UCSD Design Lab & the National Cancer Institute organize workshop on Human Systems Integration

On October 20 and 21, the Design Lab jointly organized a workshop with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at their headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland. The workshop focused on Human Systems Integration (HSI), which is a rapidly growing field involving the analysis, design and assessment of human interactions with complex sociotechnical systems and products (e.g., aircraft, spacecraft, mobile devices, web sites). NCI is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is one of 11 agencies that comprise the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

In Bethesda, the Design Lab had the unique opportunity to help the Healthcare Delivery Research Program (HDRP) at NCI plan for a new set extramural funding opportunities associated with HSI in healthcare. Prior to the meeting, the Design Lab held frequent conference calls with NCI over a period of months to select the participants for the workshop and devise a schedule. In total, the Design Lab brought together approximately 20 cancer researchers, healthcare delivery experts and HSI designers from UC San Diego, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, the University of Pittsburgh, University of Texas, University of Maryland, University of Toronto, Georgia Institute of Technology, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and other institutions including attendees from the Federal Communications Commission and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The workshop generated considerable interest among health policy makers in Washington, D.C. and follow-up efforts are already underway. In fact, the Design Lab will host a Spring 2017 meeting of West Coast stakeholders in the HSI and cancer research fields.

All photos provided by Ben Shneiderman

Design for older people sucks. Here are four ways to fix it

Digital Arts editorial with Stefan Sagmeister and Design Lab Director Don Norman on designing for sixty-somethings.

Beginning in May, Alive Ventures launched a series of ongoing panels titled “Old People are Cool, Design for Them Sucks”, aiming to open up a discussion with the design community on how to better design for older adults. John Zapolski, founder of Alive Ventures, and design thought leader Ayse Birsel of Birsel + Seck, hosted the series of discussions, with guests including design luminaries such as Stefan Sagmeister and Don Norman.

“When I would visit him in retirement homes, I would see people who needed walkers and wouldn’t use them because it was a stigma,” said Norman. “They were so ugly and it sort of shouts out to the world, ‘Hey I’m old and crippled and therefore probably feeble minded as well,’ right? Well no, it’s wrong. And so I noticed that, but I didn’t pay much attention until I myself reached my eighties and started looking at my friends and other things and realised that, yes, people shunned a lot of things that are being made to help them because they don’t like to admit publicly they have problems.” - Don Norman

Community-Based, Human-Centered Design

Don Norman, Design Lab Director & Eli Spencer, Design Lab Faculty

We propose a radical change in design from experts designing for people to people designing for themselves. In the traditional approach, experts study, design, and implement solutions for the people of the world. Instead, we propose that we leverage the creativity within the communities of the world to solve their own problems: This is community-driven design, taking full advantage of the fact that it is the people in communities who best understand their problems and the impediments and affordances that impede and support change. Experts become facilitators, by mentoring and providing tools, toolkits, workshops, and support.

The principles of human-centered design have proven to be effective and productive. However, its approach is generally used in situations where professionals determine the needs of the target populations and then develop products and procedures to address the needs. This is Top-Down design: starting with higher-level conceptualizations and then refining the ideas and concepts to specific instances of products or services. This works well for mass produced items which only allows limited specialization for individual needs and requirements.

UX Design Tips from Experience Designer Emilia Pucci | Design Chats

Emilia Pucci, Design Lab Designer-in-Residence, shares some useful tips on User Experience Research and Prototyping.

Design Chats is a video series where we sit down with design practitioners to answer questions about how they utilize human-centered design.

View our Design Chats playlist on the Design Lab YouTube Channel

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.