Design engineer / Applied research / Institutional design
I design and build systems where technology meets people.
I'm Dominic Gelfuso, a designer and engineer working across physical products, research software, and institutions. I've helped bring electric-vehicle charging systems into production, conducted human-centered research, developed educational programs, and built experimental tools for examining how people reason and make decisions.
My work starts by understanding a problem, making its structure explicit, and building something that can be tested in the world.
Evidence
Shipped · 2018–21
Mustang Mach-E charging
Schematic stand-in. The exploded view of the Mobile Charger arrives once Ford clears photographs or CAD.
Reconstruction placeholder · pending artifact
Working prototype · 2026
SecondThought
Schematic stand-in. One question anchored to one passage; the case study runs the real interaction on synthetic text.
Reconstruction placeholder · pending artifact
Delivered · 2026
Mines curriculum map
Schematic stand-in. Rows are courses, columns are proposed AI-capability rules — delivered as recommendations, not adopted policy.
Reconstruction placeholder · pending artifact
Selected work
Products, prototypes, and institutions — selected for what they reveal about the problem and how it was approached.
Research and questions
More recently, I've been studying systems that make their own representations and assumptions inspectable. In writing, learning, and design, the aim is not just to generate better outputs; it is to help people understand the reasoning that produced them. SecondThought, InstaGraph, and related studies are different attempts at that question, with different stages of evidence.
Publications
Interested in a project, research question, or collaboration? Get in touch.