About

Jason O. Germany is an Associate Professor and the current Chair of the Industrial Design program at the University of Washington. He joined UW in the autumn of 2015, after serving as a faculty member in the Product Design program at the University of Oregon for five years. His teaching spans a range of courses in both undergraduate and graduate programs within the Division of Design, including studios in softgoods, industrial design foundations, medical and health design, digital product experiences, transportation, and digital fabrication, as well as industry collaborative classes. Professor Germany's research takes a systems-based approach and covers overlapping fields such as design entrepreneurship, urban computing, digital product semantics, and rescue/medical device design. He has been involved as an investigator on several funded research projects, collaborating with departments and researchers across campus and outside organizations. His professional background includes work as a senior industrial designer and project lead in various sectors, including design firms, action sports, housewares, and mobile devices. His design work has received numerous patents and awards, including regional, national, and international recognitions such as ID Magazine’s Best in Category and IDEA Golds for consumer products and medical/health categories.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Medicine
• Artificial Intelligence
• Physics
• Mechanical engineering
• Human–computer interaction
• Software engineering
• Engineering
• Operations management
• Nuclear medicine
• Simulation
• Surgery
• Anesthesia
• Operating system
• Cardiology
• Manufacturing engineering
• Systems engineering

Selected publications

• ASSESSING THE EYE GAZE BEHAVIOURS OF ILLUSTRATORS SKETCHING FACIAL EXPRESSIONS FROM OBSERVATION

  2024-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Sketching is a historical means of sharing knowledge and remains vital for communication across disciplines. Drawing translates mental images and experiences into visual knowledge and expression. Sketching education is steeped in tradition, but emerging digital technologies like eye-tracking glasses allow researchers to, for the first time, see through the eyes of illustrators as they work. This exploratory study uses eye-tracking glasses to measure head and eye kinematics, eye gaze quantity and duration, and production script order of novice and expert illustrators. It introduces terminology, high-fidelity measurement tools, assessment methods, and insights that could influence future drawing pedagogy. Eleven illustration undergraduate students and three instructors wore eye-tracking glasses as they drew facial expressions while referencing live models. Results uncovered four categories of head pitch and eye saccade kinematics and expert and novice gaze differences referencing the model and drawing paper. Experts rapidly gaze at the reference 3.5 times more than the novice who gaze longer and 3.0 times more often than the expert. Novices gaze at their paper for 59% of their drawing time, compared to the experts at 40%. Experts had 18 rapid (less than 1.0 s.) paper gazes, while novices had 8. All participants followed a similar product script, beginning with light construction lines for the head, face, nose, eyes, and mouth in varying orders, then adding darker contour lines, adding detail from the centre outwards. Participants returned to refine eye and mouth facial details 25 – 35 times. This study uncovers previously unseen bio-mechanical movements and observational drawing methods.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Hand postures: an analysis of patterns in novice design drawing

  Proceedings of DRS · 2024-06-16

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In the realm of design drawing, extensive research and professional expertise have been dedicated to identifying the techniques and specific methods employed by designers. However, limited knowledge has been captured as to the potential in-fluence of human biomechanics on the act of design drawing. This research en-deavors to scrutinize the specific hand postures adopted by a diverse group of de-signers, particularly those who are at the early stages of their design training, name-ly second-year design students. This exploration extends to investigating how these postures are influenced by prior exposure to design or art drawing instruction and, most crucially, how they impact factors such as pain, strain, and contribute to changes over time. To accomplish this, we gathered and analyzed a dataset of 284 images featuring a group of novice design drawing participants (n=71). The results indicate that certain postures may lend themselves to design drawing and reduce hand strain.

  PublisherDOI

• Therapeutic limb hypothermia for the treatment of traumatic acute limb ischemia

  Journal of Medical Engineering & Technology · 2024

  • Medicine
  • Anesthesia
  • Surgery

  Acute limb ischaemia (ALI) is an emergent clinical condition that strains pre-hospital resources and impacts healthcare costs and patient quality of life. Hypothermia has long been used in clinical and research settings to mitigate ischaemic damage in tissues, but prompt reperfusion is needed to prevent loss of limb or function from ALI. To address the unmet need for pre-hospital intervention of threatened limbs awaiting definitive specialty care, we have focused on controlled application of hypothermia. Over years of animal experiments, phantom limb creation, and materials selection, we conceptualised and created a portable limb-cooling device that can be used alone or combined with a traditional tourniquet or resuscitative endovascular balloon occlusion of the aorta. Here, we describe our process of building and testing the device, from computer simulation through animal-limb metabolic studies, to prototype testing.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Digital to Physical Medical Modeling: Industrial Design Activities in Support of a Limb Cooling Medical Device

  AHFE international · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Industrial design has a long history of leveraging anthropometrics human factors data as a basis for good design and decision making throughout the design process. This data ranges from individual measurements supporting the bespoke design for the individual to large data sets normalized across populations that supporting a much broader user group. When it comes to the design of medical devices, traditional anthropometric data has increasingly been complemented by a range of scanning methods (3D surface, CT, MRI) as a form of input with a resulting output of CAD models as well as digitally fabricated medical models. Both the digital and physical medical models can support a number of industrial design activities as well as serving as a collaborative platform between allied disciplines during the design and development of a medical device. This paper relays the specific role medical modeling played in the industrial design process for the device design of a limb cooling product. This product was targeting the impacts of tourniquet induced limb ischemia by leveraging cooling to mitigate tissue damage. Over the course of this project, limb medical models were utilized as a platform for a number of activities including supporting several industrial design methods from early ideation to testing and concept refinement.

  PublisherDOI

• Bespoke and Repetitive: Converging Technologies in the Design of Custom Products

  AHFE international · 2022-01-01

  articleSenior author

  The growth in Industry 4.0 marks a change in some ways that products will be created as well as the ways in which professions like industrial design will continue to grow. Advances in technology, data, and analytics will increasingly give designers the ability to develop customized or bespoke products for a range of end users. Specifically, the intersection of 3D surface scanning, generative design and digital fabrication could trigger this growth. This paper examines how the intersection of these technologies is currently being leveraged by designers for bespoke solutions and identifies growing opportunities and attributes that make the design of customized repetitive use products a strong candidate for adoption of these digital tools.

  PublisherDOI

• Prototyping a Thermal Limb: Methods for Building a Thermally Representative Phantom Limb

  Lecture notes in networks and systems · 2021-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• DESIGN AND TESTING OF A THERMAL PHANTOM FOR HUMANS FOR TREATMENT OF ISCHEMIA, PART 2

  Proceeding of 5-6th Thermal and Fluids Engineering Conference (TFEC) · 2021 · 1 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Medicine
  PublisherDOI

• Leveraging Empathic Strategies: Prototyping for Commercial Space Vehicle Design

  Proceedings of DRS · 2020

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Systems engineering
  • Computer Science

  When designers are tasked with the role of future forecaster, they engage in speculative acts that can be aided through prototyping. These tangible analogues act as a platform for building ideas as well as empathy in an effort to approximate the future activities and experiences of end users. The emergence of space tourism as a viable industry in the near future, will require designers to develop prototyping strategies that emulate these future experiences. To that end this paper reports on the development of a modular prototyping system for the design of space vehicle interiors. As a means of evaluating the effectiveness of this experimental prototyping platform it was deployed in a student class studio setting where designers utilized these elements throughout a team project. The results from this experiment indicate that a modular structure has several advantages across multiple phases of the design process that can translate to future space vehicle design.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Assembly, Space, and Things

  IGI Global eBooks · 2019-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author

  Each day as one notices more people walking along sidewalks, head down peering into smart phones, the fear is that social interaction in public space is dead. However, the integration of human and non-human processes may connect our communities now in more ways than ever before. New urban design theory suggests that “the city” may not be understood as a whole, rather as an assembly of dynamic urban processes. At many bike share systems around the world only static maps with limited interaction experience. Urban interaction design and the Internet of Things, is changing this experience. The interdisciplinary methodology describes a symbiosis of people, space and things. The significance is the integrated urban interaction design process of: urban design theory using classification of urban experience; geospatial analysis at the street-scale of point addresses, and fabrication of a test-bed kiosk to test ambient sensors and user interaction. Connectivity experienced in the virtual space of social media may now enter back into the physical realm of public space.

  PublisherDOI

• Form Follows Story: An Approach to Designing for Commercial Space Travel

  2019-08-27 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Designers have long embraced uncertainty as a profession. Iterative approaches to problem solving and a desire to develop these alternatives into a final concepts are the underlying structure of the design process. Based on that, designers are increasingly taking on the role of future forecaster. That being said, design education is challenged to find appropriate methods to address and prepare students for a role in envisioning the future. Situated between contemporary problems and speculative ones, design fiction provides a potential platform for exploring the future. One such future experience is that of commercial space travel. Early missions into space were large government funded initiatives that supported the efforts of a select few individuals to go into space and report back about their discoveries. Recently, there has been a surge in interest in the private space sector producing such visible players as Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, and Blue Origin. This marks the dawn of space tourism where humans will be able to stay in space hotels, travel to the moon, and beyond. This also represents a shift towards an area of tourism that has no historic examples to drawn from and subjects tourists to environments and experiences that no designer has ever had, nor has the ability to directly reflect upon. What methods can designers use to empathize with this type of inaccessible experience? With the pace of change accelerating at a rate not previously seen, the problem of future framing and designing for experiences that have not yet materialized is something that educators are beginning to introduce into regular design and engineering curriculum. This paper disseminates the approach to designing for this emerging future through an industry collaboration course that explored the future of commercial space travel for the year 2030. In combination with TEAGUE Aviation Studio (http://teague.com/), the aim of this course was to have undergraduate industrial design students explore what a seven day journey around the moon would entail and then design concepts for the resulting habitable spacecraft. To approach the intangible experience of space travel, students were challenged to consider activities and environments that were far removed from their everyday experiences. Unlike some traditional user centered research methods that might leverage interviews, observations or other direct engagement with research participants, this course asked students to develop their own empathic and immersive research methods. These methods were then leveraged to develop journey stories as a launching point for the actual design concepts. Coupling these two problem framing strategies of empathic immersive research and storytelling exposed both opportunities and some limitations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ketan Sunil Mhetre

  University of Washington

  6 shared

• Abhijith Shasheendra

  University of Washington

  6 shared

• Ashley Emery

  University of Washington

  5 shared

• Shahram Aarabi

  University of California, San Francisco

  5 shared

• Philip Speranza

  3 shared

• Nathan J. White

  University of Washington

  3 shared

• Sahil Patel

  2 shared

• Emily Kao

  Highland Hospital

  2 shared

Labs

• Industrial DesignPI

Awards & honors

• Defense Medical Research and Development 'Therapeutic Limb C…
• Core77 International Design Award 2021, 'Runner Up - 2nd Pla…
• IDSA - International Design Excellence Award (IDEA) 2021, 'G…
• Amazon Catalyst Grant (Amazon Catalyst Fellow) – (2018 – 201…
• UW CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund (Jan. 2024 – Jan. 2025) 'TPT…