process through which they learn is opaque. Students want to improve their learning process and have some level of metacognition about how best they learn but lack a formal framework about how to apply this information. In this project new learning interventions and instruments will be developed to further these ends in design courses. This will include updating current materials for NUFlex and developing new pilots for design courses and expansion into other courses that use iterative creative processes including art

Team members: Mark Sivak, Jamal Thorne, Nick Wilson

This project was a collaboration between Banca Intesa S.p.A., an Italian banking group, and the design team led by Paolo Ciuccarelli from the Center for Design, Northeastern University. The project aimed to create a collection of data visualizations for Banca Intesa S.p.A. to explore its impacts on the growth of knowledge depth in the company. The results will be used for developing the training program and supporting the future business plan.

Team members: Paolo Ciuccarelli, Houjiang Liu, Yuan Hua

Partners: Banca Intesa, Italy

We are investigating how UI and UX elements can affect the consumption and spread of misinformation on social media platforms. In particular, we are exploring how design can mitigate the negative effects of social metrics (SM) and filtering algorithms (FA) on the consumption and spread of information and news on such platforms. Our assumption is that we can influence users’ behavior and try to limit the spread of misinformation by designing new ways to present and visualize SM and to increase users’ awareness of the hidden effects of FA and SM. This assumption is based on previous research on the impact of UX design on user’s digital behavior.

Team Members: John Wihbey, Myo Chung, Mike Peacey, Estefania Ciliotta, Paolo Ciuccarelli, Yuqing Liu

Partners: Sara Colombo and Guangyu Chen – TU Eindhoven

This research group is seeking to understand attitudes in young adults (18-24) regarding climate change and how it affects mental health and health behaviors. We hypothesize that the environmental risk wrought by climate change and the national conversation on sustainability likely leads to a spectrum of beliefs, behaviors, and values regarding personal agency and resilience, which we are loosely defining as climate nihilism, climate ambivalence, and climate hope. The working group is pursuing two phases of data collection using complementary, cross-disciplinary methods (i.e., Design Toolkits, Online Surveys) to explore collective and relational aspects of climate change and health.

Team Members: Miso Kim, Michael A. Mages, Sara Carr, Susan Mello, Estefania Ciliotta

Students: Madison Thomas and Yechan Yang