Skip to content

Design Forward Panel Discussion: Focusing on 2017

Design Forward Panel Discussion: Focusing on 2017

Design Forward Panel Discussion: Focusing on 2017

UC San Diego’s Design Lab recently teamed up with Axure Software Solutions, Inc. to cosponsor a panel discussion on the value of design as an economic and civic driver. Don Norman, Director of the UC San Diego Design Lab, moderated the panel, which included several highly-accomplished San Diego business, civic and design leaders. The panelists included San Diego City Councilmember Barbara Bry, Brojure.com Chief Creative Officer Victor Nacif, Digital Telepathy Founder Chuck Longanecker and Port of San Diego Director of Enterprise Strategy and Innovation John Bandringa.

The event was hosted by the Design Forward Alliance (DFA), a nonprofit organization recently created to unify and promote the value of professional design and design thinking for better outcomes in business, education and government. The event and panel served as the first in a series of events leading up to Design Forward 2017. While last year’s Design Forward summit was organized by the Design Lab, the DFA will run the next Design Forward on October 26 and 27 in 2017 with plans to help San Diego gain international recognition by becoming the official “Design Capital of the World” by 2022. The World Design Capital (WDC) is a city promotion project by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design to recognize and award accomplishments made by cities around the world in the field of design. Hosting fee for 2018 is listed at about $450,000 USD.

“The Design Forward Alliance was born based on the conversations that started from the Design Lab, Design Forward 2016 and the need to create an advocacy group because of all the different groups that actively participate in design in their own ways,” said Scott Robinson, DFA Board President and Chair. “Whether you’re designing products, services, experiences or brands, all of these things are different forms of design and we think that the Alliance can help unify our message. We’re here as an alliance to advocate on behalf of you… designers.”

In 2016, Design Forward focused on the power of human-centered design and its impact across industry, government and the design community at large. The 2016 event included design luminaries Robert Schwartz, General Manager of Global Design, GE Healthcare; Kurt Walecki, Vice President of Design, Intuit; and Sam Yen, Chief Design Officer, SAP as speakers and distinguished guests. Ahead of the panel discussion, Robinson announced that Design Forward 2017 will also have a brilliant roster of distinguished speakers, but it will also involve a series of design challenges throughout the year, pitting San Diego’s freshest design talent against some of the community’s most practical (and unsolved) design issues.

For more information about this year’s Design Forward event, please visit http://designforwardsd.com/.

UC San Diego’s Design Lab recently teamed up with Axure Software Solutions, Inc. to cosponsor a panel discussion on the value of design as an economic and civic driver. Don Norman, Director of the UC San Diego Design Lab, moderated the panel, which included several highly-accomplished San Diego business, civic and design leaders. The panelists included San Diego City Councilmember Barbara Bry, Brojure.com Chief Creative Officer Victor Nacif, Digital Telepathy Founder Chuck Longanecker and Port of San Diego Director of Enterprise Strategy and Innovation John Bandringa.

The event was hosted by the Design Forward Alliance (DFA), a nonprofit organization recently created to unify and promote the value of professional design and design thinking for better outcomes in business, education and government. The event and panel served as the first in a series of events leading up to Design Forward 2017. While last year’s Design Forward summit was organized by the Design Lab, the DFA will run the next Design Forward on October 26 and 27 in 2017 with plans to help San Diego gain international recognition by becoming the official “Design Capital of the World” by 2022. The World Design Capital (WDC) is a city promotion project by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design to recognize and award accomplishments made by cities around the world in the field of design. Hosting fee for 2018 is listed at about $450,000 USD.

“The Design Forward Alliance was born based on the conversations that started from the Design Lab, Design Forward 2016 and the need to create an advocacy group because of all the different groups that actively participate in design in their own ways,” said Scott Robinson, DFA Board President and Chair. “Whether you’re designing products, services, experiences or brands, all of these things are different forms of design and we think that the Alliance can help unify our message. We’re here as an alliance to advocate on behalf of you… designers.”

In 2016, Design Forward focused on the power of human-centered design and its impact across industry, government and the design community at large. The 2016 event included design luminaries Robert Schwartz, General Manager of Global Design, GE Healthcare; Kurt Walecki, Vice President of Design, Intuit; and Sam Yen, Chief Design Officer, SAP as speakers and distinguished guests. Ahead of the panel discussion, Robinson announced that Design Forward 2017 will also have a brilliant roster of distinguished speakers, but it will also involve a series of design challenges throughout the year, pitting San Diego’s freshest design talent against some of the community’s most practical (and unsolved) design issues.

For more information about this year’s Design Forward event, please visit http://designforwardsd.com/.

UC San Diego’s Design Lab recently teamed up with Axure Software Solutions, Inc. to cosponsor a panel discussion on the value of design as an economic and civic driver. Don Norman, Director of the UC San Diego Design Lab, moderated the panel, which included several highly-accomplished San Diego business, civic and design leaders. The panelists included San Diego City Councilmember Barbara Bry, Brojure.com Chief Creative Officer Victor Nacif, Digital Telepathy Founder Chuck Longanecker and Port of San Diego Director of Enterprise Strategy and Innovation John Bandringa.

The event was hosted by the Design Forward Alliance (DFA), a nonprofit organization recently created to unify and promote the value of professional design and design thinking for better outcomes in business, education and government. The event and panel served as the first in a series of events leading up to Design Forward 2017. While last year’s Design Forward summit was organized by the Design Lab, the DFA will run the next Design Forward on October 26 and 27 in 2017 with plans to help San Diego gain international recognition by becoming the official “Design Capital of the World” by 2022. The World Design Capital (WDC) is a city promotion project by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design to recognize and award accomplishments made by cities around the world in the field of design. Hosting fee for 2018 is listed at about $450,000 USD.

“The Design Forward Alliance was born based on the conversations that started from the Design Lab, Design Forward 2016 and the need to create an advocacy group because of all the different groups that actively participate in design in their own ways,” said Scott Robinson, DFA Board President and Chair. “Whether you’re designing products, services, experiences or brands, all of these things are different forms of design and we think that the Alliance can help unify our message. We’re here as an alliance to advocate on behalf of you… designers.”

In 2016, Design Forward focused on the power of human-centered design and its impact across industry, government and the design community at large. The 2016 event included design luminaries Robert Schwartz, General Manager of Global Design, GE Healthcare; Kurt Walecki, Vice President of Design, Intuit; and Sam Yen, Chief Design Officer, SAP as speakers and distinguished guests. Ahead of the panel discussion, Robinson announced that Design Forward 2017 will also have a brilliant roster of distinguished speakers, but it will also involve a series of design challenges throughout the year, pitting San Diego’s freshest design talent against some of the community’s most practical (and unsolved) design issues.

For more information about this year’s Design Forward event, please visit http://designforwardsd.com/.

Read Next

Ucsd Design Lab Don Norman

Don Norman’s Favorite Book, Famous UC writers on their favorite books

Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change by Victor Papanek
“The first sentence in this book is ‘There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them.’ I read this book in the 1980s, and it had a huge impact..."
Design Lab Design@large Wednesday Philip Guo

Design at Large Tackles Human-Centered Computational Tools

WHAT IS DESIGN@LARGE? A new wave of societal challenges, cultural values, and technological advancements is…

Design Lab Uc San Diego Ailie Fraser Tricia Ngoon

CHI 2018 Conference Spotlights Design Lab Work

This year’s ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — more commonly known…

Sd Design Trek Ucsd

Design Trek Brings San Diego Design Community Together

This past March, SD Design Trek took students and early-UX career professionals on a three-day showcase of design companies in San Diego to gain a firsthand look at what the local design community has to offer. The March 4 kickoff and showcase took place just down the hall from the Design Lab, in Atkinson Hall’s Auditorium. 

The event commenced with the words of keynote speaker, Amish Desai, who graduated from UCSD in 2003 with a Cognitive Science HCI degree and currently serves as the VP of Experiences at Moonshot. “[The talk] was about being design minded, in terms of design being much more than a craft and is actually a driver for business growth,” he says. “The idea is to instill some lessons I learned in the last 17 years as to why the importance of design is not just beautiful things but is also about doing experiments and making, driving cultural changes, creating experiences, analytics, and having business rigor.”
Design@Large UCSD Design Lab

Design@Large Spring 2022


For the first time in the nearly 10-year history of the Design@Large speaker series the UC San Diego Design Lab is partnering with California 100, an initiative focused on identifying and uplifting transformative ideas, people, and projects through research and engagement that accelerate progress towards a shared vision of California’s future over the next century.

**This will be a hybrid event (in-person and remote). Capacity is limited. Please register ahead of time.

TOPICS
- 4/13, Alternative Transportation Futures
- 4/20, Climate Risk Reduction and Technology
- 4/27, Housing Justice and Urban Design
- 5/11, Transborder Regions and Immigrant Integration
- 5/18, Future Prospects in Health Equity and Tech Innovation
- 5/25, The Future of Work and Higher Education

There will be no Design@Large classes on 04/06, 05/04 or 06/01.
There are no speakers on 03/30, but class will still take place for students.
J. Tanner Cusick

J. Tanner Cusick joins the Design Lab as a Designer-in-Residence

When J. Tanner Cusick took a class called Social Architectures, he never expected that the trajectory of his career would change forever. While pursuing his MFA at UC San Diego, Cusick explains that it was in this class that he and his classmates designed “interventions” around campus. "Basically, we would change the environment and see how it influenced human behavior,” says Cusick. “I did a piece under Geisel that challenged people to use the space differently by creating a game of human Candy Land. I colored all the blocks beneath the library, and everyone came in costumes.” He reflects that what he didn’t realize at the time was that they were really practicing experience design.

It was the combination of this event and Cusick’s experience as a teaching assistant (TA) that taught him what User Experience (UX) was. “While I was a TA, I taught a digital art class and students were assigned The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman. I'd never read the book before and I was amazed by it," said Cusick. It was the ideas in the book that influenced Cusick to shift the context of his work. “I ended up teaching myself about the discipline and doing a lot of UX design and content design. And that's what I have been doing since then."
Back To Top