Designing Better Tools
2026-10-02 • Emily Hellmuth
MDes student April Jung shows her design work. Sam Fox School students Tejas Garg, Jillian Johnson, and Selah Pabon also participated in WashU’s Digital Transformation Research Corps..
A digital tool to translate complex genomic and environmental data for improved cancer screening and care.
An AI-driven, public-facing dashboard designed to transform how journalists, scholars, policymakers, and the public understand religion and politics.
An interactive, multimedia map of cultural assets identified by community members.
Last summer, four Sam Fox School students joined WashU’s Digital Transformation Research Corps — a 10-week, paid summer program that pairs faculty-led teams with student developers and data scientists to create digital tools and artificial intelligence models that advance research across disciplines.
Jillian Johnson, a student in the Sam Fox School’s inaugural cohort of the Master of Design for Human-Computer Interaction and Emerging Technology, was assigned to three projects, including the development of an AI-guided, video-based facial rehabilitation system led by faculty in WashU Medicine’s Division of Plastic Surgery.
“I’ve been doing a lot more hands-on, front-end prototyping,” Johnson says. “That’s been a fun process to work with developers to figure out how to convert design principles into code.”
WashU’s Digital Intelligence & Innovation Accelerator (DI2) started the program in 2025, but this year’s iteration was the first to include design consultants — a move that Jonathan Hanahan, chair of the MDes program, explains was intentional.
“From the inception of the MDes program, we’ve been working to find ways to more elegantly integrate design into the research happening across campus. To see our design students play integral roles on these teams, it raises the bar for the types of research projects we can be doing at WashU. Not only will these tools function, but they will be tools people will want to use, and that leads to greater possibility for real impact.”
Another research project — led by Crickette Sanz, chair and professor of biological anthropology — focused on biodiversity in the Congo Basin, the world’s second-largest river basin.The project aimed to improve the efficiency and accuracy of video camera trap datasets researchers have been collecting and analyzing manually. Undergraduate design student Selah Pabon was tasked with creating a dashboard and series of webpages that would help researchers quickly read and understand the data coming in from the AI tools.
“I’m used to designing for classes and class projects,” Pabon says. “Being able to work on real-world projects and scenarios and getting to meet people from different areas was interesting, but also difficult. I had to learn how to communicate with them and make sure we were on the same page.”
“Having student designers involved in the development process from day one meant these research projects weren’t just technically rigorous; they’re tools people actually want to use,” says Dan Maranan, executive director of DI2. “The MDes students made the program and our projects much stronger this year.”
