Hello there! I am an interdisciplinary researcher, human-centered engineer and team builder.
My design research focuses on understanding creative work theory and practice to improve practices of creativity, interdisciplinary teamwork, and engineering education. My research at Stanford spans across disciplines in both the Mechanical Engineering Department and the Psychology Department. My research on culture and AI has been sponsored by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). I received Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship (2018-2021), Best Paper Award from the prestigious design research journal Design Studies (2021), Rising Stars for Women in Mechanical Engineering (2021, MIT), and Poster Award at Stanford Data Science Conference (2023), to name a few.
I have taught design thinking and held innovation-learning workshops across industry and academia in various cultural contexts. I previously worked on an human-centered innovation project for Lockheed Martin spacecraft (2010-11) that led to successful implementation resulting in an estimated cost savings of $20 million per satellite. I worked as an innovation specialist and consultant to develop, launch and run systematic human-centered innovation program at Siemens China (2012-2014), where I taught design innovation to research project teams across sectors incl. healthcare, energy, manufacturing, and infrastructure & cities. Over the years, I taught design innovation workshops across universities in Tokyo, Shanghai and at Stanford. I consulted Deutsche Bahn Systel to build high-performance self-organizing teamwork (2017-18), corporate participants through Stanford Center for Professional Development Project Management Advanced Certificate program (2016), and served as corporate coach to Stanford ME310: Global Engineering Design Innovation (2019-). I have also hands-on consulted and launched a Makerspace in Beijing for kids to imagine, make and empathize (2015) and designed community-building activities for the new postdoc program at Stanford SPARQ center (2023-2024). In 2024-2025, I taught two graduate-level research courses at Stanford on (engineering) design theory, methodology, and practice.
My early story—
Figure above: How a hard-core engineer turned herself into an human behavior researcher, Xiao's early story