A few years ago, Rachel Switzky had an “aha” moment that would later help reshape education in Grainger Engineering and across the university.

She had been doing one project after another for various Fortune 500 companies, finding ways to improve their customer service experiences.

“As a consultant, I was helping businesses employ human-centered design principles across the pipeline,” Switzky said.

But then it hit her: “I just thought that if I’m working with organizations to build human-centered design across different business units, then wouldn’t we be so much better off if we could figure out how to formally teach these principles earlier in the process?”

A decade after the Siebel Center for Design launched on the Illinois campus, funded through a lead gift of $25 million from the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation along with institutional funds, Switzky’s dream is taking shape throughout the university. In Grainger Engineering, at least four academic departments have worked with the center to redesign curricula — resulting in students who are more capable and confident in their abilities to meet the needs of end-users.

Of course, engineering curricula have always encouraged problem-solving and considered the end-user. But teaching consciously human-centered design levels up students’ abilities to solve problems. They are asked to implement, systematically and scientifically, tools and processes that help them understand the people for whom they are designing. By working closely with users, teams develop, test and refine solutions that better meet real-world needs.

“Human-centered design is a philosophy that students use as a tool for creative problem solving,” said Switzky, director of the Siebel Center for Design. “It helps drive empathy, creativity, iteration, collaboration, refinement and other qualities that make the world a better place.”

Aerospace engineering professor Elle Wroblewski can attest to the approach’s success in AE 202, Aerospace Flight Mechanics.

The prompt students receive in the course is simple: design a catapult and glider, using the former to safely land the latter. In the past, students tried their best but took the outcome lightly, often laughing if their gliders slammed into a wall.

In concert with the Siebel Center team, Wroblewski added a new element to the project: a tiny, plastic cat “pilot.” Instead of considering only the glider, students had to think about safely landing the cat.

The impact was immediate.

“All of a sudden, students were worried when their glider crashed into the wall,” Wroblewski said. “They started considering how to rethink the flight mechanics in order to protect the cat. It not only made them more empathetic to the end-user, but it also made them better engineers.” 

Aerospace engineering also utilizes human-centered design in some 300- and 400-level classes.

It not only made them more empathetic to the end-user, but it also made them better engineers.

Mechanical science and engineering professor Kellie Halloran said that adding human-centered design elements made her students more innovative. The roughly 500 students who take her ME 170 class, Computer-Aided Design, each year are told to redesign or design a consumer product from scratch. The open-ended project has often resulted in ideas that were impossible to implement or had already been done many times.

Emeritus mechanical science and engineering professor Michael Philpott first introduced human-centered design to ME 170. Working with the Siebel Center team, Halloran has continued to develop the curriculum through additional activities and reflections. Students now spend three weeks thinking about consumer products they use and interview people about pain points in their lives. The students then synthesize the interviews and ponder solutions.

The result?

“We had some really fun projects, like an affordable cookie warmer, and the creativity has just gone through the roof,” Halloran said. “I think sometimes students, especially engineering students, are very quick to jump to a solution right away. Human-centered design really encourages you to think about the actual problem you’re trying to solve. What does the consumer really need? It’s a helpful framework for slowing down and fully immersing yourself in the problem.”

The Siebel Center’s work extends beyond helping faculty redesign courses. Associate Director of Assessment & Research Saad Shehab has helped build the center’s approach to measuring how students develop human-centered design competencies, providing faculty with evidence they can use to refine their courses over time.

The data confirm the faculty members’ perceptions, according to Taylor Parks, who is an engineering course development fellow with the Siebel Center for Design. On surveys that measure students’ abilities to empathize, iterate, implement, communicate and collaborate on solutions, students consistently scored higher after human-centered design was implemented.

Wroblewski’s AE 202 students, for example, self-rated their own confidence in understanding aerospace safety at an average of 4.97 out of 10 at the beginning of the class versus 7.27 at the end.

“Our data are showing that you really do need to deliberately target the areas where you want to see long-term growth,” said Parks, who along with her colleagues is seeking to publish the results in a peer-reviewed journal. “Where we have not made interventions, we are not seeing a lot of growth, even in related competencies.”

Five years ago, materials science and engineering senior lecturer Matt Goodman found himself evaluating his department’s senior capstone project, identifying some areas that needed improvement. His students enjoyed research but didn’t have the framework to engage with the design process, he said. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic struck, creating a perfect storm of challenges that led him to reach out to the Siebel Center team.

The result was an expanded capstone project — two semesters instead of one — that the department still uses today.

“We started integrating human-centered design into the capstone, and students really took to it,” Goodman said. “By the end of May, after engaging with it for two semesters, students are fluently using the language of the human-centered design framework. Their self-efficacy is significantly improved.”

In fact, materials science students showed significant improvement across all five human-centered design spaces: understanding, synthesizing, ideating, prototyping, and implementing. In AY 2023-24, the most dramatic improvement, which was in the prototype space, showed students’ self-efficacy scores jump from 65.3 out of 100 before the class to 83.6 after it.

The pandemic, with all its challenges, also created opportunities for industrial and enterprise systems engineering professor Molly Goldstein to reimagine her freshman-level engineering design courses. Goldstein found new ways to collaborate and innovate online.

“I had a good time coming up with different design prompts that were really creative, including a prompt that encouraged fitness in dorm rooms, since gyms were closed,” she said. “The Siebel Center team was great about having a team of folks who were willing to brainstorm. Even with it being a stressful time, those classes were a fun experience for students.”

It is not just faculty who see growth from adding human-centered design to their coursework. Students see the benefits too. Chy-Amari Finley, who will graduate with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering this December, said the classes that incorporated human-centered design gave her new confidence.

In a controls course during her junior year, students explored spacecraft attitude control. Finley and her peers were charged with safely docking a cat astronaut in a spacecraft.

“I went out of my way to design controls that would have a high percentage likelihood of docking the cat,” said Finley, whose exposure to human-centered design has influenced her to pursue a career in aerospace medicine.

The Siebel Center team has launched human-centered design across the university and helped faculty across colleges implement the principles in their courses. Outside of the discipline-specific work, which incorporates design into an existing field of study, University of Illinois students can also earn one of two certificates — one in Immersive Experience Design and one in Health Innovation — by taking three courses in human-centered design and design thinking. Students also have access to two general education courses, DTX 180: Exercising Empathy and DTX 221: Human-Centered Design Across Disciplines. The team is working to launch a human-centered design minor in the near future.

In addition, Siebel Center for Design hosted its first symposium on human-centered design in engineering this spring, bringing together practitioners and those interested in learning more about the philosophy to the Illinois campus.

"Illinois has claimed a leadership role in advancing the concepts of human-centered design across the nation," Shehab said. "It's exciting to see how our research, curriculum development and thought leadership are transforming higher education."

Switzky believes the principles will become even more important as artificial intelligence continues to accelerate technology advancement in the workplace.

“We are teaching students how to make designs and products better, how to work in teams, and how to communicate in the workplace,” she said. “These are the qualities that students need to be successful in the 21st-century workplace, and to differentiate themselves from others. Corporate leadership knows that. They understand it and they value it.”