Featuring work from more than 80 postgraduate multidisciplinary students, the online Showcase celebrates the next generation of design thinkers and creative leaders, exploring innovative, thought-provoking work from across our postgraduate programmes, including User Experience Design, User Experience and Service Design, Ergonomics and Human Factors, Integrated Industrial Design, and Graphic Design and Visualisation.
View the Postgraduate Showcase.
Four postgraduate students have shared insights into the projects they're exhibiting and the real-world challenges their work seeks to address:
Yu-Ru (Ellie) Lin - User Experience Design
Yu-Ru (Ellie) is showcasing the culmination of her master's studies, presenting ‘Ember’, a psychologically informed conversational agent designed to help people navigate their anxiety around medical screening.
Yu-Ru said: “The starting point for this project was personal. Watching people close to me go through a cancer diagnosis was difficult, and it left me wondering: if I could go back, what would I change? Getting them to screen earlier so treatment could start sooner. But I quickly realised the problem wasn't a lack of awareness; it was psychological barriers like fear and anxiety.
“I built 'Ember', a psychological technique-informed conversational agent that helps people sit with their anxiety about screening instead of avoiding it.”
Brandon Harris - User Experience and Service Design
Brandon's project explores how artificial intelligence can help rebuild trust in digital banking following system errors.
Brandon said: “I wanted to figure out how AI can fix broken trust through its post-error apologies.
“Rather than a physical product, my outcome is a set of practical design guidelines for AI creators. My results showed that over-explaining a mistake actually highlights an AI's incompetence and decreases trust. Instead, a good AI apology needs to be concise, use specific numbers to prove it understands the user's account, and explicitly promise to learn from the mistake for next time.”
Debbie Martindale - Ergonomics and Human Factors
Debbie is showcasing the culmination of her studies at the Showcase, presenting pioneering research that addresses critical safety gaps in emergency healthcare.
Clinicians in the UK’s emergency departments are forced to make complex decisions to keep a vulnerable mental health patient safe. With standard stretchers posing severe stability and self-harm risks, floor nursing is sometimes utilised as the safest immediate option. However, environmental temperatures in these areas can introduce hidden thermal risks.
For Debbie, this real-world dilemma sparked a vital research project. Debbie set out to investigate what happens to the human body when a patient has to be nursed on a mattress placed directly on an A&E floor.
Tianyue Lang - Graphic Design and Visual Communication
Tianyue's project, ‘First Move’, examines the emotional barriers behind procrastination and offers a new digital approach to overcoming them.
Tianyue said: “The initial idea came from observing a very common experience among design students: knowing a project needs to move forward but feeling stuck at the starting line.
“Instead of pushing people to 'be more productive,' I wanted to ask: could a digital tool help them understand what is actually stopping them and make that first step feel easier?”
You can read the full student stories on the Postgraduate Study webpage.