From User Reviews to User-Centered Generative Design

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 then 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 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 will pursue two phases of data collection using complementary, cross-disciplinary methods (i.e., Design Toolkits, Online Surveys, etc.) to explore collective and relational aspects of climate change and health. We hypothesize that climate may be experienced emotionally by youth in two key ways: as stress, ongoing underlying feelings of concern, malaise or anxiety, or as shocks, coping with a sudden catastrophic environmental event, like a flood, storm, landslide, or wildfire.

Read the published paper here.

Mapping the Boston Healthcare Ecosystem

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 an interdisciplinary, cultural, and pragmatic interdisciplinary transition in healthcare systems, nurturing a patient-centric development of new products-services to provide more agency and choices to patients and to promote health equity and inclusion.

This project is developed by the Health & Wellness Design Lab.

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.

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.

View the archive here.

Starting in their teenage years, young adults make a myriad of life-changing sexual and reproductive health decisions. Their choices largely rely on the perspective they have developed about sexual health from their social networks (caretakers, siblings, peers, coaches, teachers), formal education, and information in the media. The contemporary information landscape includes a broad spectrum of channels, ranging from formal sexual education in schools to social media influencers and fictional films. The short-term goal of this project is to develop an in-depth understanding of how teenagers learn about sex, to understand where and from whom they get their information, and to identify potential gaps in information channels. We will pursue this goal through developing strong partnerships with faculty and community-based organizations in Boston and Oakland to ensure that our team has trusted partners to implement our project in diverse geographic areas. The long-term goal is to leverage the seed grant data and partnerships to develop a competitive grant application to design and test a digital platform which will provide a supportive environment for teenagers to access reliable sexual health information.

Which US cities have more amenities within 15 minutes of active mobility? This project is a data visualization collaboration with the MIT Senseable City Lab, using GPS data from more than 40 million smartphones. The 15-minute city concept aims to make essential amenities reachable within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from home. If effectively implemented, this could promote sustainable transportation, foster vibrant urban environments, and reduce vehicular congestion and emissions.

View the project website here.

Design-based research is used as a paradigm for investigating learning through the systematic study of instructional strategies and tools. However, there are few studies addressing early childhood interventions that include children. This workshop focuses on music-based, participatory design research approaches for engaging children in literacy and STEAM learning, challenging dominant cultural conceptions and pedagogical practices related to children’s agency in learning. The project focuses on the design of the Urban Griots Playground (UGP) series of technology-driven family workshops that leverage multimodal pedagogies (oral/aural, visual and kinesthetic) for exploring how interactive, music-based activities that have shown promise in stimulating literacy behaviors can be developed and applied to actively engage children around STEAM concepts. The findings that will result from this work will enrich theory and practice in the fields of early childhood education, music technology and literacy research by documenting the design applications and epistemic implications of digital orality systems.

Service design teams are composed of people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. To be successful navigating this pluriverse, collaborative teams need to develop mechanisms to embrace and nurture the power of diversity. However, teams often lack specific tools and skills to leverage the strengths of diversity. These workshops aims to provide participants with tools to raise awareness of cultural differences and similarities. These workshops also aims to have participants experience firsthand the impact of materiality – in the form of evocative objects – as enhancers of intercultural conversations. We explore how surfacing a variety of mental models through objects is possible and effective in intercultural teams. Our goal is to demonstrate how teams can use this approach to approach a new problem space from different perspectives, benefiting from the power of diversity.

Misinformation is spreading through society, on social media networks and elsewhere, about a range of important topics. But in democratic societies, appropriate action requires large groups to form reasonable opinions, or attitudes, on what are often complex issues. This project aims to understand how groups can remain ignorant whether through error or omission and for how long, even when group members act rationally and assess evidence that itself points to the truth. We ask how group knowledge and beliefs form, and how “higher-order” information (e.g. knowing there is a misinformant in the group) improves individual judgement. The interdisciplinary project employs computer simulations of large, realistic social networks. The results will yield new evidence about the metaphysics of group attitudes and shed light on current debates on the use of higher-order evidence. In turn, our philosophical simulations may: provide insights in the deployment of existing economic models of information sharing; challenge assumptions about computational workloads on graphs; and ultimately inform company and government policy.

View the project website here.

This project is a collaboration with the City of Boston to facilitate a participatory budgeting process grounded in equity. This involves creating a deliberative community conversation toolkit for use by community partner organizations who will be recruited and managed by the City of Boston. The key focus is on equity-centered recruiting, prioritizing fair and inclusive practices to ensure diverse representation and creating an equitable and informed decision-making environment. The collaborative effort aims to empower community members, allowing them to actively voice needs and priorities that are relevant to their neighborhoods, generating data that can be formed into project proposals and fostering inclusivity and fairness throughout the process.

This project is a case study exploring a novel approach to medical equipment design. Design ideas can come from the most unlikely of sources… MAGIC! The day-long hackathon sought to find design solutions to create safer, less wasteful medical devices, including central line kits, by drawing inspiration from the design of props used in magic performances. While magic and medical devices might seem an unusual combination at first, those in attendance instantly saw the correlations between the strategies used in magic to design the seemingly impossible and how those can be utilized in design exercises to inspire safer, more patient-centered medical devices.

The report from the hackathon explores the shift towards patient-centered healthcare and the role of design in facilitating this transformation, drawing inspiration from magic as a catalyst for change. The findings from the hackathon emphasize the power of interdisciplinary design thinking and the potential to transform healthcare systems, suggesting that the interdisciplinary research of design, magic, and healthcare deserves further exploration in the future with theoretical exploration and projects.

Read the abstract here (#252).

Gender Bias and AI

Technological development, especially in the form of artificial intelligence (AI), opens possibilities for service design. However, the AI-reliant systems we design replicate our inherent biases. Threads of Assumption is a multi-year interactive art project that collects and codes stories of gender bias. For the initial dataset, we collected intimate conversations using a digital platform. However, traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis could not evaluate gender bias. Starting in 2021, we developed a workshop format for collecting qualitative data, centering on reflection and storytelling, to build a training dataset for AI models to identify gender bias. Relying on our expertise as artists and designers, we cultivate a meditative space for contributing sensitive stories. Participants experience how hands-on activities, such as writing and weaving, can personalize abstract and sensitive topics and make complexity tangible and accessible. Participants leave with a blueprint of best practices for facilitating a workshop for qualitative data collection, tools for integrating physical making into workshop design, and an expanded understanding of how gender bias affects them, their communities, and the service design process.

This project is an exploratory business analytics application that allows the organization to explore and audit risk management data to understand and manage the complexity. The application affords users a visual understanding of how risk is distributed across organizational structures and how activities are distributed among different actors at the company. Additionally, users can identify activities and associated risks without appropriate controls and develop plans to redistribute workflows.

The power behind the design of this application is its minimal interface design that facilitates user interaction. A query status pane allows users to filter, zoom, and highlight specific attributes of the visualizations. Additionally, navigational controls create a visualization-first user experience by hiding all non-visualization components on the screen.

View the application here.

This project explores the link between capitalist systems and climate change, drawing from H.A Baer’s analysis of profit-driven economies perpetuating fossil fuel reliance and greenhouse gas emissions. Using World Bank and GermanwatchClimate Risk Index data, it examines countries’ vulnerability to extreme weather events and emissions per capita. Taking a metaphorical approach, we adopt the hurricane as a form that aligns with the sense of a looming threat.

Scholars have advocated for the importance of evaluation in service design, proposing comprehensive frameworks for such integration in design processes. This research seeks to complement existing theoretical studies by providing empirical insights into the utilization of metrics by practicing service designers. Our study presents findings derived from a global survey and in-depth interviews conducted with service designers from eleven countries. Our results highlight the value of using metrics in service design practice and a gap in systematic knowledge. We also underscore that organizational context can either foster or challenge the utilization of metrics in practice. This article contributes to ongoing service design evaluation research by providing data pertaining to the perceived benefits of metric usage within the service design process and in organizational collaboration, as well as insights into the perceived difficulties.

Read the published paper here.

This project launched a set of initiatives to face the COVID-19 emergency through design. The first step is to collect information about the experiences of people living in areas heavily affected by coronavirus who cannot leave their homes. We aim to understand their fears, problems, and hopes, as well as how their habits are changing in the moment. From there, the goal is to quickly design new solutions to address the specific issues of people facing this emergency. These solutions will entertain, connect, and support individuals and communities in new ways.

The Design for Emergency Data Platform collects data about people’s experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. We investigated these questions: How have people been dealing with restrictions and containment measures introduced by many countries in response to the pandemic? What have their emotions, fears and hopes been? What problems have they encountered? How have their habits and lives changed since then? The data was collected through a survey disseminated in 12 countries, but the project is still expanding. The website publishes the ongoing results from the analysis of 7500+ responses and counting.

View the project website here.
View the published paper here.

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.