Alumni Faculty

Biography

Ricardo combines a strong creative foundation as an industrial designer with a passion for pushing the limits of computational applications, systems and tools. He has been studying creativity and innovation principles through multi-agent social systems for the last ten years and is also involved in the development of new methods and support systems for the fuzzy front-end of the design process. Currently, he is looking into the best facilitation strategies for ideation processes in teams.

He leads a team of two dozen instructors across disciplines in the Year 1: Introduction to Design (3.007), a unique cornerstone design course that integrates engineering, architecture and design and the respective disciplinary traditions, pedagogy conventions and practices to introduce all freshmen students to design. He also teaches postgraduate modules, including ‘Design and Creativity’ at the Asian Consumer Institute. Ricardo is a founding member of Opportunity Lab (O-Lab): http://www.sutd.edu.sg/olab.aspx

Ricardo has received a number of teaching awards and collaborates with several editorial teams including the Journal of Engineering Design, the Journal of Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice, the Rapid Prototyping Journal, International Conference on Design Computing and Cognition, International Conference on Computational Creativity, International Association of Societies of Design Research, Design Research Society International Conference, and ACM Creativity & Cognition.

Education

• PhD Design Computing, The University of Sydney, Australia. 2000 – 2005. Doctoral dissertation: “Computational Explorations of Creativity and Innovation in Design”
• Visiting Postgraduate Student, MIT 2002 (Design and Computation group).
• Bachelor of Industrial Design, Autonomous Metropolitan University, Mexico 1996.

Awards

• Tec de Monterrey Graduate Program Teaching Award (Engineering and Design Division), 2010
• Tec de Monterrey Undergraduate Program Teaching Award (Engineering and Design Division), 2009 and 2010
• Member of the National System of Research (SNI), Conacyt Mexico 2008-2011
• IPRS International Postgraduate Research Scholarship Australian Government, 2000-2004
• IPA International Postgraduate Award University of Sydney, 2000-2004
• Valedictorian Award, UAM Mexico, 1996

Research Interests

• Social simulation of creativity and innovation
• Rapid prototyping for creative design
• Participatory design methods
• Evolutionary design systems
• Mass customization of designs

Research Projects

2013-2016        Participation Evaluation in Design with the Developing World (PartE). SUTD-MIT International Design Centre Research Grant S$281,200 (PI)

2013             Modular Field Research Kit. International Design Centre Infrastructure Grant S$53,400 (CO-PI)

2012-2013        Opportunity-Lab. Education Department SUTD S$100,000

2012-2015        RoboMods: Design Principles for Self-reconfigurable Modular Robots. SUTD-MIT International Design Centre Grant $549,916 (CO-PI)

2012-2015        Start-Up Research Grant SRG EPD $100,000

Research Opportunities

I am looking for PhD students and Research Fellows/Postdoctoral Researchers in the field of design computing, rapid prototyping, design and creativity methods, artificial intelligence and design. Feel free to email me your CV and research proposal.

Recent and Key Publications

• Gerrard, V. and Sosa, R. (2014) Examining Participation, Participatory Design Conference, Namibia.
• Telenko, C., Sosa, R. and Wood, K. L. (2014) Changing conversations and perceptions: The research and practice of design science. In Chakrabarti, A. & Lindemann, U. (eds.), Impact of Design Research on Practice. (2014) Springer.
• Mohan, RE., Rojas, N., Seah, S., & Sosa, R. (2013). Design principles for robot inclusive spaces. In DS 75-4: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED13), Design for Harmonies, Vol. 4: Product, Service and Systems Design, Seoul, Korea, 19-22.08. 2013.
• Nejati, H., Cheung, N., Sosa, R. and Koh, D. (2014). DeepCAPTCHA: An Image CAPTCHA Based on Depth Perception. In Multimedia Systems Conference 2014 (MMSys ’14).
• Sosa, R., Xu, Q. and Mohan, RE (2014). The House that Roomba Built; Creative spatial and furniture designs by a cleaning robot, Conference on Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia, CAADRIA 2014.
• Sosa, R. and Gero, J. S. (2013). Multilevel computational creativity. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computational Creativity (p. 198).
• Sosa, R. (2013). The creative value of distant analogies, 5th International Congress of International Association of Societies of Design Research, Tokyo Japan August 2013.
• Kuhr, R., Otto, K., Sosa, R., Raghunath, N., & Hölttä-Otto, K. (2013). Design with the developing world: a model with seven challenges for the future. In DS 75-4: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED13), Design for Harmonies, Vol. 4: Product, Service and Systems Design, Seoul, Korea, 19-22.08. 2013.
• Nansai, S., Rojas, N., Mohan, RE., & Sosa, R. (2013). Exploration of adaptive gait patterns with a reconfigurable linkage mechanism. In Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on (pp. 4661-4668). IEEE.
• Sosa, R. and Gero, JS (2013). The creative value of bad ideas. In Stouffs, R., Janssen, P., Roudavski, S., & Tunçer, B. (Eds.) Conference on Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia, CAADRIA 2013. 853-862.
• Sosa, R. and Dong, A. (2013). The creative assessment of rich ideas. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Creativity & Cognition (pp. 328-331). ACM.
• Sosa, R and Gero, JS: Brainstorming in Solitude and Teams:A Computational Study of Group Influence, International Conference on Computational Creativity 2012, Dublin Ireland. May 30 – June 1 2012, http://computationalcreativity.net/iccc2012/
• Sosa, R and Gero, JS: 2008, Social structures that promote change in a complex world: The complementary roles of strangers and acquaintances in innovation, FUTURES, The journal of policy, planning and futures studies, 40(5), 577-585.
• Gero, JS and Sosa, R: 2007, Complexity measures as a basis for mass customisation of novel designs, Environment and Planning B- Planning & Design, 35(1), 3-15.
• Sosa, R and Gero, JS: 2005, A computational study of creativity in design: the role of society, Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing AIEDAM, 19(4) 229-244

Publications in Progress

• Reconfigurable design robots
• Effects in new idea assessment
• ShapeStorming: A Model of Visual Ideation to Study Design Creativity
• From concept to specification maintaining design intent
• Identifying candidates for reconfigurable design
• World Design Cities
• Creativity in the Top Engineering Schools in Asia
• Design Challenges in Self-Screening Medical Devices
• Evaluating Participatory Design
• Creativity Awareness Index
• Creativity in early childhood
• The Illusion of Understanding

Invited presentations

• Global Innovation Roundtable, Government of India, November 2013 in Delhi, India: http://www.globalinnovationroundtable.gov.in/speakers/index-2.html
• ICED 2013 Workshop between SIGs Computational Design Synthesis and Design Creativity, Seoul, Korea, August 2013
• Design & Emotions Symposium at Tokyo Institute of Technology: “Design and Innovation”, 03/14/13, Japan
• Design for Sustainability Seminar at SIMTech: “Design for ethical impact and social responsibility” (A*Star), 03/26/13, SG
• Best Poster Award, IEEE Life Sciences Grand Challenges Conference 2013: Dothanh, T., Zhou, Y., Nejati, H., Cheung, M., Koh, D., Sosa, R., Tan, SH., Chio, M., Liang, M., Tan, A. and Swetter, S. (2013) “Design of a mobile imaging system for early diagnosis of skin cancer”