IRIS Design Lab
Interdisciplinary Research in Sustainable Design
In the IRIS Design Lab, we study Quantified Cognitive Empathy. We begin by building empathy with stakeholders in a qualitative manner, such as through interviews and observations. We then move to quantitatively express this empathy to create meaningful design insights. Research projects in the lab have three foci: (1) Modeling the role of the public’s decisions in large-scale sustainable technology implementation; (2) Improving engineering designers’ abilities to address complex customer preference for sustainability; and (3) Using data on how consumers perceive products, especially visually, to understand evaluations and decisions. These foci represent three corresponding design vantage points: (1) system-level; (2) human-scale or product-level, and (3) single-decision-level. The exploration of these different vantage points is fundamental to performing insightful design research on complex design issues, such as sustainability.
For more information please visit IRIS Design Lab’s website.