Deana McDonagh

About

Deana McDonagh is a Professor of Industrial Design in the School of Art + Design at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She also serves as a Health Innovation Professor at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and is the Director of the (dis)Ability Design Studio at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Her expertise lies in empathic design research strategies aimed at enhancing quality of life through the development of intuitive and meaningful products that foster emotional sustainability. Her research concentrates on emotional user-product relationships and how empathy can bring designers closer to users’ authentic needs, ensuring that both functional and emotional aspects are addressed in design.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Humanities
• Sociology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Marketing
• Gender studies
• Art
• Engineering
• Geography

Selected publications

• Review of assistive devices for the prevention of pressure ulcers: an engineering perspective

  Disability and Rehabilitation Assistive Technology · 2023 · 14 citations

  PURPOSE: Pressure ulcers (PUs) are prevalent among immobile bed or wheelchair-reliant individuals who experience prolonged sedentary positions. Pressure relief and frequent repositioning of body posture help to mitigate complications associated with PUs. Adherence with regular repositioning is difficult to maintain due to nursing labour shortages or constraints of in-home caregivers. Manual repositioning, transferring, and lifting of immobile patients are physically demanding tasks for caregiver…

  PublisherDOI

• The Urban Women Travelling Issue in the Twenty-first Century

  Journal of Regional and City Planning · 2021 · 11 citations

  Mobility generally refers to the ability or capacity to move. The subject of women’s mobility has been well documented and investigated by researchers since the 1970s. Early studies were initially inspired by the issue of gender-based violence encountered by women. At the same time, there is increasing research on women transportation mobility due to the increasing percentage of women working and travelling outside the house. However, there is an absence of studies that adopted a systematic re…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• UNDERSTANDING FACTORS OF USING PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION AMONG WOMEN IN KUALA LUMPUR

  Jurnal Pengembangan Kota · 2021 · 10 citations

  In recent decades, the percentage of women working outside their homes has ascended in many developing countries depicts the needs on the understanding of how women travel daily. Many claims, public transportation facilities, and infrastructure related to it do not consider the needs of women travelers but fit men's standards. As a result, many face difficulties became dependent on men for traveling or facing safety-related issues that deter them to use public transportation independently. Thus,…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• User-driven product development: Designed <i>by,</i> not designed <i>for</i>

  The Design Journal · 2023-11-03 · 7 citations

  articleSenior author

  The current state of function and design of accessible assistive technology is lacking, evidenced by low usability and high abandonment rates by people with disabilities (PwD). A significant contributing factor to these negative outcomes is a lack of user-centered design or user-opinion in the product development. The Human Performance and Mobility Maker Lab (HPML) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a new facility dedicated to developing assistive technology by PwDs. Rather than b…

  PublisherDOI

• The pedagogy of discomfort: Transformational Experiential Learning

  2021-11-10 · 6 citations

  articleSenior author

  Education is meant to be a transformative experience. In the practice of transformative pedagogy, instructors provide students with the time and space to explore their own set of beliefs, values, and standards and how they incorporate those beliefs into their work, subconsciously and consciously. At times transformative pedagogy can be uncomfortable, however, the value of discomfort in the pedagogical process of a design course is the ability to acknowledge a gap of knowledge in our social exper…

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Andrée Woodcock

  Coventry University

  23 shared

• Anne Bruseberg

  18 shared

• Joyce Thomas

  14 shared

• Komal Faiz

  13 shared

• Howard G. Denton

  11 shared

• A. Woodcock

  9 shared

• Wesley David Scott

  9 shared

• Elizabeth T. Hsiao‐Wecksler

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  9 shared

Education

• PhD, Design and Technology

  Loughborough University

  2006

Awards & honors

• Design Minds. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s 201…
• Provost’s Faculty Retreat Grant, $4000
• CHART Research Awards, Collaboration in Health, Aging, Resea…
• Arts Humanities Research Council (UK) Women’s mobility netwo…
• Red Dot Award (Fashion) for “Easy Jacket: Assistive Transiti…

Similar researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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