Dr. Elena Ruiz has taught at Emerson for eleven years, but this semester she’s teaching differently. Instead of starting lectures with abstract design theory, she opens with a dataset — bus arrival times, campus dining traffic, even students’ own step counts — and asks her class to find the story inside it.
“Design isn’t just about how something looks,” she explains. “It’s about noticing a pattern nobody else has noticed yet, and then explaining it clearly enough that other people can act on it.” Her students say the shift has made the material stick in a way lectures alone never did.
The approach grew out of her own research into how people misread data in everyday decisions — work she’s been quietly building for years alongside her teaching load. This year, for the first time, she’s folding that research directly into the undergraduate curriculum.
“I used to think my research and my teaching were two separate jobs,” she says. “Now I think they were always supposed to be the same job.”
