Larry John Leifer

Stanford University | SU · Department of Mechanical Engineering

In the digital era, what the toy industry wants to do is not only the toy part but to attract more users. Several studies have addressed that traditional industrial design can no longer fully meet users’ needs. Reflecting on the literature and user studies, we describe project-based learning (PBL) practice and four sets of novel contexts, personas,...

This research investigates changes in team behavior and communication through interruptions and gestures, due to design process strategies in pre-formed remote teams for conceptual design tasks. Understanding creative remote team behavior is important due to the increase of remote communication in knowledge work. Teams were given a creative or anal...

With the rapid development of science and technology, the ability to creative thinking has become an essential criterion for measuring talents. Current creative thinking courses for college students are affected by COVID-19 and are challenging to conduct. This study aimed to explore practical ways to teach creative thinking knowledge online and exp...

A key challenge in innovation creation is the rapid generation of new, relevant knowledge. This chapter discusses how design practices generate the fundamental knowledge of knowing why, essential for innovation in the real world. It illustrates the importance of knowing why in uncertain and ambiguous situations and the conditions of innovation. We...

This chapter outlines a humanistic and creative Philosophy of Design that evolved over several decades at Stanford University. This Philosophy of Design is often referred to as Human-centered Design and Design Thinking. It incorporates humanistic and creative qualities, including creative thinking modes, attitudes and human values, creative attribu...

This book chapter outlines different facets of Human-Centered Design, which evolved over half a century. These facets have different foundational influences that lead to design by, with, and for people. Designing for people, including Ergonomics and Human Factors and Interactions Design, originated from early developments in experimental psychology...

In recent years, technological and methodological advancements in brain imaging techniques, such as functional near-infrared spectroscopy, hyper-scanning, and wireless data collection, have allowed design researchers to examine the neurocognitive processes of designers during specific design activities in more natural environments. Based on these n...

Today’s user experience (UX) educators and designers can no longer just focus on creating more usable systems, but must also rise to the level of strategists, using design thinking and human–computer interaction (HCI) solutions to improve academic and business outcomes. Both psychological, designer, and engineering approaches are adopted in this st...

Synchrony, the natural time-dependence of behavior in human interaction, is a pervasive feature of communication. However, most studies of synchrony have focused on dyadic interaction. In the current work, we explore synchrony in three-person teams using immersive virtual reality. Participants spent about two hours collaborating on four separate de...

This paper examines the immediate effects of group methods in facilitating remote team collaboration. We recruited seven teams with prior experience working together. All teams completed two current, complex, and open-ended design challenges using remote tools. We examined design activities before and after teams were given a design method interven...

The COVID-19 Pandemic has exacerbated challenges in remote design collaboration during the past year. Public policy has shifted almost all activities into a remote format. This separation in physical space results in challenges in design collaboration and design work. Three topics that have become more complicated during our study during the pandem...

This is a qualitative single case study of a geographically distributed student team that experienced a quite different graduate course, compared to previous year's. This was due to the restrictions placed upon them following coronavirus lockdowns. With already ongoing research, and continuous development of the course, the authors had documented i...

This paper examines the immediate effects of group methods in facilitating remote team collaboration. We recruited seven teams with prior experience working together. All teams completed two current, complex, and open-ended design challenges using remote tools. We examined design activities before and after teams were given a design method interven...

The process of design involves rich emotional experiences from resolving team conflict to breaking impasses to discovering creative insight. To explore emotion in designing we present a mixed-method study of experienced designers. Situated emotion is assessed by triangulating speech acoustics, electrodermal activity, and semantics with contextual i...

The practice of design thinking has become widespread over the last years, and an increasing number of people and institutions have experienced its innovative power. However, the success story of the approach has also meant that the term has evolved into something of an overused, or even misused, buzzword. The demand for an in-depth, evidence-based...

The practice of design thinking has become widespread over the last several years, and an increasing number of individuals and institutions have come to recognize its innovative power. However, its success story has also meant that the term has evolved into something of an overused, or even misused, buzzword. The demand for an in-depth, evidence-ba...

The NeuroDesign Special Interest Group (SIG) introduces an initiative that seeks synergies at the intersection of digital engineering, neurocognitive science, and design research. It focuses on examining designers’ thinking (i.e., creativity and collaboration) in particular in team settings. This SIG aims to advance the understanding of neurocognit...

The research presented in this article investigates and discusses the changes in conception throughout twenty-three product innovation projects. Changes in conception in the thinking of the designer that leads to novel design concepts have been investigated mainly in situ through methods such as protocol analysis. However, scholars emphasized that...

This paper introduces an innovation course has been taught at Stanford University since 1967. In its 52-year-long journey and iterations, both teachers and students learn to dance with ambiguity, collaborate in teams, build to think, and make ideas real. They embrace design thinking and experience the entrepreneurial culture of Silicon Valley in th...

Through a strategic learning process, prototypes unveil design directions. We provide a review of prototyping methods for novice designers to study and pedagogical practice for capstone design course faculty to juxtapose. Stanford University's ME310 graduate-level project-based learning course introduces students to various prototyping design techn...

The world population is steadily ageing and the World Health Organization recently stated that 8.5 percent of people worldwide are aged 65 and over. This cohort is projected to account for 1.6 billion people by 2050. Assistive Technology has been developed over previous decades with a par-ticular aim to support people with disabilities. With the e...

When it is done well, design teamwork is a fun, creative, and productive activity. However, the learning of effective design teamwork is hampered by lack of exposure to variation in design contexts, lack of deliberate practice and lack of appropriate feedback channels. In this chapter we present immersive Virtual Reality (VR) in accompaniment to ac...

The practice of design thinking has gained in prominence over the past several years, and an increasing number of people and institutions have experienced its innovative power. However, as a result of this success story, the term has also evolved into something of an overused, or even misused, buzzword. The demand for an in-depth, evidence-based un...

In this paper, we frame design as a learning process where discomfort abounds, and through the process, engineering designers iteratively reconstruct their knowledge and identity. Design and design thinking require very different kinds of cognition and behavior than engineering science. How engineers deal with their cognitive and epistemic biases w...

In recent years design has had a renaissance in business and management research and practice. Several authors have discussed if management is a design practice and how far design ought to go to design behaviors. This article discusses, evaluates and explores organizational design as a human-centered design practice. Relevant theoretical concepts o...

This paper investigates relationships among the cognitive characteristics, interaction behaviors, and ideation outcomes of 14 engineering design teams engaged in concept generation. Cognitive characteristics were measured using the Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory (KAI), which assesses an individual's cognitive preference for structure in gener...

We now appear to be in the full grip of the media transformation from paper-based media to a digital-based media. This evolution in mobility of information (experiences) has occurred alongside the mobility of matter and labor (goods and services, mass and heat), all of which have come about as a result of evolution in technologies of encryption, co...

In the pursuit of breakthrough innovation, it is necessary to recognize that most, if not all, respective disciplines exhibit tendencies for “solution-fixation.” When problems appear, the historical value of designers and managers has been associated with an ability to swiftly recognize, properly mobilize, and solve them. The Hasso Plattner Design...

GivenA team-of-teams organization demands collaboration.A command-control organization demands cooperation.The Challenge:How might we make the distinction actionable on a day-to-day, session-to-session basis within the enterprise? Can a culture of extreme collaboration co-exist with a culture of extreme cooperation?Can we summarize the challenge as...

More and more organizations have experienced the impact of design thinking on their innovation culture. People can see the way it changes how they and their coworkers innovate, how it affects their teamwork, and the impact it has on the quality of their output. The desire to understand the reason for this impact and to improve our knowledge about i...

This research paper attempts to position fundamental principles of design thinking within a framework of problem-solving theory. The roles that are assumed in a co-creation community, team or workplace, are influenced by a champion who arises and systematically anchors alternatives and ideas once proposals are about to be realised. By embracing div...

We present a theoretical framework about how designers learn new ways of thinking and doing named the reframing theory. The theory underlines why some designers’ creative behaviors endure and some not in face of a conflicting social belief system. In this paper, we first describe the problems that designers and educators face when the cultures that...

This paper investigates the relationship between interaction behaviors and the cognitive characteristics of participating individuals in engineering design teams engaged in concept generation. Individual characteristics were measured using the Kirton Adaption-Innovation inventory (KAI), which assesses an individual’s cognitive preference for struct...

Food is important and pertinent to everyone in more ways than one with its physical, social, mental, and cultural implications. The significance and interest in food and food-related activities are growing, and along with this movement there is a surge of human-computer interaction technologies in the food industry, also known as human-food interac...

Reports about the depletion and pollutant of the earth by human interference and the increasing need for urbanised areas require us to think differently about how we go about achieving this increased urbanisation. In this context, urban mining, where demolition sites are mined for increased recycling and value extraction. Due to high specialisation...

Background: Previous research has shown that hearing aid wearers can successfully self-train their instruments' gain-frequency response and compression parameters in everyday situations. Combining hearing aids with a smartphone introduces additional computing power, memory, and a graphical user interface that may enable greater setting personaliza...

This paper presents a framework for engineering design innovation education. This is discovery research in a purely qualitative sense. The authors, both highly experienced educators, are reflecting upon their practice of delivering team-based new product development courses at the master’s degree level at deeply different universities in Sweden and...

This research examines the capabilities and boundaries of a hands-free mobile augmented reality (AR) system for distributed healthcare. We use a developer version of the Google Glass™ head-mounted display (HMD) to develop software applications to enable remote connectivity in the healthcare field, and to characterize system usage, data integration,...

The probability of breakthrough innovation has increased as we gain a deeper understanding of design innovation processes and the organizations that use them best. It is increasingly clear that an organizational “impedance mismatch” is a barrier to bringing breakthrough innovation home to corporations, governments, and economies. A brief working de...

Stanford University’s Center for Design Research has been in operation for 30 years. Its primary impact on practice comes through its people. In this chapter, we summarize the CDR’s research approach and themes, and then look at the mechanisms through which the people of CDR affect the landscape of industry and education and impact the practice of...

In an ever rapid changing world of today, enterprises cannot leverage only on past success. Striving for an innovation success demands traditional systems engineering methods (i.e. ConOps in our case) to be updated. This study points towards the benefits for such a company to leverage the usage of the ConOps together with the needfinding of a desig...

Design research at Stanford’s Center for Design Research (CDR) has always been user-centric. Over time, the focus has been extended beyond user needs and product specifications to include the “human-machine-experience”. A recent wave of research on the autonomous-car/driver experience has focused our attention on the role of “complex adaptive machi...

A visual notation called the interaction dynamics notation was used for analysing the moment-to-moment interpersonal interactions in design reviews. The expressions of professional vision (PV) – a system of seeing and interpreting that characterises a professional group – are identified in these design review interactions. The analysis showed that...

This research examines the capabilities and boundaries of a hands-free mobile augmented reality (AR) system for distributed healthcare. We use a developer version of the Google Glass™ head-mounted display to develop software applications to enable remote connectivity in the healthcare field; characterize system usage, data integration, and data vis...

Since 2008 scientists from the Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering in Potsdam, Germany, and from Stanford University, USA, have engaged in the joint Design Thinking Research Program, financed and supported by the Hasso Plattner Foundation.

With the integration of design thinking into engineering education, a missing link has been created between the science-focused, context-independent part of engineering and the human society focused, context-dependent aspect. The latter area has long been neglected, partly due to the uncertainty that comes with the unpredictability of human behavio...

This study explores, in the context of automated braking, how a voice alert accompanying the car's autonomous action affects the driver's attitude and driving behaviour. To examine the research question we designed an experimental setup in a simulator environment that (1) enabled automatic braking to perform as a vehicle's autonomous longitudinal b...

Design thinking has seen rapid growth since mid-2000s far beyond the engineering and arts disciplines traditionally concerned with design. In universities, it is increasingly being used to create programs where graduates from multiple disciplines can learn to develop a design orientation to problem solving. This rising popularity of design thinking...

In a very unique way, design thinking enables teams and organizations to find completely novel solutions to even complex challenges and to become sustainably innovative. The desire to understand the reason for this effect and to improve our knowledge about innovation drives the HPI Stanford Design Thinking Research Program. Since 2008 scientists fr...

A shikake is an embodied trigger for behavior change to solve social or personal problems. In this paper, we first present a general statement regarding the concept of Shikakeology as the science of shikake. The mechanism behind a shikake covers a wide range of physical and psychological triggers. From a shikake perspective, physical triggers are u...

Electronic sensors systems can be used to unobtrusively gather real-time measurements of human interaction and biometrics. However, developing custom sensor systems can be costly, time intensive and often requires high technical expertise in embedded mechatronic systems. We present a prototyping case study of a real world system, TeamSense, with th...

Chronic wounds, including pressure ulcers, compromise the health of 6.5 million Americans and pose an annual estimated burden of $25 billion to the U.S. health care system. When treating chronic wounds, clinicians must use meticulous documentation to determine wound severity and to monitor healing progress over time. Yet, current wound documentatio...

America's economic growth and international competitiveness significantly depend on its ability to innovate9. Entrepreneurship is an important pathway to innovation and leadership-however, until recently there has been little research exploring what factors influence whether or not engineering graduates will engage in entrepreneurial activities. Th...

There is mounting evidence that the engineering design thinking paradigm works when applied with diligence and insight, but is it really only about products and services? While profits are typically associated with goods and services, we really must ask, who made that happen? Who was responsible for their conception and implementation? Are we too p...

This book summarizes the results of Design Thinking Research carried out at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, USA and Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. The authors offer readers a closer look at Design Thinking with its processes of innovations and methods. The contents of the articles range from how to design ideas, methods...

Design thinking as a user-centric innovation method has become more and more widespread during the past years. An increasing number of people and institutions have experienced its innovative power. While at the same time the demand has grown for a deep, evidence-based understanding of the way design thinking functions. This challenge is addressed b...

In this paper, we introduce Awear, a context-aware hearing system comprising two state-of-the-art hearing aids, an Android smartphone, and a body-worn Streamer to wirelessly connect them. Awear aims to improve the sound quality perceived by individual hearing aid wearers by learning from their stated preferences. Users personalize, or “train,” the...

Product development knowledge cannot be embodied in a specific individual, a specific group of individuals, or a formal process. Those elements can only embody aspects of product development knowledge. Interaction of those elements is what assigns meaning to the aspects of knowledge and allows for their synthesis. Therefore, it can be said that pro...

This study explores, in the context of semi-autonomous driving, how the content of the verbalized message accompanying the car’s autonomous action affects the driver’s attitude and safety performance. Using a driving simulator with an auto-braking function, we tested different messages that provided advance explanation of the car’s imminent autonom...

The field of engineering design research is being pulled into two opposing directions—toward scientific rigor on one hand, and a greater relevance for professional practice on the other. The development of design theories in the field reflects this dichotomy. We have formal design theories deriving from mathematical roots that rarely influence the...

Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE) is at a turning point. Planning, designing, developing and operating IT used to be a management task of a few elites in public administrations and corporations. But the continuous digitization of nearly all areas of life changes the IT landscape fundamentally. Success in this new era requires to put...

Die Wirtschaftsinformatik steht heute am Wendepunkt. Ist die Planung, Entwicklung und der Betrieb von Informations- und Telekommunikationssystemen (ITK) bisher eine Managementaufgabe einiger „Eliten“ in Verwaltung und Wirtschaft gewesen, so führt die zunehmende Durchdringung aller Lebensbereiche mit ITK zu einer Veränderung der gesamten ITK-Landsch...

ME310 is a radical course that has been taught at Stanford University since 1967. The year-long course is a graduate level sequence in which student teams work on complex engineering projects sponsored by industry partners. Student teams complete the design process from defining design requirements to constructing functional prototypes that are rea...

This paper describes a pilot study in which we explored the impact of cognitive style and academic discipline on the variability of prototypes in design tasks as part of a larger research project aimed at understanding the relationships between design behavior, cognitive preferences, and physiological reactions. Engineering and non-engineering stud...

This book summarizes the results of Design Thinking Research carried out at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, USA, and Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. The authors offer readers a closer look at Design Thinking with its processes of innovations and methods. The contents of the articles range from how to design ideas, method...

In this paper, we first briefly overview the concept of shikakeology and introduce shikake trigger categories and the shikake trigger matrix. Then we propose the shikake design process as a method for creating new shikake. We validate the usefulness of the process through a case study.

Stanford University's design methodology program—a master's-level course in mechanical engineering—involves a prototype deliverable that explicitly prompts student design teams to investigate previously unexplored and potentially risky or intimidating corners of their design space. Each team carries out this exploration during a design mission know...

This paper proposes a quantitative exploration and evaluation method for need finding that may be used in situations where the classical quantitative methods - interviews and direct observation - may not be effective on their own. "Instrumenting the user" combines sensor data logging with periodic, immediate self-reports. The purpose of instrumenti...

Empirical methods used for studying design thinking have included verbal protocols, case studies, and controlled experiments. Studies have looked at the role of design methods, strategies, tools, environment, experience, and group dynamics. Early empirical studies were casual and exploratory with loosely defined objectives and informal analysis met...

Prototypes are made, presented, and interpreted differently by people according to their understanding and frame of reference. Design educators have, in recent decades, come closer to one another in how they approach design creativity. Still, many distinct differences exist. One of the most striking has to do with the role of prototyping in develop...

Purpose The aim of this paper is to suggest a redefinition of the functional product value calculation in lean product development (LPD). The proposed method integrates emotional customer value into the traditional model, which is based on minimizing operating costs and reducing time‐to‐market. Design/methodology/approach Perceptions of customer v...

Concept generation, an activity in which a number of design concepts are generated for further evaluation through prototyping and testing, is an important stage in the engineering design process. In design practice and design education, concept generation is often conducted in teams. During this activity, designers interact with one another to gene...

Systems and methods for representing and diagnosing interaction sequences in accordance embodiments of the invention are disclosed. In one embodiment of the invention, a group interaction diagnosis and recommendation server system includes a processor and a memory configured to store a set of reference interaction data, where the reference interact...

This chapter describes the launch year activities of the analyzed project where we aim to quantify engineering design behavior to such an extent that use statistical algorithm to discover, describe and model fundamental design thinking behavior paradigm. It is a joint research endeavor with the EPIC chair of Prof. Hasso Plattner at the Hasso Plattn...