HCD research lab is hiring highly motivated graduate and undergraduate students, see more details here: Openings

The Human-Centered Design Research Lab at Miami University conducts design research at the intersection of engineering and psychology, with the goal of advancing theories and methodologies that keep end-users at the center of the design process and support individual and group decision making of engineers and designers.

The lab research portfolio mainly lie in two major themes and integrating the research into engineering design education.

• Theme 1 studies user-product interaction, which characterizing design attributes by studying human cognition, emotion, and behaviors when they interact with products. The example projects include understanding and calibrating trust behaviors in autonomous vehicles (AVs) and pedestrian interaction, shaping customer pro-environmental preferences by design.
• Theme 2 focuses on studying engineer and designer design process in order to develop new methods and frameworks to support their design activities. The example projects include improving structured design processes, such as functional analysis, by incorporating user research, validating the alignment of these processes with designers’ cognitive flows, and assessing problem-design space explorations; investigating teamwork challenges and strategies among novice designers, examining the impact of diversity and equity on inclusion within undergraduate engineering design teams.