This research team is mapping the healthcare ecosystems of Boston and Milan, exploring the co-design and co-production processes that contain evidence of patient-driven innovation. The project observes and maps different scenarios in which design plays a role in the interdisciplinary innovation process, mapping experiences and practices of products-services, technologies, organizational processes, initiatives, public programs or actions, and policies—with the goal of pinpointing and connecting this emergent knowledge to the actors’ system that produced them. The mapping of the Boston healthcare ecosystem will be compared with Milano’s to clarify the nature of the empowered patientship and identify opportunities for strategic cross-connections and research initiatives through interdisciplinary collaborations and partnerships. The project aims to promote a cure to care cultural, pragmatic, and interdisciplinary transition in healthcare systems; nurturing a patient-centric development of new products-services to provide more agency and choices to patients and promote health equity and inclusion (meaning impact on individual satisfaction and community welfare).

This project is developed by the newly launched Health & Wellness Design Lab. (learn more below)

Machines in industrial workplace environments have notoriously been a source of harm for human health. Machines in gyms, instead, can help improve both health and fitness. This observation has been the starting point for this project. As people make use of machines in gyms or similar exercise setups to improve their health, why not take inspiration from that and develop machines for the factory floor that do the same?

This project is developed by the Experience Design Lab and the Institute for Experiential Robotics at Northeastern University. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under the award number 1928654. Development of the prototype takes place in our space at innovation hub MassRobotics in the Boston Seaport.

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.

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.

This curated collection is part of a broader research endeavor in which data, sonification and design converge to explore the potential of sound in complementing other modes of representation and broadening the publics of data. With visualization still being one of the prominent forms of data transformation, we believe that sound can both enrich the experience of data and build new publics.

View the archive here.

COVIC is a broad multi-lingual, multi-cultural view of visualizations created during the global COVID-19 pandemic. The project classifies articles and figures in a format that is available for teaching and research purposes; contains a snapshot of information design practice during the pandemic period; illustrates the range of qualitative and quantitative visualization possibilities; preserves a persistent record of ephemeral online visualization artifacts; provides a portrait of this moment of inflection accelerating the transition from print to online; represents both a problem space — how can visualization practice be used to address this problem — and a solution space — the techniques being used at different times, in different languages, and in different contexts. If you would like access to the archive, please email the center.

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.

This project is an investigation of 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. The 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.

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. 

This project is part of the Health & Wellness Design Lab. (learn more below)

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.

The Center for Design is curating a collection of resources that might enlighten us to think about design, design research, and design practice in general as collaborative practice. We have been gathering different available resources and have built a Repository of design tools, trends, methods, publications, case studies, and podcasts to help designers and general practitioners easily find and access information and design materials, following the meta-design approach of enabling platforms for others to choose, design, and act.

Daphne Menheere, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands.

Dan Lockton, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands.

Chang Hee Lee, KAIST, South Korea.

Marion Lean, UK Department for Culture, Media, and Sport, UK.

Carine Lallemand, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands.

Dietmar Offenhuber, Northeastern University, USA.

Holly Robbins, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands.

Elisa Giaccardi, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands.

Samuel Huron, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France.

Towards An Expanded Practice of Inquiry, Critique, and Action. 

Dan Jackson, Executive Director, NuLawLab, Northeastern University School of Law. 

Jules Rochielle Sievert, Creative Director, NuLawLab, Northeastern University School of Law. 

Miso Kim, Design Director, NuLawLab; Assistant Professor, Northeastern University College of Arts Media and Design. 

Sankalp Bhatnagar, Senior Researcher, NuLawLab, Northeastern University School of Law.