I am Michael,
a design researcher and educator.
I am a postdoctoral scholar at Bucknell University with a PhD in Human Centered Design & Engineering.
About
I approach design as a transformative practice that bridges disciplines, fosters critical reflection, and invites collective imagination. With over a decade of experience leading research across academic, civic, and applied settings, I work with teams, students, and communities to navigate uncertainty, make sense of complex situations, and engage convergent challenges — drawing from human-computer interaction (HCI), science and technology studies (STS), design justice, and more-than-human theory to surface values and tensions and support institutional and educational change.
At Bucknell University, I work as a postdoctoral scholar on a Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) Program focused on fostering student agency in engineering education. Drawing on the capabilities approach, the RED group develops curricula and learning tools that support students in developing navigational agency and expand their awareness of meaningful opportunities across their social, academic, and professional journeys. My work centers on making these change efforts visible and interpretable through Research through Design–informed studies, developing a retrospective methodology to trace how courses and systems shape knowledge production through practice over time. I collaborate closely with faculty to translate these design processes into transferable insights that inform both research and practice.
I hold a BS and MS in Human Centered Design & Engineering and a BA in Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington, where I completed my PhD under the advisement of Dr. Tyler Fox, with guidance from committee members Dr. Jennifer Turns and Dr. Eben Kirksey. Please explore my CV or portfolio below and feel free to get in touch. I welcome opportunities for collaboration, conversation, and new directions.
Research
Selected research projects.
Research on AI as a Reflection Tool
Exploring AI as a reflection tool for competency development during prompt engineering: vibe coding a bird identifier app with Claude.
Design for Speculative Entanglements
Expanding design speculative through quantum mechanics for more relational, justice-oriented ways of engaging with complex and uncertain futures.
Design Competencies Research:
UX Design to Transition Design
Exploring use and development of design competencies as HCDE graduate students shift from immediate user needs to long-term societal and ecological change.
Web Application: MoCA
(Model of Coordinated Action)
An application developed so research contributors can easily access, create, update, and visualize MoCA research datasets.
Publications
Selected peer-reviewed publications and academic works.
Beach, Michael W., Emily Knaphus-Soran, Maryam Tanveer, Jana Foxe, and Pauline C. Dott. (2024). Women in Engineering and STEM: A Review of the 2024 Literature. Society of Women Engineers. https://swe.org/magazine/women-in-engineering-and-stem-a-review-of-the-2024-literature/.
Beach, Michael W. (2024). “Nonlocality, Nonlinearity, & Complicit Bias in Climate Diasporas.” Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA), University of Texas at Dallas.
Beach, Michael W., Christina Graves, and Tyler Fox. (2024). “Speculative F/Actors: Climate Futures – Crafting a Workshop for Collaborative Worldbuilding in Cataclysmic Climates.” In Halfway to the Future. ACM.
Gabrielle Benabdallah, Michael W. Beach, Lucy Suchman, Kavita Philip, Nathanael Elias Mengist, and Daniela Rosner. (2023). “The Politics of Imaginaries: Probing Humanistic Inquiry in HCI.” Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Beach, Michael W. and Fox, T. (2023). “Speculative F/Actors: Climate Futures – Crafting a Workshop for Collaborative Worldbuilding in Cataclysmic Climates.” Workshop WS27: HCI for Climate Change: Imagining Sustainable Futures. April 28, 2023. CHI, Hamburg, Germany.
Beach, Michael W., and Tyler Fox. (2022). “Value Sensitive Speculative Design: Exploring More-Than-Human Relations in the Age of Climate Catastrophe.” IxD&A 51
Ghoshal, Devarshi, Ludovico Bianchi, Abdelilah Essiari, Drew Paine, Sarah S. Poon, Michael W. Beach, Alpha T. N'Diaye, Patrick Huck, and Lavanya Ramakrishnan. "Science Capsule: Towards Sharing and Reproducibility of Scientific Workflows." In 2021 IEEE Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science (WORKS), pp. 66-73. IEEE, 2021.
Ghoshal, Devarshi, Ludovico Bianchi, Abdelilah Essiari, Michael W. Beach, Drew Paine, and Lavanya Ramakrishnan. "Science Capsule-Capturing the Data Life Cycle." Journal of Open Source Software 6, no. 62 (2021): 2484.
Jones, Ridley, Michael W. Beach, Melinda McClure Haughey, Will Sutherland, and Charlotte P. Lee. "Construction of Shared Situational Awareness in Traffic Management." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, no. CSCW1 (2021): 1-27.
Neang, Andrew B., Will Sutherland, Michael W. Beach, and Charlotte P. Lee. "Data Integration as Coordination: The Articulation of Data Work in an Ocean Science Collaboration." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 4, no. CSCW3 (2021): 1-25.
Collaborators, Partners, & Affiliates
Get In Touch
Interested in collaborating, learning more about my work, or just having a conversation about research, design, or futures thinking? I’d be glad to hear from you.