Shape the future by designing it — spend your summer conducting real research alongside Stanford faculty, turning bold ideas into meaningful impact.
About the Internship:
Important 2026 Deadline:
Students interested in the 2026 Summer Undergraduate Research Internship in Design should apply [Via Google Form Application] no later than Friday, March 27th. Project information can be found at the bottom of this page.
About the Internship:
Across the Stanford School of Engineering and university more broadly, vibrant design research produces physical artifacts, computational systems, and human organizations; draws on new and traditional materials and affects natural and built environments. The Undergraduate Design Research Internship will invite Design B.S. students to conduct scholarly research related to Design through a full-time (35+ hours/week), 10-week, paid summer internship.
Students will work directly with faculty mentors from the Method and Domain areas, who proposed projects, to investigate research questions related to design. These faculty-led research projects relate to Design broadly, including: design of new systems and technologies, participatory or action research, investigations into the phenomena of design, methods and tools for design, study of the impact of designed artifacts and systems on people and the planet. Students will build directly on skills and abilities they develop both in Core Design courses and also in their technical depth areas. Additionally, we plan to engage with faculty mentors of our Domain areas to propose research projects that directly address problems in the existing four domains, including Designing for the Planet, Designing for Biological Futures, Designing for Social Impact, Designing for Health.
Throughout their summer research internship, we envision students achieving the following learning and experience outcomes. Engaging in problem and knowledge understanding and sensemaking through both empirical means as well as review of existing academic literature. Applying design and engineering methods to solve problems related to research topics in design, including the development of new technology, systems, and tools. Strengthening evaluation and analysis methods to consider the success of different design interventions or to capture and understand new knowledge about people and systems. Students will improve their technical communication skills. We also hope to foster community across undergraduate students and faculty. Lastly, our goal is that students build an understanding of what Design based research looks like, designerly ways of knowing, exposing students to academic literature in their area of design, conducting literature reviews, posing research questions, selecting design research methods to address those questions, and sharing those findings with the broader community.
The Internship Program is made possible through a Departmental Grant to the Design B.S. Program from the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE). Full-time (35+ hours/week), 10-week, paid internships are available in the Summer only.
Eligibility:
Only Stanford University undergraduates may apply. Graduating seniors are not eligible for funding in the summer after degree conferral. Priority is given to students who have declared a major in Design. See here for specific eligibility: https://undergradresearch.stanford.edu/info-fac-staff/fac-dept-grant-administration/fac-dept-eligibility-reqs#Student.
Pay and Commitment:
Full-time internships come with a base stipend of $8,500, with additional needs-based supplements (up to $1,500) available with certification from the Financial Aid office. In addition to their project duties, interns will be expected to:
How to Apply:
Apply via application by the posted deadline. If you have general questions about the summer internship program, please contact Prof. Sean Follmer, sfollmer@stanford.edu.
Schedule for the 2026 Summer Design Research Internships:
Watch the Information Session Recording here
Passcode: v8=6cksY
2026 Research Projects (Apply via the Google Form):
2026 Research Projects (Apply via the Google Form):
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Project - Designing a Mixed Reality Platform
Faculty Mentor: Jeremy Bailenson (bailenson@gmail.com)
The Virtual Human Interaction Lab studies how virtual and mixed reality impact human behavior. We design new simulations, and test the way those simulations impact attitudes, behavior, and cognition, both inside the lab itself in controlled experiments as well as in the wild in field studies.
This internship will focus on designing an mixed reality experience for the Apple Vision Pro headsets, in particular ones that push the boundary on The Perceptual Turing Test (designing a simulation that is largely indistinguishable from the real world). Using new capture technologies we will build a photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splat of various rooms in the lab, and then will design experiences that can alter a series of aspects of that room, for example lighting, scale, object presence, object layouts and other effect. Moreover we will be focusing on the ability to use filters to delete real objects from the actual room, as opposed to augmenting the room with digital ones. The goal is to studying how the mind responds when one has difficulty understanding what is real their environment.
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Project - Tracheal Acoustic Monitoring Device Production Design
Faculty Mentor: Chris Chafe (cc@ccrma.stanford.edu)
Tracheal Acoustic Monitoring (TAM) is a wearable device to detect respiratory airflow obstruction during sedation or anesthesia—an issue often missed by current monitoring technologies. Traditional methods like the precordial stethoscope, which provided real-time auditory feedback on breath sounds, were sidelined by less invasive technologies that, while improving clinician mobility, lack sensitivity to certain types of respiratory airflow obstructions. TAM combines the advantages of historical and modern methods by utilizing a novel, wearable device that captures crucial acoustic data without limiting mobility. We have created a functional, wired prototype and are advancing towards a wireless design for clinical trials. Our objective is to assess TAM's impact on reducing the incidence and severity of hypoxemia in patients during procedures and in recovery rooms to address the unrecognized respiratory obstruction that can lead to severe complications.
The intern will work with the TAM team on early-stage manufacturing design using the current prototype as a starting point. They will become conversant with its physical, electronic and acoustical constraints and begin the transformation to a production-ready version. Knowledge of materials, CAD, and assembly and testing pipelines a plus. Team members from the Medical School, CCRMA, and outside engineering consulting will advise. Along with attending weekly team meetings, visits to hospitals and medical device manufacturers are envisioned.
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Project - Designing Beyond Medication Adherence in Injectable Therapeutics
Faculty Mentor: Vivian Feig (vfeig@stanford.edu)
Our lab develops minimally invasive therapeutic technologies designed to integrate seamlessly into patients’ lives, addressing the critical gap between laboratory innovation and real-world adoption. For injectable therapeutics in particular, the field has made significant progress on medication adherence, converging on evidence-based design criteria such as maximum injection forces, optimal administration frequencies, and ergonomic device geometries. While these advances are crucial, they represent a functional baseline rather than an aspirational vision for patient experience. This project asks: what would injectable therapeutic systems look like if we designed not just for adherence, but for patient empowerment, confidence, and hope? How might we create technologies that patients feel ownership over, that build competence rather than dependence, and that support meaningful integration into the fabric of daily life?
Design students will investigate the full spectrum of patient experience with self-administered injectables, from initial prescription through long-term therapy management. Using methods that may include ethnographic research, patient journey mapping, and rapid prototyping, students will identify opportunities for design intervention across multiple dimensions of the therapeutic experience. Projects may involve physical making with mechanical injection devices, exploring how form, materiality, and interaction design shape emotional response and user capability. Students will also have the opportunity to engage with the Feig lab’s materials-focused methods, investigating how chemistry and materials processing choices—from polymeric formulations to drug delivery kinetics—can be intentionally designed to support patient agency and positive therapeutic relationships. Final deliverables will include design frameworks, prototyped interventions, and recommendations for future development of patient-centered injectable systems.
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Project - Hands-On Biofutures: The Giving Tree
Faculty Mentor: Aaron Straight (astraigh@stanford.edu); Char McCurdy (cmccurdy@stanford.edu)
How does hands-on material transformation reveal the practical limits of circularity in biogenic systems? This Research through Design investigation examines what circular economy theory obscures about material loss, process efficiency, and external inputs when transforming a biological feedstock, in this case, trees, across multiple processes and products. The student will investigate how making itself functions as a method for understanding material systems, generating knowledge about practical challenges in the bioeconomy transition. The student will work directly with Char McCurdy (Design), with additional scientific oversight from Aaron Straight (Biochemistry). Research methods employed in this project will include multi-process fabrication (milling, pulping, fiber extraction, substrate preparation), material accounting, literature review, expert interviews, and shadowing with foresters and processors, hybridization of existing practices for studio-scale work, SEM imaging and microscopy, and systematic documentation. Research outputs include protocols, methods, and artifacts from each transformation pathway tested; process reflection analyzing what making revealed about circularity constraints; and literature review situating findings within circular economy and biomaterial systems scholarship.
Student Profile:
We need someone who can move fluidly between shop and lab, science and scrappy making. You should bring hard skills in at least two of these areas: woodworking/furniture making, CAD/CAM and digital fabrication, electronics/circuits/Arduino, and experimental craft techniques. You should be comfortable with hybrid approaches, including moving between scientific protocols and studio practices, building functional tools from available materials, and rapid low-fi prototyping to test ideas. Strong candidates are resourceful problem-solvers who can work independently, document systematically, and are not afraid of failure or experimental dead ends.
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Project - Hands for Underwater Bimanual Manipulation
Faculty Mentor: Mark Cutkosky (cutkosky@stanford.edu)
Design Research Internship: Hands for Underwater Bimanual Manipulation - Summer 2026
Advisor: Mark Cutkosky
PhD student mentor: Soy Choi
Goal:
The Stanford Robotics Center has embarked on designing a successor, Ocean5K, to the OceanOneK underwater robot. It will need new hands. There is a desire to endow it with hands that are more dexterous and capable than those on the current robot, which were developed in Cutkosky’s BDML lab. The design search space is very large. Among other things, we need to determine how many fingers the hands should have, and whether they should be anthropomorphic, with opposable thumbs, and even whether there should be mirrored left and right hands, or perhaps two different, specialized hands. We also need to determine how many motors and tendons are needed for each hand. We look forward to working with a design intern to help us explore the space of possibilities.
Methods:
Although we can do a substantial amount of design exploration in simulation, nothing beats physical prototypes for determining what is most intuitive and effective for people to control. We will 3D print simplified hands that can be operated manually by cables, etc. and immersed in the swimming pool outside of BDML as people attempt tasks such as acquiring delicate objects, manipulating poles and nets, etc. The Design Intern will work closely with Prof. Cutkosky and PhD student Soy Choi to fabricate prototypes and test them with human users to help us learn what is most versatile and intuitive while also being feasible to adapt to the Ocean5K platform. If the student is interested, they will be encouraged to learn how we model hands in MuJoCo as well. We will also expose the intern to the literature on underwater hands and grippers.
Prior Experience:
We are looking for a student who is good at CAD and 3D printing and enthusiastic about prototyping and testing human-operated devices. A general interest in the future of underwater robotics is encouraged as well.
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Project - Physically Assistive Robotic Fabric
Faculty Mentor: Allison Okamura (aokamura@stanford.edu)
Soft robotics uses compliant, bio-inspired actuators to enable safer interaction, delicate manipulation, and adaptability in unstructured environments, but the field’s “soft for soft’s sake” approach has led to limited force and payload. In contrast, fabrics are strong in tension yet soft in bending, allowing high forces while distributing contact to avoid damaging heavy, fragile objects. Existing work on robotic fabrics involves traditional robots to manipulate passive fabric, or fabrics with weak actuators that merely change local shape.
This project will develop robust robotic fabrics that apply large forces by passively redirecting loads along tensile directions by combining pneumatic and electromagnetic activators with computational design and fabric modeling to enable safer, low-power manipulation. There are several possible directions for summer work, depending on the state of the research at the time. One is fabrics will self-spread to create large contact areas that protect fragile objects and the human body, to create inflatable supports governed by distributed control that responds to implicit human inputs. Another is body-conforming garments that self-don and self-doff using inflated channels and/or robotic zippers. A third is wearable fabric haptic devices used to communicate high-dimensional information to users.
Students will work with PhD students and Postdocs to develop, test, and document new fabric devices. The outcomes may be published in research papers and/or used as demonstrations of assistive technology in the Stanford Robotics Center. We are looking for students with interest and/or experience in one or more of the following areas: sewing, fashion design, knitting, pneumatics, CAD, 3D printing, user interfaces, and mechatronics skills such as motors and microcontroller development boards/embedded systems. The ideal undergraduate researcher in our lab has innate curiosity, hands-on resourcefulness, attention to detail in design and documentation, persistence when debugging, and a proactive, collaborative spirit.
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Project - AI-Supported Audio Augmentation to Support Mindfulness
Faculty Mentor: Sean Follmer (sfollmer@stanford.edu)
Mindfulness is critical for everyday wellbeing, serving as an effective means to regulate stress, improve emotional resilience, and support long-term mental health. This research project aims to develop novel mindfulness technologies that leverage audio-based interfaces to seamlessly integrate mindfulness practices into daily activities, transforming everyday moments into opportunities for calmness and mental restoration.
In this summer project, interns will gain hands-on experience with the multimodal AI components of the system, which dynamically sense and identify moments when an individual needs mindfulness support. This work may involve acquiring, processing, and interpreting physiological data (e.g., heart rate variability) as well as contextual signals from the environment (e.g., ambient sounds). Interns will also contribute to the evaluation of the proposed system, including managing field studies that deploy the device in real-world settings, collecting and analyzing user data, and assessing the effectiveness of the interventions.
This project is particularly well-suited for applicants who either have strong programming background and are comfortable processing multimodal data, or who have experience conducting user evaluations and deploying technological systems in real-world settings.
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Project - Mapping the Exploration of Musical Ideas
Faculty Mentor: Judy Fan (jefan@stanford.edu)
This project investigates how composers explore and navigate the space of musical ideas--from notes to melodic motifs--as they work through the process of composing a new piece. We will investigate what concepts and tools composers draw on at different stages of composition, how they generate ideas and iteratively refine them, and what drives them to reach for particular concepts and tools at particular stages in their process.
The intern on this project will gain hands-on experience conducting empirical research on creativity, working at the intersection of cognitive science, music, and computation. Core activities will include designing and running behavioral studies with human participants (including composers), analyzing high-dimensional data to characterize patterns in creative exploration, and formulating and testing scientific hypotheses about what drives decisions during musical composition. By the end of the summer, the intern will have developed practical skills in research design and data analysis while contributing to a deeper scientific understanding of how people generate and refine creative ideas — with broader implications for how we think about design, problem-solving, and human creativity more generally.