News

Tue, 04/21/2026

HCDE undergraduate Zahra Jamal Hassan has been named to the 2026 Husky 100, a UW recognition honoring students who demonstrate leadership, service, and meaningful impact. Hassan’s work centers on expanding access to engineering and supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion through community-centered outreach.

Mon, 04/20/2026

On April 23, Husky Giving Day brings the HCDE community together to support student success. Gifts help fund student opportunities, strengthen inclusive programs, and provide emergency support when students need it most.

Mon, 04/20/2026

First-year HCDE PhD students Hanna Barakat, Matthew Bilik, and Jessica Jarratt have been awarded prestigious fellowships through the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Their work explores topics ranging from AI policy and technology infrastructure to environmental contaminants and community-driven science.
 

Mon, 04/13/2026

HCDE researchers contributed 23 papers to the 2026 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), including two Best Paper Award and two Honorable Mentions.

Fri, 04/10/2026

Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, founder of the AI Red Team Microsoft, will deliver the guest address at the University of Washington Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering’s 2026 Graduation & Awards Ceremony on June 12.

Tue, 03/31/2026

Professor Gary Hsieh’s Prosocial Computing Group is building tools that make academic research easier for practitioners to use. From AI-powered design cards to short-form science videos, their work helps close the research–practice gap.

Thu, 03/19/2026

As she retires from the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, Professor Cecilia Aragon reflects on helping shape the field of human-centered data science, mentoring students, what she hopes they carry forward into the future of AI, and the next chapter of her career.

Mon, 03/02/2026

Step inside HCDE classrooms at our end-of-quarter showcases. Discover student work across service design, AI, prototyping, usability research, and venture design.

Thu, 02/05/2026

The Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering is accepting nominations for the 2026 HCDE Outstanding Alumni Award, which recognizes alumni whose work reflects the mission and values of our community. Nominations are open through April 1, 2026.
 

Wed, 01/21/2026

HCDE Professor Kate Starbird has been named an ACM Fellow, one of the highest honors in computing, for her groundbreaking research on misinformation and online information ecosystems. The honor recognizes her contributions to understanding and improving information ecosystems, including during crisis events and in addressing misinformation.

Mon, 01/12/2026

HCDE master’s student William (Wang Silang) earned two awards at the Stanford XR Immerse the Bay Hackathon for a project exploring how immersive and Tangible User Interface (TUI) technologies can help people engage meaningfully and respectfully with memories of deceased loved ones. 

Mon, 12/29/2025

In Autumn quarter, HCDE welcomed students for wearABLE Futures, a fast-paced design jam focused on the question: How might we make wearable technology more accessible to all humans? Industry mentors from Ipsos, Oura, Meta, Ralytics, and Microsoft’s Inclusive Tech Lab met with student teams, offering feedback and helping students connect their ideas to real-world feasibility and impact. 

Wed, 12/17/2025

HCDE Associate Professor Nadya Peek is designing open, human-centered automation tools that help scientists run more reproducible, creative, and accessible experiments. Working with collaborators across engineering, science, and fabrication, her research focuses on building flexible automation systems that can be adapted to different labs, workflows, and research questions.

Wed, 11/19/2025

The Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering is proud to recognize Natasha N. Jones (PhD ‘12), associate professor in Michigan State University’s Department of African American and African Studies, as the inaugural recipient of the HCDE Outstanding Alumni Award.

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.

Mon, 06/23/2025

As part of HCDE’s 2025 graduation events, Professor Kate Starbird delivered a special teach-in exploring the foundations and future of human-computer interaction. Starbird traced how the technologies we use every day emerged from federally funded research, and emphasized the continued importance of inclusive, human-centered research. Her talk urged graduates and guests to recognize the role of public investment in shaping technology that serves people.