Christine Toh

1. Design Cognition & decision-Making

My foundational research is on individual designer cognition and decision-making as practiced in real-world engineering design contexts, drawing on the empirical traditions of behavioral economics and cognitive science to study individuals and small teams in industrial and educational settings. By investigating design cognition and decision-making with empirical methods helps us understand designers’ ethical rationality, which reflects disciplinary ideology and contributes to supporting work in complex design engagements. My work on concept selection and cognitive biases brought renewed attention to the early stages of the engineering design process and showed how ownership bias, or an individual’s tendency to prefer their own ideas, impacts concept selection in design education. 

I also focus on studying and developing tools for sustainable product design, a topic of current interest in both industry and engineering education. My work highlights the many influences on translating design methods from academia into practice that are core to training engineering students to be effective technical leaders.

I am now exploring how designers negotiate ethical and operational tensions, for example, when client product requirements and manufacturing operations conflict with sustainable design goals. Understanding how individuals navigate these wicked problems will advance engineering education through research grounded in the everyday politics of design practice.

2. design Systems & Methods

I examine how design tools and methods impact outcomes and the communities we aim to serve. The main premise of this work is that by co-designing technologies with community partners, we can learn about the process and principles of design that enable new approaches and methods to create more equitable engineering outcomes, bridging the empirical-conceptual gap to help build theories of equitable engineering.

I worked with communities of rural Nebraskans with Parkinson’s Disease to develop tools for monitoring balance and mobility, intended to improve individuals’ capacity for self-management of health and wellness. This research shows a stark gap in design methods originating from disciplinary domination in social institutions that align poorly with the enabling conditions of participatory co-design. 

My projects in this space center methods for building more equitable systems, but show how individual interventions can affect limited change in the presence of power differentials in entrenched systems such as the engineering discipline. I study study co-design methods in large community-led engagements with significant power differentials to support underresourced communities and the cultural, institutional, and disciplinary barriers that they face.