I'm Yen-Fu Chen, Associate Professor in the Department of Digital Media Design at Tatung University and Principal Investigator of the Participatory Design Lab. I work as both a design researcher and a design educator, and I received my PhD in Design from Sheffield Hallam University in the UK in 2014.

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I have led eight research projects funded by the National Science and Technology Council, along with a number of Ministry of Education projects and industry-academic collaborations. This work has been published in Dementia, JMIR Serious Games and other SSCI/SCIE journals, and received two Best Paper Awards at IASDR 2025. I have supervised over 30 undergraduate capstone teams, four of whom secured NSTC undergraduate research grants, and their work has been recognised by the Red Dot Design Award.

 

My research attends to the people, the relationships and the everyday situations that are easily overlooked. I believe design thinking is not a procedure for solving problems but a philosophy for understanding life — which is why my research is not about designing products, but about designing participation itself: how can those who have had no voice and no opportunity to take part — people, or even non-people — become participants again, through design.

 

This research is rooted in real-world sites. Since 2018 I have carried out fieldwork on dementia care at veterans homes, co-developing relational technologies with residents and their caregivers. I bring design thinking into places that are not design schools, from university classrooms to high schools. And through citizen science, I invite people to hear the environments around them again — including the species that cannot speak. More recently I have turned to human-centered AI: when AI becomes a co-creator, how can human judgment, taste and values be preserved?

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I work through three actions: exploring needs that have not yet been seen; translating knowledge and experience between different worlds; and waiting for a design to enter real life, to be reinterpreted and reshaped by the people who use it — waiting for it to slowly become something it was never meant to be. Because a design only reveals its true shape once it is actually used.

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Four Research Tracks

 

1. Participatory Design for Dementia Care — Designing to make visible the caregivers whose voices too few have carried.

2. Citizen Science & More-than-Human Design — So that everyone can contribute their part to the environment they live in.

3. Design Thinking Education Methodology — Bringing design thinking to places that are not design schools.

4. Human-Centered AI Design — Letting AI see humans; letting humans see what AI is doing.

 

The full research position and four tracks →