Sponsored Research

Interested in Collaborating with our GXD Faculty & Students?

Our NC State Graphic & Experience Design studio courses collaborate with companies and organizations each year to research and prototype possibilities around a specific topic of mutual interest. Our faculty also lead smaller, more focused funded research teams to pursue specific research topics for you.

Sponsored Studios: This means that a faculty member leads 10-14 GXD or MGXD students, who spend a part of the studio course delving into your UX/UI research topic (typically 9-10 weeks).  The company/organization provides funding to support the work. All of the studio projects that I lead focus on integrating AI capabilities, many consider UX/UI challenges inherent to human/machine teaming. Other colleagues in our department have different areas of expertise, however, and they lead sponsored studios, as well. The deliverables for our sponsored studios are typically the UX research, UI prototypes, and scenario videos that demonstrate the resulting prototype in use. 

For example, a company might come to us and ask the students to explore the possibilities for calibrating trust between an AI system and a specific user group. They might ask the students to reimagine a current experience in an AI-powered future setting (as was the case for our work with the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology).  They might ask the students to design interfaces and experiences around a topic specific to their sector: semantic search, AI-assisted decision making, etc. The project can stem from any newly identified pain point that the company wants to address.

The project should be something future-facing that the company is interested in exploring but doesn’t have the time to dig into right now. The students shouldn’t be doing the same kind of work that your employees regularly do already. The goal is not to produce a patentable project but rather a prototype that inspires future directions.

Focused Research Teams: A company/organization/industry partner might choose to fund a smaller, more focused research team instead. This team would consist of 1-2 faculty members and 1-2 graduate students. These teams can go deeper into a narrowly focused topic and produce outputs that align with the goals of the industry partner. These projects range in length from 1 semester to multiple years. 

We also have a model in which a studio pursues a broad, more speculative project, and then a small research team takes a piece of the results and produces deeper, more implementable prototypes. Feel free to email me directly if you would like to discuss one of these options [hsarmstr@ncsu.edu].

To view recent projects, visit this page.