Our Research
IEAM's research cohort includes over 200 researchers annually, ranging from freshmen undergraduates to graduate students to tenured faculty at both IU and Purdue. Working in an interdisciplinary, collaborative, community-engaged learning context, our team's applied research helps to create efficiencies and increase the effectiveness of Central Indiana's charitable food system. Emphasizing a human-centered design approach, we also incorporate concepts from the Toyota Production System into process improvement, co-creating potential solutions with our partners that respect their organizational culture, allow for dozens of small changes, and result in big impact.
Because our faculty and student teams are interdisciplinary, our members approach projects in different ways, have exposure to different frameworks, and use different tools and techniques for problem-solving. Through the course of a project year, we work to help our students work together using the shared language of design. Our team has adopted the Herron School of Art + Design's Collaborative Action Research in Design process model. We teach students to UNDERSTAND and DEFINE various problems related to hunger and mobility, then IDEATE, PROTOTYPE, & TEST proposed solutions with community partners.
