From MIT to IDEO: Sheng-Hung Lee on the Future of Design and Education

Sheng-Hung Lee is a designer, engineer, and educator dedicated to advancing human-centered design and systemic service innovation. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), focusing on human behavior and service design. He is also a Board Director at Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA). His interdisciplinary research integrates design, technology, and system engineering to develop innovative service models that enhance longevity and well-being.
With dual master’s degrees in Integrated Design & Management and Mechanical Engineering from MIT, and dual undergraduate degrees in Industrial Design and Electrical Engineering from National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Lee bridges technical expertise with creative problem-solving. His professional experience includes working at IDEO and Continuum, where he contributed to high-impact projects spanning product design, service innovation, and design strategy.
An active researcher at MIT AgeLab and the Ideation Lab, Lee explores topics such as smart home solutions, Design for Longevity (D4L), and inclusive design strategies. His work has been published in leading journals and conferences, and he serves as a reviewer and guest editor for international design publications. Beyond academia, Lee is engaged in global design communities, including the World Design Organization (WDO) and IDSA, advocating for design’s role in shaping the future of human experiences. For more information about Sheng-Hung Lee’s design and research work, please visit his website:

 https://www.shenghunglee.com

Since its inception in 2019, Design Education Talks podcast has served as a dynamic platform for the exchange of insights and ideas within the realm of art and design education. This initiative sprang from a culmination of nearly a decade of extensive research conducted by Lefteris Heretakis. His rich background, intertwining academia, industry, and student engagement, laid the foundation for a podcast that goes beyond the conventional boundaries of educational discourse.

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Transcript

0:09

Welcome to Design Education Talks by the New Art School. Our guest today is Sheng Hong. Welcome, Sheng Hong. Very happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me. It's fantastic to have you here. So tell us about you and your work. So I'm Sheng Hong. I trained as industrial designer in electrical engineering by when I was in college. And very lucky to join Ideal Design Continuum for five, six years. And now really focus on talk about ideas shifting from design for retirement to design for longevity. So you can think about its extension from financial planning to longevity planning. So we think more than just financial health. Also think about like family support, community, social wellbeing. So pretty broad. And that's my current work with MIT HLi and also MIT Ideation Lab. That's really exciting. So how did you get into teaching? I, for me, like, I really, I view teaching also as a research. And for me, like, this is my 12th year teaching. And when I work at IDEO and at Fudan University and taught about like product design and people, like graduate school, like a thesis project, undergrad school thesis project, and that kind of like, really for me, like you teach, you kind of learn more. because it tried to synthesize like complicated theory or framework to your own language and to let people without any design background or limited design background to understand what it mean by prototyping, what do you mean by synthesizing or ideation? So it's for me like that really fascinating to me. And as my growing changed my career to more like academia now I've still like co-lecture also here for the class called aging and built environment. with the H-Lab director, which is also my boss, Joe Coughlin, and also as a lab instructor for the class introduction to design, and really focused on undergrad kids major in mechanical engineering department. That's really exciting. And what is your latest project? So my latest project, it's pretty cool. With teaching, I'm going to graduate soon, hopefully. And also, my current site project is like, I talk with one designer from Teague. So Teague, you can think about as a design studio with Boeing. And we try to think about how can we envision and design space travel for aging population. So space traveling is fascinating. The reason we think about space traveling with aging population is kind of like both extreme conditions. Space travel is like extreme environment, like zero gravity or very different various like gravity situation compared with extreme users. It could be like kids or elderly people. It's more like, yeah, fragile. They're kind of fragile in terms of their physical or mental condition. That's great. So how do you see the area of employability for graduates today? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know, I feel like for me, we used to very intuitively divided design by different discipline, right? Industrial design, architecture, urban planning, interaction. But now I feel like... the challenge we're facing is complicated, it's like systematic, for example, like climate change, aging issue. And we can solve this problems just by one designer, one hero designers. It's more like collective effort and collective work. So I do feel like now the way we think about design, it should be divided by different types of challenges. And that can really help to kind of think about how can we cultivate. students or young talent with multiple skill set. And that also shifted, changed the career in industry. Like, yeah, for example, when I work at IDEO, my title is industrial designer. And at that time, it's actually become dinosaur. I mean, now client came to us as a, no, we're not just one have industrial design product as a final deliverable. We want the whole experiences and services with strategy and research, right? So kind of like they want everything. Well, what does that mean for students graduate from school? Like, yeah, you have great like skill, rendering skills, catching skill, but where's the human skill? We want to expand like, yeah, I know people talk about like T shape, but I feel now we should even push further like pie shape person, not just one core, also think about another side, like how can you expand and not just like expand horizontally, also vertical. to make sure we can address challenges, also across collaboration. It's really important like collaboration, human skill, creative leadership, communication skill, all I think is really important in design education. And that really position ourselves, we shouldn't position ourselves as a design labor, we should position ourselves as design leader. So that's kind of where I look at the job market, yeah. That's very interesting. So what adjustments do we need to make to design education to facilitate that? Justified education to facilitate. I feel like it's more like you can see, not just because I feel design education also connect with other disciplines, right? Not just design, engineering, technology, social science. So somehow when other domains are changing rapidly, especially AI, everyone talk about AI and chat GPT all the time, AI is everywhere. What does it mean for design as a field, as a study? And I feel like now, like MIT, for example, we have the new like a Morningstar Academy for Design, and MAD call MAD, they propose and promote like Design Plus. So Design Plus means like, we're not just, how do you, you can't really home the definition of design, it's more like design plus something, design plus engineering, design plus like social science, design plus. technology and that really form the new ideas of like, how do we view our curriculum design? How do you view the way we look at education? It's a mix of like domain and also like, it really depends on people's interests, passion. And also to be honest now, a lot of like repetitive work is already replaced by AI. We need to create more new challenges, also like solve more new challenges by this computational age. Okay, so you mentioned De Jani, so what would you say skills are that students need in order to leverage that? I feel like what skills students need is like traditionally it's like one way communication. When I grew up in Taiwan, in traditional Asia, kind of like educational environment with traditional expectation. Oh, high score, top one, top two, role model, type A students, right? Like A plus, A. And I feel it's more like one way communication. Professor, lecturer taught teach you, you received the knowledge, but now it's like everything is transparent, right? Like you give me like seven days, I learn from you to everything. The hard skill, right? Okay, I asked chat GPT help me to do how to coding in Python or give me all the information is very transparent. I think now it's like we're in the class, it's more like, yeah, it's less about one way communication, it's like multiple ways. not just student to teacher, also students to two students, peers. And also it's actually not physically only in, for example, I'm here in Cambridge in Boston, no, it's to the world. For example, this podcast we're going to show across the globe, not just in UK. Right. So it feels like for me that we also transformed that way we think about education is less about teaching. I think it's more about you curate the right content to let students to talk. And my perspective. I really don't think we should call a teacher or professor as a teacher teaching. It's more like an enabler. And I feel we really create the right condition. So people fail, they feel forward and they feel safe to fail. I feel like my example is I, I learned so much from every time the, the failure kind of moment in the project. Oh, shit. I don't know. Like we don't have enough funding. the time didn't work, the scope of the project, it doesn't right. So somehow that really makes me think about, yeah, really what I learned in the class or in the company is human skill. It's connect with people and the knowledge, the hardcore skill I can always learn and grab online or offline. It's like an accelerator. You know, you mentioned YouTube, you know, there are ones I was looking for a very specific solution to software, really specific. And there were 10 videos on YouTube that claimed to do that. But really only one of the 10 did. So if the student doesn't have the information, they can't judge what content to learn. They can't curate. So we're like an accelerator for that. So it's problematic with the information because everybody claims to have the information, but very if you actually have the information. Yes. So in fact, if anything, YouTube can be more confusing. if you don't already have the information. Yeah, I think built on that, let me think about, now people use like generative AI tools a lot, right? The funny thing is like, you can give me like tons of ideas, but how do you like curate lifestyle, my own taste, right? Like you say, YouTube provides so many knowledges, so many people promote their ideas, but somehow how do you know it's the right knowledge? or just suitable knowledge for you. So that's why it becomes more confusing. It's a pool of like information, not knowledge. And it's also what the input is, even for AI or for YouTube, you know, as Kodas used to say, garbage in, garbage out. If you're feeding garbage, then that's what you're gonna get. Yeah, exactly. Yes, exactly. So you're right. So somehow I truly feel like this education, we still need to focus on ethnography for research. understand people human empathy part it sounds very old school like oh why you need to go out interview people no that's the core that's where like i said that's the input we want to have before we do any design or any like you know process absolutely so what do you want to see in a portfolio what you want to see in student in graduate profile or student profile that's Every year I got all the questions about how can I prepare my portfolio for a job interview or like internship opportunities. I feel like I truly think it's not about like number of works in your portfolio. Let's say three to five. I think what I really want to see or most people hiring people want to see or design director want to see is like vulnerable story. The story about failure. I know I don't critique all the design award. It's more like a lot of people have great concept. You want like concept design award, design award for student category. Amazing. But if you look into it, damn, where's the process? It's very sexy rendering. It's very cool sketches, right? Oh, it looks beautiful. Like everything's like professional visually, authentically, elegantly designed. But if you look into it, how do you get the solution at this stage, right? Tell me how you feel. I tell me what are the people's stories. And most people are like, Oh, I don't have that. I just have rendering or animation or like very, very tiny section of it. And I feel the, the portfolio is by yourself. And for me, the process is the destination. You have to, I feel like design is not, and it's the evolution is keep working, keep evolving, changing different condition, resource, constraint, stakeholders. So somehow when you show people your work, it's actually tell your design journey, your story. So the reason I say three to five, because I want people to expand, to talk about the process, how you work on this project. Do you feel like it's communication-wise okay? Is it a teamwork project or just like your individual project? And I feel that's really important can tell how much effort you put in the process come up with this solution. For me, solution is just the result. one of the possibilities. Yeah, exactly, exactly. What about ideas? Ideas is I feel like, I always feel like we design things with human temperature. Means like, empathy is very broad terms. But what I really mean by empathy is like, does people feel this aha moment? Oh. It's so beautiful, like design. It's not overly design. When I work with my friend and he's asking one of the famous designer, like Nato Fukasawa, very famous Japanese designer and he used to be like ex-IDEO and found like, now it's like advisor for Muji. So he's telling my friend, he said, oh, you guys want to design a stationery or souvenir? So, you know, is another souvenir? So the idea is like, is it really people needs that? Or just like design for sake of design. So what I mean by that is like, I really feel like identify the real research question on design challenges really hard. And solution really depend on your questions. How do you frame this? Like, for example, when we said, oh, this is like, I feel this room is bad. It makes me feel always depressed. And we'll look into it. It's a roomless bed or because for example, temperature is not right. Lighting is not right. Right. Or somehow there's no window space. Where's the green? Where's the plants? So somehow we need to identify that through our live experiences and also like, not just empathy is everything. Absolutely. Is there anything else you'd like to add that we haven't discussed? No, I feel, I feel like, um, Design education is nowadays a lot of challenges, right? And I know based on my experience, a lot of schools want to establish PhD program for design. So they call it PhD in design. And then I personally feel like, okay, what's the purpose? And what happened people graduate from the PhD program? And how can we design a PhD program to combine both academia and industry? Because I truly believe that design is like application science. It's connected with industry and also framework. It's not just about, oh, let's close the door. Publishing, you know, like writing. No, we need to go to the market, go to the world to embrace all this ambiguity. And how can we do that in academia? And I will say design academia is very different field. I feel it's always just beautiful tension between like the, the client's request and also how do you stay like a neutrality in academia? And that's why I feel like that's interesting topic to look at it. And also I read some books about PhD program for designers. A lot of like schools already have the PhD program, but the problem is like, how can you make it sustainable? Yeah. I'll be cultivated the right talent for research and design and how can we make sure we have very strong capability, not just on research also have design side. Creative side also with rigorous research process. And that will be make. this interesting program more meaningful and important. Absolutely. Is there any advice you'd like to leave us with? I feel nowadays is very lucky for me. I really feel I'm very lucky to be a designer and especially a design educator. And I always get inspired by students and young talent, also senior people, my advisor and mentors. And I feel as a designer, it's like a, it's a lifestyle choice. It's a passion, it's a lifestyle choice. What I mean by that is like, I- I very little, very few to feel tired. I feel like because I enjoy the process, the way I feel I enjoy it is like I forgot about time. I really immersed myself into it, especially for design education. Like you just purely love it. It's not task, it's not like achievement. It's you're looking for fulfillment. And I feel that's really beautiful to really think through that and really like live in. the work I feel satisfied also help people empower people. And that really makes me happy. Yeah. I really appreciate that you give me this chance to, to share my thoughts in this great platform through this podcast. That's really wonderful. Cause we can spread, you know, can spread to the world. Not just like between both of us. I feel like if I can help younger people, why not? Because I also, the people get help in the past, especially now I feel like it's the same way I want to give people more, not just receiving for others. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much and hang. It was fantastic talking to you and keep in touch with the podcast. Thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you for having me.