Professor Xu Sun
Professor in Industrial Design and Manufacture
Xu Sun, Professor of Product Design and Manufacture, is the very first academic staff who has a product design, interaction design background joined the University of Nottingham Ningbo China and is also the first female full professor in the Faculty of Science and Engineering. In the past five years, she has been supervising students doing design projects and received more than 30 awards from international design competitions.
Professor Xu Sun said that it is the human-centred design philosophy and a perfect combination of technology and art, which she has endorsed for many years in both her teaching and research.
Professor Sun has a solid background in technology. She studied Financial Mathematics for her bachelor degree and Telematics Application for her master. During her study at the University of Twente, Netherlands, she found out the charisma of transdisciplinary innovation, like information technology and humanities. Therefore, she studied Professional Doctorate in Engineering (PDEng) in User System Interaction Design with full scholarship in the Technical University of Eindhoven. After that, she started her research on the human-product interaction design especially on personalised mobile devices at Loughborough University. Her research outcome had been tested in the London Olympic Games.
Professor Xu Sun received her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 2010 and later joined the University of Nottingham UK in the Human Factor research group, a transdisciplinary research body across computer science and mechanical, design and manufacturing research.
Her current research focus moved to smart transportation and healthcare. She has been dedicated herself into improving the autonomous driving experiences in collaboration of the University of Nottingham UK and Jaguar Land Rover Corporate. Her study on autonomous driving has been published in many academic journals like Applied Ergonomics, IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Cognitive Computation.
Xu Sun and Dr Carl Pickering, previous Head of Autonomous Technology in Jaguar Land Rover
As an expert in the fields of “Human-Centred Product Design”, Professor Sun has established a national and international reputation as a Chartered Technological Product Designer, filed more than 20 patents and published 70 high-quality articles.
When she first knew that the University of Nottingham Ningbo China was going to open the BEng (Hons) Product Design and Manufacture programme, she thought it was a great opportunity for her to bring the human-centred design philosophy to China and cultivate more design talents in China.
Professor Sun believes that a good product, is not only pretty from its appearance, but more importantly useful and can solve people’s problem indeed. Therefore, Professor Sun answered her call of duty and became the very first academic staff in the Faculty who majoring in product and interaction design. With the support from her colleagues, they gradually built the excellent teaching team for the PDM programme.
“China has been a country known for manufacturing, but not many people would say China is good at design, especially in the modern industry,” said Professor Sun.
My philosophy of teaching is to encourage students to be designers who aim to make people's lives richer and happier. To achieve these objectives, I introduce case studies of genuine design problems which require creative design solutions. An excellent design solution requires a good understanding of user and design theories, and I encourage every effort to provide students with the confidence to seek and express a solution to real problems among the people we seek to serve.
In the past ten years, the programme has been evolved in accordance with the Specific Learning Outcomes for accredited degree programmes by Institution of Engineering Designers (iED).
BEng (Hons) Product Design and Manufacture programme is a multi-disciplinary programme which values creativity whilst emphasising an understanding of manufacturing, material science, ergonomics and management. Students are able to experience the whole product design and development process. They will be equipped with the cutting-edge design techniques like human factor engineering design, computer aided design, digital manufacturing design and human-computer interaction design.