ucsd design lab mikael Walhström

Designer in Residence & Social Psychologist Mikael Wahlström Leads Projects to Explore Autonomous Ships

Designer in Residence & Social Psychologist Mikael Wahlström Leads Projects to Explore Autonomous Ships

Designer in Residence & Social Psychologist Mikael Wahlström Leads Projects to Explore Autonomous Ships

The Design Lab welcomed Mikael Wahlström as a Designer in Residence this past fall. Wahlström hails from Finland where he received his PhD in social psychology from the University of Helsinki. While pursuing his doctorate, he worked at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) where he studied human-computer interaction. He currently works on complex systems including robotics and plants research at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, a leading international research and technology company.

Wahlström was drawn to working at The Design Lab given that UC San Diego is a leading university for his interests in distributed cognition and context-focused research.  While at The Design Lab, Wahlström led an ongoing project to explore autonomous ships, a research initiative started during his studies at HIIT. The project examines the “ship-bridge” concept and specifically how user research can be leveraged to imagine futuristic bridges. Through speaking with expert navigators, Wahlström identified the needs and challenges of real-life navigation. One of the project’s main objectives is to analyze the communication and interaction between ships as unified entities. After presenting an article written about his work, Wahlström is excited for how the project will continue to progress.

Previously, Wahlström worked within the field of robotics surgery to understand how we navigate within our own bodies. Through task analysis, he studied a concept known as auto-confrontation, which describes explaining one’s own activities through different representations of media.

As he reflects on his work, Wahlström expresses gratitude for having had the opportunity to learn about how distributed cognition can be applied on a more profound level.

It’s been a very positive experience. I received good feedback from Don [Norman] on the autonomous ship project. I’ve also enjoyed meeting everyone and learning about their work to identify possibilities for future studies and collaborations.

The Design Lab welcomed Mikael Wahlström as a Designer in Residence this past fall. Wahlström hails from Finland where he received his PhD in social psychology from the University of Helsinki. While pursuing his doctorate, he worked at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) where he studied human-computer interaction. He currently works on complex systems including robotics and plants research at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, a leading international research and technology company.

Wahlström was drawn to working at The Design Lab given that UC San Diego is a leading university for his interests in distributed cognition and context-focused research.  While at The Design Lab, Wahlström led an ongoing project to explore autonomous ships, a research initiative started during his studies at HIIT. The project examines the “ship-bridge” concept and specifically how user research can be leveraged to imagine futuristic bridges. Through speaking with expert navigators, Wahlström identified the needs and challenges of real-life navigation. One of the project’s main objectives is to analyze the communication and interaction between ships as unified entities. After presenting an article written about his work, Wahlström is excited for how the project will continue to progress.

Previously, Wahlström worked within the field of robotics surgery to understand how we navigate within our own bodies. Through task analysis, he studied a concept known as auto-confrontation, which describes explaining one’s own activities through different representations of media.

As he reflects on his work, Wahlström expresses gratitude for having had the opportunity to learn about how distributed cognition can be applied on a more profound level.

It’s been a very positive experience. I received good feedback from Don [Norman] on the autonomous ship project. I’ve also enjoyed meeting everyone and learning about their work to identify possibilities for future studies and collaborations.

The Design Lab welcomed Mikael Wahlström as a Designer in Residence this past fall. Wahlström hails from Finland where he received his PhD in social psychology from the University of Helsinki. While pursuing his doctorate, he worked at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) where he studied human-computer interaction. He currently works on complex systems including robotics and plants research at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, a leading international research and technology company.

Wahlström was drawn to working at The Design Lab given that UC San Diego is a leading university for his interests in distributed cognition and context-focused research.  While at The Design Lab, Wahlström led an ongoing project to explore autonomous ships, a research initiative started during his studies at HIIT. The project examines the “ship-bridge” concept and specifically how user research can be leveraged to imagine futuristic bridges. Through speaking with expert navigators, Wahlström identified the needs and challenges of real-life navigation. One of the project’s main objectives is to analyze the communication and interaction between ships as unified entities. After presenting an article written about his work, Wahlström is excited for how the project will continue to progress.

Previously, Wahlström worked within the field of robotics surgery to understand how we navigate within our own bodies. Through task analysis, he studied a concept known as auto-confrontation, which describes explaining one’s own activities through different representations of media.

As he reflects on his work, Wahlström expresses gratitude for having had the opportunity to learn about how distributed cognition can be applied on a more profound level.

It’s been a very positive experience. I received good feedback from Don [Norman] on the autonomous ship project. I’ve also enjoyed meeting everyone and learning about their work to identify possibilities for future studies and collaborations.

Read Next

Be on your best behavior: San Diego is being judged this week

By Phillip Molnar, San Diego Union Tribune

San Diego and Tijuana are throwing a party for just one man this week, and you’ve probably never heard his name.

Montreal native Bertrand Derome, managing director of the World Design Organization, is getting the red carpet treatment across two nations as the cities vie for the title of World Design Capital.

The award means a global spotlight on the region and lots of free advertising. Selected every two years, the Montreal-based World Design Organization picks a different city as its “capital.” Some previous winners have been Seoul, Helsinki, Cape Town and Mexico City. San Diego and Tijuana decided to apply together as a binational region.

The festivities started Sunday night with a jazz concert, light show and chic party for Derome at the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park. There were only about 200 people at the event for a venue that can hold 3,500. The $85 million shell on the San Diego Bay opened in August.

“It’s a great city and an amazing venue. I have to say I’m pretty impressed by the design communities that came together,” Derome said at the event.

The UC San Diego Design Lab

This is an exciting time for the field of design. The technologies that the research communities have worked on for the past 25 years have leapt off the pages of academic journals and into the daily lives of billions. What used to be our imagination is now our reality. These have enabled an extremely wide range of innovation in multiple arenas: healthcare and medicine, business, social interaction, entertainment.

But technology only enables: a practical application requires more than the underlying technology. If we build things for people, then knowledge of both people and technology is required. If we are to make them pleasurable, then the creativity and craft skills of artists and traditionally trained industrial and graphic designers are required. If they are to be understandable, then social scientists are required, including experts in writing and exposition. If they are to thrive in the world of business, then schools of management are required. Design aspires to combine these very different vertical threads of knowledge. Design is an all encompassing field that integrates together business and engineering, the social sciences and the arts.

The Design Lab’s Srishti Palani Wins Google’s PhD Fellowship

In continuing excellence among UC San Diego Design Lab researchers, Srishti Palani, a PhD student and Department of Cognitive Science at the Design Lab, was named a 2021 Google PhD Fellow for her work in Human Computer Interaction focused on improving web search and intelligent guidance during creative work. The fellowship is open to researchers in computer science and related fields. Palani was one of 60 students throughout the world to be selected for a Google Fellowship–an award that supports outstanding and promising PhD candidates of all backgrounds who seek to influence the future of technology by providing funding, mentorship, collaboration and internship opportunities.

Palani’s research takes an interdisciplinary approach involving cognitive, computer, and learning sciences to better web search and intelligent scaffolding of complex creative information work. “We use web search almost every day to search things, and it affects how we learn and work and create and collaborate. I’m really passionate about researching this area and building novel computational techniques that integrate web search into people's larger work context. Google, of course, has the most state-of-the-art web search technology that has existed in my lifetime, so I’ve always wanted to collaborate with the researchers, software engineers, and data scientists there to understand how we can get a better web search when people want to search for more complex information needs.”
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 Sheng-feng Qin

Spotlight on Sheng-feng Qin: His take on Design from China to the UK and US

Sheng-feng Qin is a professor at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle in the School…

The Worst F&#%ing Words Ever

Triton Magazine

Benjamin Bergen is a professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego and director of the Language and Cognition Lab, where he studies how our minds compute meaning and how talking interferes with safe driving—among many other things that don’t need to be bleeped. His latest book is What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves. He calls it “a book-length love letter to profanity.” You’ve been warned.
Back To Top