Meichun Liu is a scholar, international award-winning designer, and entrepreneur. Her work explores the boundaries between mass production and handcraft, tangible and digital, individual and systemic. Some of her work targeted smart crafts, integrating craft materials and processes with digital technologies with the aim to enhance sensory experiences and interactions. She also worked with biomedical engineers to develop biomedical products and wearable devices such as EEG helmets and smart contact lenses. Her current research investigates how technological artifacts mediate human experience of and interaction with the world at different scales. Design research at the individual level includes the persuasive effects of digitally enhanced artifacts on human behavior and decision-making. At the system level, she uses techniques such as agent-based modeling and simulation to study the emergent properties driven by design interventions in complex adaptive systems.
Before joining the University of Washington, she was an Associate Professor at Asia University in Taiwan, where she served as Department Chair of Creative Product Design and received the Excellent Teaching Award in 2016. From 2010 to 2019, she was the founder and design director of Wolkeland Design. In collaboration with craftspeople, the company developed designs using ceramic, bamboo, wood, rush grass, and glass with modern technology, many of which were exhibited and mass-produced. Early in her career, she worked with IT companies like Gigabyte Technology and IPEVO, where she participated in and led product development projects from concepts to the market as an industrial designer. She has been the recipient of over a dozen design and innovation awards, including iF, Red Dot, G-Mark, and Franz; and a Graduate Study Fulbright Grant for her doctoral study.
Meichun received her PhD in Design from North Carolina State University, USA; Master of Design from the University of Alberta, Canada; and bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design from National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan.
