Speaker: Ranjitha Kumar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Abstract: The world has entered an era of design. Through phones and myriad other devices, everyday people interact with digital design constantly: better user experience is often a company’s competitive edge, and consumers are willing to pay a premium for personalized products that achieve desired outcomes.
Despite the tens of billions of dollars spent annually solving design problems, design thinking remains an endeavor mostly based on intuition and HiPPOs, as well as one in which spending money does not guarantee results. My research is motivated by one central observation: that as more and more creative work is done digitally and shared in the cloud, we can — for the first time — apply data mining and knowledge discovery techniques to solving design problems, casting design not as an art, but as a science. In this talk, I’ll discuss how data-driven tools can scaffold the design process and scale the creation of high-quality design.