Research Initiatives

Research Focus

ID's research goal is to develop methods that will help organizations gain a more detailed and relevant understanding of users' increasingly complex lives, and drive the development of innovative and humane products and business concepts.

In recent years, organizations' knowledge of how to make new products, communications, and services has grown tremendously. The decreasing costs of computing, the ability to embed computing into physical products, and the ability to create value by connecting products and services via networks, have exponentially increased the variety of offerings a company can create.

At the same time, organizations have a decreased ability to predict how consumers will use these new offerings. Twenty years ago it was possible to predict the general patterns of how people worked, learned, played, managed family life, and kept healthy. Today people have many more lifestyle options, making the old methods of market segmentation and demographic studies less reliable. The global economy has exacerbated this situation -- not only are patterns of living becoming less predictable, but cross-cultural differences are becoming subtler as well.

This growing gap between the increased knowledge of how to create offerings, and decreased understanding of the patterns of daily life, has left executives in a precarious situation. Organizations that know how to make just about anything find they are not certain about what to make.

Sponsored research programs
(PhD) indicates topics currently accepting PhD applicants

Thinkering Spaces, funded by the MacArthur Foundation
Context-Sensitive Design
Design for the Base of the Pyramid
DIF: Design Information Framework
Global Companies in Local Markets
New Product Definition (PhD)

Other research topics (by faculty investigator)
(PhD) indicates topics currently accepting PhD applicants

Jeremy Alexis
The Strategic Value of Design

Judith Gregory
Human-Centered Design in Health Care and Medicine
Qualitative research methods and Participatory Design for Multidisciplinarity Collaboration
Emotions and Motivations in Design
Cultural-Historical Activity Theory and Science & Technology Studies

Keiichi Sato
Interactive Systems: Re-Configurable Interface and Physical Interaction (PhD)
General Design Theory/Methodology and its Application (PhD)
Model-Based Representation of Cultural Factors in Interactive Systems Design (PhD)

Modified: Monday, 16-Apr-2007 15:39:12 CDT