Hoa Vo is an assistant professor of interior design at the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design at Indiana University Bloomington. She earned her Ph.D. in interior design with a minor in educational psychology from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in 2021, and held a tenure-track position at Georgia State University before joining the IU faculty in 2024.
Vo’s research investigates how emerging technologies—particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR)—can enhance, rather than replace, design expertise. Trained as a designer and educator with experience in 3D digital graphics, she brings a distinctive lens to questions about how the built environment is experienced and how creativity in the design process is evaluated. Her mixed-methods approach integrates rich data, user studies, and technical innovation to explore two central questions: how spatial decisions in built environments impact occupants, and how creative thinking unfolds within the design process. She has published multiple peer-reviewed articles—including lead and solo-authored work in the Journal of Engineering, Design and Technology, International Journal of Architectural Computing, Intelligent Buildings International, and Diségno (forthcoming)—and has received support from internal grants such as the Faculty Assistance in Data Science (FADS), Grant-in-Aid (GIA), and the College Arts and Humanities Institute (CAHI) Research & Creative Activity funding.
In her IU Presidential Arts and Humanities project, Neuro-Spatial Analytics in Virtual Reality, Vo examines how intelligent tools—particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs)—can be trained to interpret human navigation behavior in immersive virtual spaces, ultimately informing human-centered design in physical environments. Yet this work extends beyond technical development. Grounded in the arts and humanities, Vo’s inquiry raises critical questions: What spatial assumptions are embedded in AI models? And how might designers leverage those insights to collaborate with, rather than be replaced by, machines? To bring these ideas to broader audiences, she will produce a collection of journal articles and conference presentations that demonstrate how technologically augmented workflows can be operationalized for both scientific insight and design application.