What We Do

The Desirability Lab applies design, behavioral economics, and psychological research to:

– Help people build high performance innovation teams that efficiently manage the challenges of integrated design decision-making
– Help designers empower users through by embedding latent learning in the product and service experiences they create
– Help consumers become more aware and in control of their responses to persuasive design

The Desirability Lab was founded by Dr. B. Altringer, faculty on Innovation and Design at Harvard University’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), the Graduate School of Design, and core faculty of the new joint engineering MBA degree offered by SEAS and Harvard Business School. Our research on teaching and learning is funded by SEAS and the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching. In addition to working with industry, we often collaborate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Innovation Lab, other departments, and other institutions on teaching, field courses, and mentoring. Link to Faculty Bio

We work with remote specialized teams to develop domain knowledge and original research for 2-3 years at a time before actively designing in a new area. Then we seek collaborations, partnerships, and sponsors for the research once it matures to a fundable stage. For example, from 2014-2017, we were actively designing in robotics while developing domain knowledge in computational gastronomy. In 2017, we began actively designing in computational gastronomy and how to create applications that help people improve their ability to improvise with flavors like chefs do (e.g., ‘flavor fluency’). Please contact ba[at]seas.harvard.edu with inquiries.

Ongoing Opportunities

Research Fellows

Interested in joining our research team? We regularly accept new researchers. These are usually part-time, learning and mentorship-based roles. We currently do not have paid positions. Register your interest in research positions here and we’ll be in touch.

Teaching Fellows

Interested in joining the teaching staff for the Innovators’ Practice or Design Survivor or Integrated Design? We select teaching fellows 1-2 months before each term. These are part-time roles and only available to Harvard-affiliates. Please fill in this short form to let us know. A month or two before term starts, we will get in touch regarding the selection process.

Team

Founder: Dr. B. A. Altringer

Dr. Altringer is senior practice-based faculty at Harvard’s Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Graduate School of Design. In 2016, she was recognized by The Harvard Crimson as one of the university’s top 15 professors and in 2018 listed by Thinkers50 as one of the people most likely to shape the way future organizations are managed and led. She runs a longitudinal research program to improve design and engineering teaching and learning. During her PhD (Cambridge University) and postdoc (MIT), she studied innovation success and failure at IDEO and Fortune 100 companies, and how high performing teams reduce the risk of avoidable project failure. She developed several SEAS courses: Integrated Design (ES285), Experiential Lessons in Design for Desirability (ES22), and Innovators’ Practice (ES21), as well as immersive courses in Human Centered Algorithm Design, wearable tech in NYC, cultural entrepreneurship in NYC.

Altringer owns Quale, a small Boston-based design firm that provides consulting services and creates original projects. Past consulting clients include: Kering, Gucci Group, Uber, Puma, Swarovski, SABMiller, Diageo, IDEO, FIFA, the Drone Racing League, Onewheel, Stanford, MIT, and the Knight Foundation. Quale’s most recent original product launch was Chef League in 2019, the iOS app store’s only chef creativity game. It features AI Chefs built on top of Quale’s Flavor Genome Project. The AI Chefs teach novices and hobbyists how to improvise flavor like an expert chef and sommelier. Previously, Altringer was on the founding team and senior leadership of Piaggio Fast Forward through the 2017 launch of their Gita and Kilo robots. In 2014, she created the Sensory Composition project (experimenting with flavor as storytelling) and the Flavor Genome Project, working with blind tasting experts, sommeliers, and chefs to create large databases of food and beverage flavors and their attributes. This led to experimental software and new ways of enabling computational flavor discovery. Altringer holds a PhD in behavioral science and design (University of Cambridge) and masters in architecture (University of Cape Town).

2019 FELLOWS

• Laurie Delaney, Research & Teaching
• Ningxin Cheng, Research
• Jordan Degraaf, Research
• David Gomez Gil, Research & Teaching
• Jason Lee, Research
• Chenlu Wang, Research & Design
• Vicky Xu, Research
• Jazib Zahir, Research
• Ailing Zhang, Research

2018 FELLOWS

• Laurie Delaney, Research & Teaching
• Brandon Shaik, Research & Teaching
• Berto Ceballos, Teaching
• Chenlu Wang, Research & Design
• Chong Hu, Design
• Ningxin Cheng, Research
• Vicky Xu, Research
• Hanna Kim, Design

2017 FELLOWS

• Laurie Delaney, Research & Teaching
• Genevieve Ennis Hume, Research
• Ngoc Doan, Teaching
• Santiago Mota, Teaching
• Keith Scott, Research & Design
• Lilian Taylor, Research & Teaching
• Yaara Yacoby, Research

2016 FELLOWS

• Lilian Taylor, Research & Teaching
• Ngoc Doan, Teaching
• Neal Adolph Akatsuka, Research
• Jacques van Rhyn, ai-kitchen