History
The Design Lab at UC San Diego was co-founded in 2014 by Don Norman, Jim Hollan, and Scott Klemmer. Ten years after its inception, and under the leadership of Mai Nguyen, the Design Lab continues to grow as a cross-campus resource for design research, education, and practice and design leader in the San Diego-Tijuana megaregion.
Design @ UC San Diego
UC San Diego has long been a pioneer in user experience (UX) design, dating back to Professor Don Norman’s 1988 book The Design of Everyday Things (originally released as The Psychology of Everyday Things). The book centers on the concept of intuitive design: when objects seem to malfunction, people often blame themselves; however, better design is needed to provide users with intuitive guidance through the fundamentals of affordances, visibility, structure simplicity, and designing for error. Norman is also credited with popularizing the term “user-centered design,” which he had previously referred to as “user-centered system design” in 1986 (U.C.S.D. to align with the acronym for UC San Diego, where he taught until he joined Apple Computer in the 1990s).
Beginnings in Cognitive Science
In 1987, Norman, along with other founding faculty Jeff Elman and Jean Mandler, established the first department of cognitive science at UC San Diego. The department consists of philosophers, linguists, psychologists, computer scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and neuroscientists to investigate the nature of human intelligence, learning, and adaptation. Indeed, a key strength of UC San Diego within the field of design is the connection to and historical leadership in cognitive science, and the deep understanding of what it means to be human.
Design Lab Founding
Norman returned to UC San Diego in 2014 to be the founding director of the Design Lab. Over the past decade since its inception, the Lab has become recognized as a leader in interdisciplinary design work, across a range of individual to societal issues, such as large-scale education, automation, healthcare, visualization of complex phenomena, human-computer interaction, the future of work, public health, and ethical concerns of ever-increasing importance. The Design Lab emphasizes design as a way of thinking, addressing core issues, taking a systems perspective, and focusing on the role of people in complex systems. Beginning in 2016, the Design Lab spearheaded a campus-wide undergraduate minor in design—to teach the iterative cycle of field observation, problem finding, and evaluating alternative solutions and tradeoffs through prototyping and testing—available to all students on campus. The minor has since grown to be the 12th largest of the university’s 113 approved and active minors and has graduated 728 students since its establishment in 2017 through fall 2023. In 2019, the Design Lab also created a graduate specialization in Design (similar to a minor at the graduate level) that exposes master’s and Ph.D. students to a breadth of design approaches and to training in power, privilege, and ethical responses.
Today
In 2021, the Design Lab moved from its original space in Atkinson Hall to the third floor of the new Design and Innovation Building, next door to the UC San Diego Central Campus blue line trolley stop. The Lab also occupies space in the UC San Diego Park & Market Building in Downtown San Diego just a short walk from a blue line trolley stop. With these two strategic locations, the lab is positioned to allow collaborations with industry and civic partners.
The Design Lab has grown from a handful of faculty to more than 23 voting faculty members and 27 affiliated faculty. In fall 2024, we are welcoming 3 new faculty members:
