Kevin Ma

About Me

I am a PhD candidate in Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley, where I am a part of the Co-Design Lab advised by Prof. Kosa Goucher-Lambert. I am closely associated with the Jacobs Institute of Design, where I have supported design education through teaching and mentorship. Before Berkeley, I earned my BS in Mechanical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, where I conducted research in COVID-19 risk modelling under the supervision of Prof. Michael Lachmann and Prof. Jennifer Johnson-Leung.

I study and design human-AI collaboration systems, particularly in complex multi-human settings. My research combines UX research, computational evaluation, and design theory to understand how people use, adopt, and collaborate with AI systems. During my PhD, I have worked with collaborators at City University of Hong Kong, Autodesk Research, Carnegie Mellon, and Virginia Tech on projects spanning GenAI-supported UX storyboarding, LLM evaluation for design, and computational simulation of design processes. Additionally, I have worked as a research intern at NASA Langley Research Center where I studied how professional designers adopted GenAI in real-world innovation settings and at HP Inc. where I designed AI conversational agents that collaborated with human teams.

Alongside research, I teach and mentor. I co-created a graduate-level design course, Human-AI Design Methods, and have mentored master’s and undergraduate students on research and design projects. I enjoy advising students who are interested in human-AI interaction research and want to pursue graduate education. If you are a UC Berkeley student and are interested, please feel free to reach out. Outside of research, I enjoy breakdancing, hiking, and reading.

Teaching & Mentorship

• Human-AI Design Methods Co-creator and teaching assistant, Spring 2026, Spring 2027 (upcoming)
• Design Frameworks Teaching assistant, Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Fall 2026
• Design Methodology Teaching assistant, Spring 2023
• Master of Engineering capstone teams Mentor of 3 multidisciplinary teams, 2024 to 2027

News

• [September 2026] Our journal paper with NASA on human-AI collaboration got accepted to ASME Journal of Mechanical Design.
• [May 2026] I passed my qualifying exam and am now a PhD Candidate!
• [May 2026] Our ongoing work on AI personas in collaborative design was accepted to ACM Creativity & Cognition.
• [March 2026] Our journal paper on using LLM agents to simulate design theory was published in a Special Issue of the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design.
• [October 2025] Our collaborative paper, led by Zhaohui Liang and Xiaoyu Zhang, on StoryDifusion, a GenAI system for UX storyboarding, was accepted to ACM ICMI 2025.
• [August 2025] Our conference paper on using LLM agents to simulate design theory got chosen as one of the top papers at ASME IDETC 2025.

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