‘Making things better’: Keller Center talk focuses on design research

The Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education hosted Jodi Forlizzi, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, as part of their Humanistic Design Speaker Series for a talk on March 6. Forlizzi’s talk discussed the contribution of design research to the development of better products, services, environments, and social systems.

The Humanistic Design Speaker Series is an introduction to understanding collaboration between science and humanities through design to create purposeful and pragmatic advances in society, both historically and today.

Forlizzi defined design research as the study of “creating new knowledge based on the current state of a problem and codifying that knowledge in the design of future products, services, systems and environments that suggest and improve future spaces.” Design research is an emerging field in the study of human-computer interaction (HCI).

During her talk, she introduced design as a forward-facing process that attempts to solve real-world problems: “making things better,” in her words.

“It’s an investigation made using the design process, where we imagine the future, give forms through a conversation with material, and then we repeatedly reframe a problem with many possible solutions,” she explained.

Her research frames the effect of technology on design research; she explained that her research group takes a “systemic ecological view to depict interactions with products among multiple stakeholders in environments and social spaces.”

Forlizzi has collaborated with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations and UNITE HERE, a hospitality labor union, to conduct research on the current state of union hospitality workers, automation technology, and future solutions on iterative co-design of technology deployment models. Her study, published in 2023, also identified job skills, workforce needs, and training materials to prepare workers and managers on how to use technology in their field of work. Subsequent work of Forlizzi has included discussions on AI and robotics.

“Interdisciplinary research is at the core of HCI, because it’s made up of design, human science and computer science,” Forlizzi told The Daily Princetonian in an interview. She explained that researchers in many different fields are working together by addressing the same research problems and investigating different questions about them.

Diya Hundiwala ’27, a student researcher at the HCI lab at Princeton and an attendee at the event, told the ‘Prince’ that there are many stages to a well-rounded product.

“Prototyping and testing are vital to design and HCI research,” Hundiwala said. “Starting with sketches and wireframes in Figma to test initial ideas and then moving into code is a process we frequently follow. The key is iterating often: test, tweak, repeat.”

Forlizzi explained the dichotomy between the theoretical aspects of science and the practical components of design.

“Design often is inspired by theories of human behavior,” Forlizzi said. “We integrate knowledge from the true and the real. So we often look at theories of what people are doing to try to figure out what’s happening.”

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Forlizzi noted that technology is a continuum and HCI researchers will always be studying human interaction with these emerging technologies. She identified herself as a “very, very traditional designer” who believes that one of the core aspects of design is empathy for the people being designed for.

The next Humanistic Design Speaker will be held on April 17 and will feature Julian Bleecker, founder of Near Future Laboratory, and will discuss the era of non-human intelligence.

Sarah Mashiat is a News contributor for the ‘Prince.’

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