Theory of User Engineering

Masaaki Kurosu is a professor at the Open University of Japan. He is also an President Emeritus of HCD-Net (Human Centered Design Network) in Japan. Based on his career as a usability and UX professional in industry and academia, he proposed the concept of user engineering. He also proposed a new academic domain of artifact evolution theory and many methods related to usability and UX including sHEM, TFD, DTM, UX graph, ERM, etc. His work on the apparent usability is well-known.

Before coming to NIME (National Institute of Multimedia Education) that was consolidated to the Open University of Japan in 2009, he was a professor at the faculty of informatics of Shizuoka University. He was formerly working for Hitachi Ltd. at the Design Center for 7 years and the Central Research Institute for 10 years. He graduated the Ph.D. course of psychology at Waseda University.

He was born in Tokyo in 1948. He served as a conference chair of APCHI98, INTERACT2001, 1st and 2nd International Conference on Human-Centered Design, and Thematic Area of HCI in HCI International conferences in 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016. He is an author or a contributor of more than 50 books.