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The Idea Lab: A Collaboration Preparing Students for the Future

The Idea Lab: A Collaboration Preparing Students for the Future

As humans, we tend to compartmentalize ourselves as being either logical or creative thinkers. Rarely do we realize that everything we contemplate and create is better when we are both. This unification of both solutions-oriented entrepreneurship and nonlinear design thinking is the foundation of a new UC San Diego student program called the Idea Lab.

The program is a part of UC San Diego’s commitment to being an innovation catalyst and to cultivating future leaders, according to Michèle Morris, Associate Director of The Design Lab. “The Idea Lab program focuses on preparing our students to step into the 21st-century job market with the mindset and skills needed to address today’s challenges with solutions that are not necessarily directed and linear,” she explains. “Being able to navigate ambiguity, engage strategically and collaboratively with diverse stakeholders, and tactically operate in an inclusive, wholistic manner is no longer simply important, it is essential.”

The Idea Lab pilot program was launched in Fall 2020 and is itself a collaboration between two unique centers within UC San Diego’s innovation ecosystem: Office of Innovation and Commercialization (OIC)/The Basement—a student startup incubator that provides entrepreneurial and leadership programs; and The Design Lab—an interdisciplinary research and education community that prioritizes how humans are impacted by complex systems and technologies.
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ucsd designathon

Designathon Ideas Imagine New Trolley Stop as a Vibrant Destination

Autonomous scooters, interactive art, food shuttles, and cable cars are just a few of the creative ideas that emerged from a two-day public designathon event that will join the efforts to transform UC San Diego from a closed campus primarily designed for work and school to destination, inviting people to come, stay and explore what the  campus has to offer. “Anybody who comes to San Diego should have this campus as a destination in addition to Balboa Park or the Gaslamp district,” said UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla in a San Diego Union Tribune article.
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Trolley Stops Designathon UCSD Design Lab

Designathon Seeks to Reimagine Trolley Stops

On April 6+7, 2019, on UC San Diego campus Warren Mall, over 200+ students, neighbors, designers, technologists, and media-makers will come together for the Pepper Canyon Mobility Hub Designathon, an event developing proposals that will support the transformation Pepper Canyon Trolley Station at UCSD campus, currently under construction, into a dynamic, multimodal mobility hub. The event is produced through a partnership between The UC San Diego Design Lab, SANDAG, UC San Diego Campus Planning, the UC San Diego Young Planners’ Society, Sixth College Culture, Art, Technology program, and UC San Diego Urban Planning Program.
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uc san diego design lab

Design Lab and MIT Media Lab Join Forces to Organize a Design·a·Hack·a·thon

No hackathon would be complete without cardboard prototypes strewn about the room, laptop screens glowing with code, and the edgy excitement of teams working against the clock. Hackathons concentrate the efforts of talented, highly motivated participants eager to develop new technologies. There is, however, often one key element missing from this picture: the people for whom these technologies might serve. This inspired The Design Lab to ask, “How might we make designing for people the central element of a hackathon?” Answer: we needed to make “design” a central component. Designathons and Design Swarms exist, but they didn’t quite fit our need to combine both designing and doing (hacking) in a very short, highly condensed manner. Eventually we ended up with Design·a·Hack·a·thon.
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Design Lab Launches City-Wide Civic Design Challenge

Calling all entrepreneurs, designers, engineers and problem solvers!   Register for the Kickoff and Information Session on Sept 21 Register for the 2017 D4SD Civic Design Challenge on Sept 22-23 In a combined effort to solve complex city problems through human-centered design…

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