Professor Maria Yang has discovered valuable strategies and techniques for designing both consumer products and complex engineering systems, partnering with organizations such as NASA, Ferrari, and IBM.

Based on her studies of the end-to-end design process, she has measured just how crucial early-stage sketching and prototyping are for success. Her work also considers how early-stage design can be effectively utilized during the integration of sub-systems in large-scale projects. The up-front understanding of these techniques can produce significantly better design outcomes, with greater efficiency.