design lab steven dow scott klemmer student presentation

Information & Interaction Design: Students Present Ideas to Esteemed Panel

Information & Interaction Design: Students Present Ideas to Esteemed Panel

Information & Interaction Design: Students Present Ideas to Esteemed Panel

One theme of design classes at UCSD is to learn how to interact with the world, get feedback to shape design ideas, and learn what works.

On Friday, June 9th, 2017, approximately 120 students in Steven Dow’s class COGS122 Startup Studio and DSGN 100 Information Design, as well as Scott Klemmer’s COGS160 Advanced Interaction Design presented various ideas such as a company that performs oil changes in your driveway, an emporium where fans can sell and purchase fan-crafted goods, and what happens when we start to communicate with the cars next to us when we’re stuck in traffic.

For their final, students in the Startup Studio class presented Kickstarter campaigns and Design 100 students gave verbal pitches on their ideas to different jurors, such as UCSD Design Lab Director Don Norman; Hilary Nemchik, the Comm Director for Councilmember Barbara Bry, Sam Ladah, VP of Human Resources at IBM, Doug Powell, IBM Distinguished Designer, as well as other researchers, scientists, and professionals in the Design community.

Steven Dow said, “We decided to combine the two classes and invited external people because it makes it fun for the students. It provides  an occasion for students to show their work  to other people in the university and beyond.”

“For the startup class, we learn data driven design and how to use the Internet and web based advertising to understand if an idea has merit and how to potentially get funding for an idea. The other class is about information design and being able to work visually with text and images in order to communicate effectively. Students followed a human-centered design to explore  problems around mobility within San Diego,” said Dow.

Students in all three classes learned how to reach people, how to get over their own shyness, talk to people, and how to get out of the classroom. They figured out what kind of resources they could pull to shape their design.

Dow said, “Each time we move students through these design courses, we’re giving them opportunities to build up their portfolio, showcase what design means in UC San Diego, and hopefully are starting to build bridges between the university and San Diego at large. When we bring a bunch of people and we get to see what they do, in both directions I think it’s positive. It’s building awareness for what we do.”

 

One theme of design classes at UCSD is to learn how to interact with the world, get feedback to shape design ideas, and learn what works.

On Friday, June 9th, 2017, approximately 120 students in Steven Dow’s class COGS122 Startup Studio and DSGN 100 Information Design, as well as Scott Klemmer’s COGS160 Advanced Interaction Design presented various ideas such as a company that performs oil changes in your driveway, an emporium where fans can sell and purchase fan-crafted goods, and what happens when we start to communicate with the cars next to us when we’re stuck in traffic.

For their final, students in the Startup Studio class presented Kickstarter campaigns and Design 100 students gave verbal pitches on their ideas to different jurors, such as UCSD Design Lab Director Don Norman; Hilary Nemchik, the Comm Director for Councilmember Barbara Bry, Sam Ladah, VP of Human Resources at IBM, Doug Powell, IBM Distinguished Designer, as well as other researchers, scientists, and professionals in the Design community.

Steven Dow said, “We decided to combine the two classes and invited external people because it makes it fun for the students. It provides  an occasion for students to show their work  to other people in the university and beyond.”

“For the startup class, we learn data driven design and how to use the Internet and web based advertising to understand if an idea has merit and how to potentially get funding for an idea. The other class is about information design and being able to work visually with text and images in order to communicate effectively. Students followed a human-centered design to explore  problems around mobility within San Diego,” said Dow.

Students in all three classes learned how to reach people, how to get over their own shyness, talk to people, and how to get out of the classroom. They figured out what kind of resources they could pull to shape their design.

Dow said, “Each time we move students through these design courses, we’re giving them opportunities to build up their portfolio, showcase what design means in UC San Diego, and hopefully are starting to build bridges between the university and San Diego at large. When we bring a bunch of people and we get to see what they do, in both directions I think it’s positive. It’s building awareness for what we do.”

 

One theme of design classes at UCSD is to learn how to interact with the world, get feedback to shape design ideas, and learn what works.

On Friday, June 9th, 2017, approximately 120 students in Steven Dow’s class COGS122 Startup Studio and DSGN 100 Information Design, as well as Scott Klemmer’s COGS160 Advanced Interaction Design presented various ideas such as a company that performs oil changes in your driveway, an emporium where fans can sell and purchase fan-crafted goods, and what happens when we start to communicate with the cars next to us when we’re stuck in traffic.

For their final, students in the Startup Studio class presented Kickstarter campaigns and Design 100 students gave verbal pitches on their ideas to different jurors, such as UCSD Design Lab Director Don Norman; Hilary Nemchik, the Comm Director for Councilmember Barbara Bry, Sam Ladah, VP of Human Resources at IBM, Doug Powell, IBM Distinguished Designer, as well as other researchers, scientists, and professionals in the Design community.

Steven Dow said, “We decided to combine the two classes and invited external people because it makes it fun for the students. It provides  an occasion for students to show their work  to other people in the university and beyond.”

“For the startup class, we learn data driven design and how to use the Internet and web based advertising to understand if an idea has merit and how to potentially get funding for an idea. The other class is about information design and being able to work visually with text and images in order to communicate effectively. Students followed a human-centered design to explore  problems around mobility within San Diego,” said Dow.

Students in all three classes learned how to reach people, how to get over their own shyness, talk to people, and how to get out of the classroom. They figured out what kind of resources they could pull to shape their design.

Dow said, “Each time we move students through these design courses, we’re giving them opportunities to build up their portfolio, showcase what design means in UC San Diego, and hopefully are starting to build bridges between the university and San Diego at large. When we bring a bunch of people and we get to see what they do, in both directions I think it’s positive. It’s building awareness for what we do.”

 

Read Next

Lily Irani

Lilly Irani: Seeking to the Community Behind the Wheel in Tech

Lilly Irani is currently an associate professor in the Communication department and an affiliate faculty member at The UCSD Design Lab. She’s the winner of the 2020 International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award and the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize for her book Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India. Inspired by the work of Lucy Suchman, Lilly’s research in the field of design extends beyond simply “asking what’s right and wrong and for whom,” but encompasses giving workers and communities “an actual voice in shaping the technology” and getting “political agency over the technologies that we use,” as she put it. 

Her involvement with the community is nothing short of impressive. For ten years, Lilly co-designed and maintained a website for online gig workers on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform to let workers share reviews of employers and jobs to take or avoid. Over the last two years, she has grown the software platform into a worker advocacy organization run by Mechanical Turk workers themselves, so they can also organize to improve their work conditions in ways that matter to them. 

More recently, she has worked with the United Taxi Workers San Diego to champion a program to digitize access to taxis for first and last mile transportation in San Diego. This project works towards maintaining good wages and rights for essential transport workers while working towards climate justice by using taxis to make public transit more useful to San Diegans. Design Lab members Udayan Tandon, Vera Khovanskaya, Enrique Arcilla, and Sam Muñoz work on this project. 

Design Lab & UCSD Spaces strive for Educational Equity Through Design

Who better to learn about good design than the people who will most benefit from…

Announcing The New Graduate Student Specialization In Human-centered Design

Announcing the new Graduate Student Specialization in Human-centered Design

Image courtesy of Adobe Stock

Announcing the new Graduate Student Specialization in Human-centered Design in partnership with the UC San Diego Design Lab, Cognitive Science (CogSci), Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), and Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science (HWSPH).

The Design Graduate Specialization is a set of courses graduate students can choose to take that fit into their home degree program requirements. It is analogous to receiving a minor, but at the graduate level. The courses fit into their home program as either electives or as courses that were already part of their core requirements, plus the option to take courses from other programs taking part in the specialization outside of their home program. In addition, students will be required to take at least one course that explicitly addresses and discusses issues of power, privilege, and ethical responses. The Design Graduate Specialization is created so that it can be integrated into a one or two-year Master program or a Ph.D. program.
Ucsd Extension Design Bootcamp

Design Lab and UCSD Extension Team Up for Design Bootcamp

This past July, San Diego high school students embarked on a five-day dive into anthropology and design as part of Design Bootcamp, a collaboration between the UC San Diego Design Lab and UC San Diego Extension.

The class first emerged from the demand for design workshops in San Diego coupled with UC San Diego’s interest in offering classes to pre-collegiate students. “This first Research Scholars ‘Design Bootcamp,’ if you will, is our first prototype,” says Michele Morris, Design Lab Associate Director. “The needs of the University, the expertise of the Design Lab, and the community platforms of UC San Diego’s Extension all came together seamlessly.”

Mayya Azarova, a Design Lab Anthropology PhD candidate, joined the team as the Bootcamp’s inaugural instructor.  Coupling her background in anthropology with design, the team customized an offering focused around ethnography and empathy-building.
Mai Nguyen

Announcing Appointment of Mai Thi Nguyen, Director of The Design Lab

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Mai Thi Nguyen as the next Faculty Director of the Design Lab, effective March 24, 2021.

Dr. Nguyen holds a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of California, Irvine and an M.A. in Sociology from Pennsylvania State University. She is an associate professor in the department of City & Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she directs the Center for Community Capital, a non-partisan, multi-disciplinary research center housed within the College of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Nguyen additionally directs the Academic Leadership Program at UNC-CH, providing leadership training and mentorship to cohorts of academic leaders. She also serves as Director of the Equity and Resilience Lab, whose members are dedicated to the inquiry of equity and resilience in urban planning and public policy.
The Idea Lab: A Collaboration Preparing Students For The Future

The Idea Lab: A Collaboration Preparing Students for the Future

As humans, we tend to compartmentalize ourselves as being either logical or creative thinkers. Rarely do we realize that everything we contemplate and create is better when we are both. This unification of both solutions-oriented entrepreneurship and nonlinear design thinking is the foundation of a new UC San Diego student program called the Idea Lab.

The program is a part of UC San Diego’s commitment to being an innovation catalyst and to cultivating future leaders, according to Michèle Morris, Associate Director of The Design Lab. “The Idea Lab program focuses on preparing our students to step into the 21st-century job market with the mindset and skills needed to address today’s challenges with solutions that are not necessarily directed and linear,” she explains. “Being able to navigate ambiguity, engage strategically and collaboratively with diverse stakeholders, and tactically operate in an inclusive, wholistic manner is no longer simply important, it is essential.”

The Idea Lab pilot program was launched in Fall 2020 and is itself a collaboration between two unique centers within UC San Diego’s innovation ecosystem: Office of Innovation and Commercialization (OIC)/The Basement—a student startup incubator that provides entrepreneurial and leadership programs; and The Design Lab—an interdisciplinary research and education community that prioritizes how humans are impacted by complex systems and technologies.
Back To Top