Design Challenges bring together designers, experts, and storytellers to address complex challenges and envision new scenarios and futures. They enable rapid, condensed forms of HCD (human-centered design), which focuses on addressing the needs and core issues of the people for whom a design is intended. This is achieved through insight, empathy, observation and inclusion, followed by rapid stages of ideation and simple prototypes to ensure the correct problem is addressed. Designathons are intended to serve as the starting point for hackathons; the combination produces a rapid demonstration of a product, service, or policy that fits the real needs of real people in real-world situations
Design for San Diego
D4SD.org is collaborating with Design Forward to host a large-scale human-centered design challenge around the complex civic issue of Mobility. People need to move around a city. Whether for work or play—and by car, bike, train, bus, boat, or foot— mobility significant affects the daily lives of millions. The San Diego region is culturally and economically diverse, as well as geographically dispersed, which makes it a ripe topic for exploring issues around transportation. Mobility challenges investigate concerns currently facing San Diegans, as well as take a look at future transportation systems.
City Robotics: A Design•a•Hack•a•thon for People-Centric Mobility
Recent advancements in autonomous and intelligent machines introduce an unprecedented opportunity to reimagine how people live, work, and play. Mobility—personal or shared, passenger-use or goods-moving—can be designed to prioritize the human experience, enhancing people’s abilities to lead creative, productive, gratifying and sustainable lives.
Don Norman and Colleen Emmenegger of the UC San Diego Design Lab and Kent Larson of the MIT Media Lab jointly bring together leading scientists, engineers, designers and policymakers from across the public and private sectors to address emerging challenges in urban mobility and to explore new directions for potential futures.
Pepper Canyon Mobility Hub Designathon
A collaboration between UC San Diego Design Lab and SANDAG to bring together 200+ interdisciplinary students, neighbors, and future transit users from UCSD and across San Diego to develop services, solutions, and speculations that will help transform the incoming Pepper Canyon Trolley Station on UCSD’s campus, currently under construction, into a dynamic multimodal mobility hub.
Upcoming Design Challenges
Design-A-Thon: Mindshifts on Megafires
April 7, 2022 at 4:00pm