Melody Zixuan Wang is a design researcher specialised in using creative methods and participatory approaches to address open, complex, dynamic, and networked socio-technical challenges. She has an interest in co-design and participatory design methods, tech and design ethics, and narrative and visual analysis methods. She has published work in major HCI and design conferences, including CHI, DIS, HRI, DRS, and IASDR. She also served as a reviewer for many of them and the co-design journal. She was an AC of the Provocations and Work-in-Progress for DIS2024 and Chair of the paper track “Design with Care” for DRS2026.

She is a fully-funded PhD candidate (2023-2027) at the Advanced Care Research Centre (ACRC) and an affiliate of the Institute of Design Informatics, Edinburgh Futures Institute, and Centre for Technomoral Futures. Her PhD is supervised by Prof. John Vines, Prof. Katie Brittain, Dr. Cara Wilson, and Dr. Tara Capel. Her doctoral research explores how sensor and IoT (Internet of Things) technologies can support older adults’ everyday care practices at home, and how “care” could be a valuable lens for design. As a first step, she has published a literature review on the different framings of care and the relationships between care and technology, and how that changed over time, along the four waves of HCI (Please see more details in the project page). She is currently conducting a long-term empirical study with older adults to co-explore the meaning of care in their lives and the potential roles of technology. During this process, she also explores the methods for navigating long-term researcher-participant relationships and alternative research outputs.

During the first summer of her PhD, Melody also worked on the “Can AI Represent Care?” project, supervised by Dr. Nichole Fernandez. The project investigates how “care” is represented by text-to-image generative AI tools, and how reflexive prompt engineering might help diversify the results. The research was later turned into an exhibition and public involvement event featured in the Festival of Social Science and Being Human Festival in 2024. The exhibition invites the public to reflect on what care means in their daily lives, question the biases embedded in technology, and consider the evolving relationship between humans and AI in shaping our understandings. The research forms part of the Images of Care project.

Before starting her PhD, Melody has worked in the autonomous delivery robot industry and at several leading design agencies. She holds a dual master’s degree in Product Service System Design at Tongji University and Politechnico di Milano. She also earns a Bachelor of Engineering in furniture and living space design.