Design and Human Factors

Our department has a long history in product design. The Human Factors program is one of the oldest undergraduate programs in the country and concentrates on designing and testing inventions for a specific client. The research here is split primarily into two areas: medical devices and educational technologies. Our research in medical devices has led to a full usability testing facility. On the educational technologies side, our research has focused on understanding how the brain learns to engineer (collaborating with the School of Arts and Sciences' Department of Education) and leveraging that understanding to develop new educational tools, in both hardware and software. We then collaborate with companies like LEGO Education, National Instruments, Texas Instruments, and others to put these technologies into classrooms for testing.