News

Tue, 11/18/2025

A team of HCDE master’s students has earned second place in the IBM Challenge as part of the 2025 Student Service Design Challenge, an international competition inviting students to design services that advance equality and inclusivity. Their project, Echo, addresses a growing need for transparency and ethical communication around the use of AI in speech-language pathology.

Mon, 10/20/2025

HCDE faculty and students participated in CSCW 2025, the premier international conference on technologies that support collaboration and social interaction, held October 18–22 in Bergen, Norway. Their participation through papers, workshops, and service reflects the department’s active role in advancing research on how people work, learn, and connect through technology.

Wed, 10/15/2025

A 2015 paper co-authored by HCDE Professor Sean Munson and colleagues has received the Runner-Up 10-Year Impact Paper Award at the ACM UbiComp 2025 conference. The influential work, “A Lived Informatics Model of Personal Informatics,” introduced a new framework for understanding how people integrate self-tracking technologies into daily life.

Tue, 09/30/2025 | UW News

In a new study, HCDE and iSchool researchers found that gamers reported life-altering experiences from play—from coping with stress to inspiration from storytelling to identity-building. The research will be presented this month at CHI PLAY in Pittsburgh.

Tue, 09/02/2025

Professor Julie Kientz has been reappointed to a second five-year term as Chair of the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, following a comprehensive review recognizing her inclusive and collaborative leadership.

Thu, 08/28/2025

From mentoring and guest speaking to sponsoring student projects, HCDE alumni and industry partners have many ways to stay connected while making a lasting impact this year.

Mon, 08/11/2025

Each winter, HCDE master’s and certificate students take a deep dive into usability testing and user-centered research in HCDE 517: Usability Studies. These highlights from Professor Sean Munson’s Winter 2025 course showcase five projects where students delivered meaningful insights to industry partners across diverse products and domains.

Mon, 07/21/2025

HCDE Professor and Chair Julie Kientz has been elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences (WSAS), recognized for her award-winning leadership in human-computer interaction and her impactful work advancing health and education technologies. As a WSAS member, she will bring HCDE expertise to support evidence-based policy across Washington state.

Tue, 07/01/2025

HCDE researchers Aayushi Dangol and Julie Kientz, with Jason Yip (iSchool), developed AI Puzzlers to show kids an area where AI systems still typically and blatantly fail: solving certain reasoning puzzles. In the game, users get a chance to solve puzzles by completing patterns of colored blocks. They can then ask various AI chatbots to solve and have the systems explain their solutions — which they nearly always fail to do accurately.

Tue, 06/24/2025

Camryn Soo (HCDE BS '25) spent two years researching the department’s history, tracing its roots in post-war efforts to bring more humanities into engineering education. Through archival research, interviews, and coursework, she uncovered how decades of curricular innovation and cross-disciplinary programs shaped HCDE into what it is today. For Soo, that effort to “rethink engineering” remains a powerful throughline in the department’s identity.