SAP collaborates with Design Lab students

SAP collaborates with Design Lab students

SAP collaborates with Design Lab students

In December, UC San Diego Design Lab students wrapped up two major projects with SAP, a German multinational software corporation at the center of today’s business and technology revolution. With regional offices in 130 countries and over 335 customers in over 190 countries, SAP makes software that streamlines business operations and also uses live data to predict customer trends for companies around the world.  From April to December, Design Lab students worked with SAP to bring company ingenuity and UC San Diego human-centered design to higher education. Under the supervision of SAP’s VP of Design Thinking and Design Lab Designer-in-Residence Andrea Anderson and Design Lab Associate Director, Michèle Morris, the students worked with a design team at SAP to conduct user research, develop journey maps and storyboards, build prototypes and conduct user testing for two platforms: Matchmaker and Cookbook.  The project culminated in a 3-day summit attended by faculty and staff from a dozen universities around the country focused on bringing design-led innovation into university classrooms.

About Matchmaker:

Matchmaker works on a simple idea: match faculty and students to real-world projects sponsored by industry and community. Originally born out of an independent project created by Design Lab Fellow Derek Lomas, the objective of Matchmaker is to explore ways to bridge the gap between academia’s need for real world content and industry’s desire to tap into university talent and research.

The Matchmaker concept is validated by over 50 university faculty nationwide and a network of corporations through SAP’s Design@Business forum.  In general, it was well received by educators who often find it difficult to access the right project for classes and it was also praised by industry leaders that value academic input to gain insights and ideas.  To build on the success of the Design Lab student’s work with Matchmaker, SAP will be transferring the project from UC San Diego to a team at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany.

About Cookbook:

The Cookbook is an online toolkit that offers “recipes” for teaching and learning techniques in higher education. The Cookbook enables educators to bring proven methods and practices of design thinking into the classroom to facilitate student engagement with course concepts and coursework.

Each recipe in the Cookbook provides a human-centered design approach to facilitating a university course. Recipes are organized into three categories: methods, classroom tips, and courses. They are designed to aid the entire teaching process from lecturing concepts to grading project deliverables and include teaching modules, lecture materials, sample lesson plans, real world artifacts, assignments, and useful links. As a proof of concept, the Cookbook is currently being tested by a small group of 11 educators.

In general, the Cookbook concept is deemed highly valuable among educators who are new to design thinking. Seasoned educators also recognize its value as a way to learn about new methods and techniques. SAP plans to continue to evolve the Cookbook and test interaction design with the help of the Design Lab.

Congratulations to Design Lab Students:

It is part of the Design Lab’s mission to provide students with opportunities to work with industry partners like SAP and gain a firsthand look at how industry professionals apply the design-thinking process to projects. Design Lab faculty Morris and Anderson commend the work of all the Design Lab students who participated in this project including Elmer Barrera, Rachel Chen, Grant Chinn, Tori Duong, Rahul Ramath, Joel Rosenthal, and Yuka Okina. They also thank and commend the SAP project counterparts for their tireless efforts and student mentorship: Rohit Kapoor and project manager, Rana Chakrabarti.

In December, UC San Diego Design Lab students wrapped up two major projects with SAP, a German multinational software corporation at the center of today’s business and technology revolution. With regional offices in 130 countries and over 335 customers in over 190 countries, SAP makes software that streamlines business operations and also uses live data to predict customer trends for companies around the world.  From April to December, Design Lab students worked with SAP to bring company ingenuity and UC San Diego human-centered design to higher education. Under the supervision of SAP’s VP of Design Thinking and Design Lab Designer-in-Residence Andrea Anderson and Design Lab Associate Director, Michèle Morris, the students worked with a design team at SAP to conduct user research, develop journey maps and storyboards, build prototypes and conduct user testing for two platforms: Matchmaker and Cookbook.  The project culminated in a 3-day summit attended by faculty and staff from a dozen universities around the country focused on bringing design-led innovation into university classrooms.

About Matchmaker:

Matchmaker works on a simple idea: match faculty and students to real-world projects sponsored by industry and community. Originally born out of an independent project created by Design Lab Fellow Derek Lomas, the objective of Matchmaker is to explore ways to bridge the gap between academia’s need for real world content and industry’s desire to tap into university talent and research.

The Matchmaker concept is validated by over 50 university faculty nationwide and a network of corporations through SAP’s Design@Business forum.  In general, it was well received by educators who often find it difficult to access the right project for classes and it was also praised by industry leaders that value academic input to gain insights and ideas.  To build on the success of the Design Lab student’s work with Matchmaker, SAP will be transferring the project from UC San Diego to a team at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany.

About Cookbook:

The Cookbook is an online toolkit that offers “recipes” for teaching and learning techniques in higher education. The Cookbook enables educators to bring proven methods and practices of design thinking into the classroom to facilitate student engagement with course concepts and coursework.

Each recipe in the Cookbook provides a human-centered design approach to facilitating a university course. Recipes are organized into three categories: methods, classroom tips, and courses. They are designed to aid the entire teaching process from lecturing concepts to grading project deliverables and include teaching modules, lecture materials, sample lesson plans, real world artifacts, assignments, and useful links. As a proof of concept, the Cookbook is currently being tested by a small group of 11 educators.

In general, the Cookbook concept is deemed highly valuable among educators who are new to design thinking. Seasoned educators also recognize its value as a way to learn about new methods and techniques. SAP plans to continue to evolve the Cookbook and test interaction design with the help of the Design Lab.

Congratulations to Design Lab Students:

It is part of the Design Lab’s mission to provide students with opportunities to work with industry partners like SAP and gain a firsthand look at how industry professionals apply the design-thinking process to projects. Design Lab faculty Morris and Anderson commend the work of all the Design Lab students who participated in this project including Elmer Barrera, Rachel Chen, Grant Chinn, Tori Duong, Rahul Ramath, Joel Rosenthal, and Yuka Okina. They also thank and commend the SAP project counterparts for their tireless efforts and student mentorship: Rohit Kapoor and project manager, Rana Chakrabarti.

In December, UC San Diego Design Lab students wrapped up two major projects with SAP, a German multinational software corporation at the center of today’s business and technology revolution. With regional offices in 130 countries and over 335 customers in over 190 countries, SAP makes software that streamlines business operations and also uses live data to predict customer trends for companies around the world.  From April to December, Design Lab students worked with SAP to bring company ingenuity and UC San Diego human-centered design to higher education. Under the supervision of SAP’s VP of Design Thinking and Design Lab Designer-in-Residence Andrea Anderson and Design Lab Associate Director, Michèle Morris, the students worked with a design team at SAP to conduct user research, develop journey maps and storyboards, build prototypes and conduct user testing for two platforms: Matchmaker and Cookbook.  The project culminated in a 3-day summit attended by faculty and staff from a dozen universities around the country focused on bringing design-led innovation into university classrooms.

About Matchmaker:

Matchmaker works on a simple idea: match faculty and students to real-world projects sponsored by industry and community. Originally born out of an independent project created by Design Lab Fellow Derek Lomas, the objective of Matchmaker is to explore ways to bridge the gap between academia’s need for real world content and industry’s desire to tap into university talent and research.

The Matchmaker concept is validated by over 50 university faculty nationwide and a network of corporations through SAP’s Design@Business forum.  In general, it was well received by educators who often find it difficult to access the right project for classes and it was also praised by industry leaders that value academic input to gain insights and ideas.  To build on the success of the Design Lab student’s work with Matchmaker, SAP will be transferring the project from UC San Diego to a team at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany.

About Cookbook:

The Cookbook is an online toolkit that offers “recipes” for teaching and learning techniques in higher education. The Cookbook enables educators to bring proven methods and practices of design thinking into the classroom to facilitate student engagement with course concepts and coursework.

Each recipe in the Cookbook provides a human-centered design approach to facilitating a university course. Recipes are organized into three categories: methods, classroom tips, and courses. They are designed to aid the entire teaching process from lecturing concepts to grading project deliverables and include teaching modules, lecture materials, sample lesson plans, real world artifacts, assignments, and useful links. As a proof of concept, the Cookbook is currently being tested by a small group of 11 educators.

In general, the Cookbook concept is deemed highly valuable among educators who are new to design thinking. Seasoned educators also recognize its value as a way to learn about new methods and techniques. SAP plans to continue to evolve the Cookbook and test interaction design with the help of the Design Lab.

Congratulations to Design Lab Students:

It is part of the Design Lab’s mission to provide students with opportunities to work with industry partners like SAP and gain a firsthand look at how industry professionals apply the design-thinking process to projects. Design Lab faculty Morris and Anderson commend the work of all the Design Lab students who participated in this project including Elmer Barrera, Rachel Chen, Grant Chinn, Tori Duong, Rahul Ramath, Joel Rosenthal, and Yuka Okina. They also thank and commend the SAP project counterparts for their tireless efforts and student mentorship: Rohit Kapoor and project manager, Rana Chakrabarti.

Read Next

Waste Management

Waste is an enormous problem. But recycling is the wrong solution.

Part 2 of a FastCompany editorial on Recycling by Don Norman

I am proud to be one of the developers of what is today called human-centered design. That is design that always starts off understanding the needs, capabilities, and desires of people. It has four basic principles, all four of which are being violated by today’s recycling craze.

Recycling is broken. There’s little clarity about what can and can’t be recycled, and the rules change from one city to the next, and sometimes even within the same city. According to the World Bank, we produce 1.4 billion tons of waste a year worldwide, a figure that’s expected to increase to 2.4 billion tons by 2025. Waste is an enormous problem that needs to be addressed if we’re going to prevent the worst effects of climate change. But recycling is the wrong solution.

Inside a Design-a-thon: How an Innovation Funnel Impacts Wildfires in California

Groups of motivated people can solve any problem, even how to mitigate wildfires in California.…

Design Lab #wearenotwaiting Nightscout Openaps

How DIY Designers are Impacting Healthcare

#WeAreNotWaiting is the social media movement of folks in the diabetes community who have come…

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.”
Don Norman To Receive Sir Misha Black Medal

Don Norman to Receive Sir Misha Black Medal for Distinguished Services to Design Education

The Sir Misha Black Medal for Distinguished Services to Design Education for 2021 is awarded to Don Norman, Design Lab Founding Director Emeritus and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the University of California, San Diego, USA.

He will receive the Medal at a Ceremony to be held at Imperial College London, at 6pm on Tuesday, October 19th 2021, where he will deliver a short address on his philosophy on design education.

This Ceremony will be combined with the Awarding of the 2020 Medal and the 2020 Awards for Innovation in Design Education.

The Sir Misha Black Medal honours those who have given distinguished services to design education. It was the first, and is the only, international award to do so. The Awards commemorate the work and life of the designer and architect, Professor Sir Misha Black, whose pioneering work played a crucial role in the development of design in Britain.

Design and Innovation Building Grand Opening: UCSD’s front door to community collaborations

In November of 2021, the UC San Diego Design Lab unveiled their long-awaited new home in the recently constructed Design and Innovation Building, or as it is affectionately referred to, the DIB. The DIB will serve as a hub for academia, industry and community innovators to participate in design events, lectures, and other working partnerships within the design community that aim to create human-centered solutions to the complex problems facing our region and beyond. The grand opening of the DIB showcased the potential for such gatherings, boasting the presence of organizations like the UCSD Design Co., Girls Who Code, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, to name a few. Such groups showcased current and past projects to the students, professors, and industry leaders in attendance. 

The opening of the DIB marks a momentous occasion in the history of the Design Lab, as the building itself, which is a multi-use environment bringing together multiple disciplines under one roof, represents the journey and philosophy at the heart of the Design Lab’s mission–making UC San Diego a world center for design research and education that fosters a new way of thinking, which addresses the core issues with a systems point of view, and emphasizing the role of people in the complex systems of the modern world.
Back To Top