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).

Expertise area(‘s): US, BE, and CA
Squad: ARTIFICE- Artificial Intelligence, Aesthetics, and Ethics

Research focus, projects I’d like to coach:
"I am interested in the interaction designs between people with a system of multiple smart things. This focus could be observed from the exemplary provided. Students can also check my recent works: Designing the Expressivity of Multiple Smart Things for Intuitive and Unobtrusive Interactions
and the vision of smart life (youtube)

What is your vision on education/coaching?
"I embrace the "learning-by-doing" philosophy in my teaching and coaching. I deeply believe that the most effective way for learning and improving one's design thinking and skills is through sketching, making, and reflecting on the process. Many students like overthinking more than using their hands in transforming the ideas into sketches or prototypes. As a coach, I will push my mentee to take action of doing designs in daily routine for acquiring stronger competencies than expected."

Exemplary graduation projects of students I coached:
José Gallegos Nieto (2018): Element
Yizhou Liu (2020): SlumberBot
Tomas Gecevičius (2021): Smart ARBnB

What is the international network you could offer students?
"I completed all my design education in Taiwan and got diplomas from the top three universities. After finishing my Ph.D., I also did two research jobs developing ICT concept designs in two research institutes. If students want to do an exchange or internship in Taiwan, I can and will be very happy to help connect them with those organizations, including NTU IoX center;  NTUST;  or Industrial Technology Research Institute.
For instance, in 2018, two master students got and did their summer internship in NTU IoX center."