Design Lab statement on protests, violence following George Floyd’s death

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Designathon

Designing UC San Diego’s New Trolley Stop | Pepper Canyon Mobility Hub Designathon Video

Watch the 14-minute Pepper Canyon Mobility Hub Designathon Video

Over 250 UC San Diego students, neighbors, and future transit users gathered on April 6-7, 2019 for the first-ever Designathon: an intensive, immersive event where interdisciplinary teams design solutions for real-world challenges. This Designathon focused on the Pepper Canyon Station, which aspires to be an ecologically, socially, and technologically friendly mobility hub on the UCSD campus, set to open in 2020.

Executive Producer: Michele Morris
Producers & Directors: Stephanie Sherman, Ash Eliza Smith, Ian Strelsky
Camera Operators: Clint Evangelista, Qiyi Fan, Alice Medrano, Steven Phung, Yimeng Sun
Editors: Steven Phung, Yimeng Sun
Story Consultant: Griffin Middelson
Animators: Weilun Yao, Lilly Gee
Sound Designers: Steven Phung
Music Composers: Remy Rose, Riain Hager, Forrest Reid
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Design Lab Ucsd Elderly

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
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Anti-racism Ucsd Design Lab

Studio Sessions – Power, Privilege, and Ethical Responses: Anti-Racism

In these times of critical conversations about civic and social justice, equity and inclusion, the Design Lab is sponsoring a series on Power, Privilege, and Ethical Responses (PPER). Our current focus is on anti-racism, specifically as it pertains to our black communities.

Part of this initiative is a series of Studio Sessions, designed to share tools that address the experiences of our black community, in hopes of bridging existing gaps between the historical precedent and current calls to action. These interactive sessions are meant to be a dialogue nurturing communication and self-reflection to build empathy and ethical responsibility amongst participants.

By utilizing Human Centered Design we can move from current structures of racism to a more inclusive system for all. Expert speakers address issues affecting our Black community ranging from the structures of Anti-blackness and White Fragility to Voter Suppression, Education, the School to Prison Pipeline, Environmental Racism, and much more. By bringing awareness to these issues in real-time, we can feel safe and move into reinforcing behaviors of oneness in real-time using the Design process and civic engagement elements of the training.
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Design Education Don Norman

The Future of Design Education

Don Norman, Design Lab Director, reports on "The Future of Design Education"

Many of you know that for a long time I have been partnering with IBM Design and The World Design Organization to rethink the curriculum for design.  This is a progress report.

The History

It all started in March 2014 when Scott Klemmer and I wrote a paper called "State of Design: How Design Education Must Change" published in LinkedIn. (Why LinkedIn? Because of the wide, diverse readership: This paper has been read by 50,167 people, with 93 comments.) https://bit.ly/31Qqv1W

Design Lab

When Scott, Jim Hollan, and I started the Design Lab, we knew what we did NOT wish to do: build a traditional design education. Our training was rich and varied, and we wanted our students to have a similarly broad education. We wanted to do things that made a real difference in the world. After all, our origin was from Cognitive Science and computers -- Human Behavior and Technology, Design is an applied field that requires multi-disciplinary approaches to important, difficult issues.
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Human-centered Design

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.
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