Sheng-Hung Lee Presents on Design Thinking Methods at American Design Management Conference
by Adam Felts
AgeLab Research Assistant and current MIT doctoral student Sheng-Hung Lee presented two papers co-authored with Joseph F. Coughlin and Olivier de Weck at the 2022 Academic Design Management Conference. The theme of the conference for ADMC 2022 was the use of humane design principles to address the world’s increasing tendencies toward brittleness, anxiety, nonlinearity, and incomprehensibility. Mr. Lee’s paper presentations focused on the incorporation of user and worker perspectives into the consideration of design processes and analysis of technological systems.
Mr. Lee’s first paper, titled “Evolving Ethics in Design Research: Reshaping Design Considerations for Product Designer,” explores the incorporation of systems thinking into a human-centered design framework in order to better hear and respond to stakeholders throughout the design process. This combination of systems thinking and human-centered design thinking is applied to Mr. Lee’s project of developing indoor footwear for older adults, and places the input and perspective of prospective users and other actors in the system (manufacturers, retailers, service providers)
The second paper, titled Human-centered “System Design for the Global Supply Chain,” seeks to establish a perspective on the highly complex topic of the supply chain by focusing on the human element of the supply chain—placing labor, wellbeing, and the environment at the center of analyses of supply chain systems rather than technologies and processes. In this paper, Mr. Lee also applies a systems thinking approach to begin to imagine how such a human-centered analysis might look.