Research works., Works of Research.

Social. Design. Research.

I specialize in researching the limits of design, across education, engineering, international development, and the like. Check it out, I'm sure you'll learn something new.

Curriculum Vitae
Investigating Innovation Practice: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in International Development
Innovation practice is a growing transdisciplinary field that has created debate in communities of social impact: around who is involved, how useful are the methods, where ethics fits into its practice, and the like. However, these discussions rarely look at how innovators actually practicing their craft. This dissertation includes three studies one currently practicing designers...
An exploration of the innovation practices designers engage in while developing technological interventions to address global poverty issues.

Ph.D. Dissertation.

Applying Equity Design to Address Oakland’s Homelessness Human Rights Crisis
In 2017, we facilitated a co-design innovation summit where unhoused Oakland residents led collaborative efforts to alleviate the burdens of homelessness, with city staff and housed residents serving as allies instead of experts.
A Case study of equitable design practice applied to Oakland’s crisis of unhoused residents.

Conference publication.

2014 OpenIDEO Usability Assessment Final Report
A usability assessment of OpenIDEO’s older platforms.

Graduate Research Report.

From the Technical to the Political: Democratizing Design Thinking
Design thinking is considered a silver-bullet solution, through which its practice assumes social progress. In this paper, we question this assumption and how it is used in the existing design market, and how they myopically focus on technological innovation and failure to address political power dynamics. We then offer additional mindsets to ensure design thinking...
Exploring mainstream design thinking’s methodologies and their failure to address political power dynamics.

Conference Publication.

Co-author network analysis of human-centered design for development
Human-centered design has been spreading worldwide to many countries, fields of study, and professions. We aspired to ask: How do they connect? By building and evaluating a co-authorship network from a dataset of personally curated peer-reviewed publications, we provide a decade-long benchmark to answer a variety of questions about collaboration patterns in the field. For...
Building and evaluating a co-authorship network of papers of human-centered design for development.

Peer-reviewed publication.

Building 21st Century Skills through Development Engineering
The 21st Century Engineer requires many skills to address social impact issues of the future. To address this issue, The University of California at Berkeley offers Development Engineering, a degree program and accompanying ecosystem that aims “…to create technology interventions in accordance with the needs and wants of individuals living within complex, low-resource settings.” This...
An analysis of the diverse and multidisciplinary skills taught to graduate students during a UC Berkeley Ph.D. Minor to train the Engineer of 2020.

Conference publication.

Design Thinking For the Poor: A Comparative Content Analysis of Development Challenges in OpenIDEO.
In the space of international development, experts aim to solve the problems of the poor with solutions driven by their expertise. Driven by technocratic problems, technologists driven to make the world a better place develop innovative technologies in widely disparate fields to serve the poor. Harnessing the process by which these technologies are made is...
An analysis of human-centered design activity and practice for the OpenIDEO Innovation platform.

Conference publication.

Examining Design for Development Online: An HCD Analysis of OpenIDEO Using HCD/UCD Metrics
OpenIDEO.com is an online collaborative platform developed to crowd source design talent across the Internet to tackle difficult interdisciplinary problems. Many of their design Challenges have focused upon issues concerning impoverished communities. Challenges include human sanitation solutions, alternatives for serving maternal health issues with mobile technologies, affordable learning tools, and social business models to improve...
A systematic literature review of bottom of the pyramid (BOP) research and activity over ten years, and OpenIDEO analysis.

Master’s Thesis.

Thermal Energy Process Heat for Lunar ISRU: Technical Challenges and Technology Opportunities
Oxygen production from lunar raw materials is critical for sustaining a manned lunar base but is very power intensive. Solar concentrators are a well-developed technology for harnessing the Sun’s energy to heat regolith to high temperatures (over 1375 K). The high temperature and potential material incompatibilities present numerous technical challenges. This study compares and contrasts different solar...
A best practices review of solar concentrator technologies for heating lunar regolith.

Peer-reviewed publication.

SPHERES Control of Attitude Control System using Reaction Wheels
The Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient Experimental Satellites (SPHERES) laboratory, which works towards the development and testing of algorithms which control autonomous microsatellites, and the Space Systems Engineering class, an Astronautical-optional class needed to complete the undergraduate Aero/Astro baccalaureate degree at MIT, have been working together in the Space System Laboratory to develop an attitude...
A detailed description of the controls mount that adjusts the center of mass of the ACS to the desired accuracy.

Research Paper.

What methods do I love to use?

qualitative methods.
facilitation.
design research.
quantitative analysis.
collaborative research.
interdisciplinary collaboration.