Yaliang Chuang

Yaliang Chuang is Assistant Professor in the Future Everyday cluster of the Department of Industrial Design. His research focuses on the design of systems of smart things. Recently, IoT and smart products have become popular and ubiquitous. However, the ever-increasing number of connected devices and advanced functions are opaque and intrusively disrupting people's ordinary lives. All kinds of notifications try to keep users in the loop but also overwhelmingly distract users' attention. Yaliang aims to investigate the design languages of smart products that can use alternative expressivities to convey needed information to the users directly and intuitively. In a recent paper*, he applied Disney animation principles in developing lights and acoustic accompaniments with LED and speaker. The result shows that the designs can express smart devices and systems' intents intuitively and unobtrusively. Based on the convincing finding, Yaliang is continuously exploring design ideas with various modalities. He believes that smart products should not be designed with a cool cube or cylinder. The subtlety of expressivity and design languages can make the product speak for itself and be perceived as useful and smart. This could increase users' experience and make the products successful.

In 2006, Yaliang co-founded the International Journal of Design. Since then, he continues to serve as its Managing Editor to help design community publish high-quality research papers and promote them through global research databases, e.g., Web of Science, SCOPUS, and EBSCO Host.

* Yaliang Chuang. 2020. Designing the expressivity of multiple smart things for intuitive and unobtrusive interactions. In Proc. of ACM DIS '20. https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395450

Yaliang Chuang obtained his BSc in Industrial Design from National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, in 1998, followed by a MSc in the same field from National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, in 2001 and a PhD from the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST) in 2007. While doing his PhD, Chuang worked as a researcher and interaction designer for Philips in Taiwan, working on design preferences, interfaces and speech processing. From 2008 to 2012, Chuang worked as postdoc at NTUST, followed by a position as UX Design team leader at the Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan. In 2013, he joined the Intel-NTU Connected Context Computing Center in Taiwan. Currently, he holds the position of Assistant Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e).