Gerry Derksen

Biography

Professor Gerry Derksen is originally from Canada where he went to the University of Manitoba’s architecture school and later graduate school at the University of Alberta. Under Jorge Frascara he studied visual communication design, which integrated user centred design philosophy with traditional marketing communication strategies. The subject of his masters thesis, “Jury perceptions of animation”, studied re-enactments of a crime scene to determine the prejudicial impact on a jury. The subject of his PhD dissertation is “A Smart Toy to Aid Children with Autism”, predicting the next best question to optimize learning. Much of Dr Derksen’s published research includes interactive media for the web, visualization in digital humanities, and communication for behavior change. Currently, he is a Professor at the Clemson University in Graphic Communications and active in the practice, research of communication design, usability and information design.

In the news for this month.

Work in progress: Dr. Derksen dissertation information available here. He will be presenting a paper at the IACIS conference on the Internet of Things entitled: Smart Toys for an Educational Framework, or you can catch him at SXSW in Austin, 2025.

Dr. Derksen completed his Ph.D at the University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign from the Informatics program with an emphasis on Design, Technology and Society. You can find his dissertation in the university archives entitle,
"A Smart Toy System to Educate Children with Autism: A Comparison of Tree-Structured Programming and Machine Learning Models for an IoT Device." ...I continue to research the topic of user experience and design as it relates to machine learning and education. Two grants are currently under review for a second study which uses an improved ANN model. I look forward to continued conversations with my colleagues, students and advisors at the U of I. Check out our research group page at the Design Concepts Lab for project information and updates here.