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About
This Month I Learnt (TMIL) is a monthly thematic conversation covering a broad spectrum of topics around projects, careers, and developments in design, products, finance, and more. This month we talk to Yujie Wang, a Product Designer, Human-Computer Interaction Researcher, and Entrepreneur, whose work delivers transformative ways for how people interact with media such as brain-computer interfaces, wearable devices, IoT sensor networks, self-driving vehicles, and responsive environments. With professional and research experiences across Philips, Maersk, MIT Media Lab, and more, Yujie’s body of work enhances personal, social, and ecological well-being from the body scale to the planetary scale.
Resources, reading materials, and Yujie’s projects and profile can be found below.
Context
Wearables are increasingly embedded in our lives, from smartwatches to VR headsets. Collectively, these devices enhance the human experience, but the process of conceiving and designing them is often a black box. Despite the usefulness of wearables, there are challenges to the accessibility of these devices, and implementing a compatible design can be quite a challenging process.
Content
In this episode, Yujie and I discuss his interdisciplinary body of work, covering AttentivU, an EEG-based Brain-Computer Interface, designed to improve productivity by mediating human attention, and AiRCAD, a reality-aided design platform that makes 3D modeling intuitive for non-designers.
With AttentivU, he talks about how EEG-based technologies can be used in clinical applications and provide tremendous value in speech therapy, motor control therapy, and enhancing learning, simply by integrating into everyday devices that fit our existing social context. On AiRCAD, he shares how modern XR devices often price out less affluent communities, creating a need for more cost-accessible devices, so that less-affluent design-aspirees get equal access and opportunities in 3D design and XR.
He reflects on the similarities and differences in his research and entrepreneurship pursuits, where at times he adapts the knowledge and lessons gained from academia, and at other times, he applies the same risk-taking appetite in academia just as he does in entrepreneurship.
Finally, Yujie shares tips on achieving success across interdisciplinary fields, encouraging researchers and entrepreneurs to venture into unknown grounds, tap on their network and drive innovation within niches.
Yujie Wang’s Profile
Yujie is a mediator between the objective and the subjective, enhancing human-human connection through shaping human-machine and human-environment relationships.
As a Product Designer/Manager, HCI Researcher, and Entrepreneur, Yujie is interested in addressing problems involving value judgment that goes beyond computational optimization. His interdisciplinary projects across scales and industries range from AR remote collaboration/telepresence tools for Image-Guided Therapy, EEG-based brain-sensing platforms for cognitive support, data analytics and exception management platforms for global supply chain management, vehicular communication systems in self-driving cars, wearable-enabled music therapy platform, Internet of Breaths (IoB) with smart air masks, vaccine syringe informant, assistive haptic-voice interface for visually impaired people, pneumatic wearables, soft architectural robotics, airport wayfinding system, to the adaptive built environment.
Yujie enjoys connecting human needs and socio-environmental conditions to strategic design decisions, and he firmly believes that the integration of design and technology within a logical business framework is the key to shaping sustainable practice into the future.
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