Design Lab & UCSD Spaces strive for Educational Equity Through Design

Design Lab & UCSD Spaces strive for Educational Equity Through Design

Design Lab & UCSD Spaces strive for Educational Equity Through Design

Who better to learn about good design than the people who will most benefit from it?

That was the driving idea behind the UC San Diego Design Lab’s decision to participate in the 15th annual Summer Summit, a summer residential program coordinated by SPACES (the Student Promoted Access Center for Education and Service).

Students in the program come from first generation low-income, immigrant and refugee families and represent diverse populations such as young women, Native Americans, LGBT, and students with disabilities.  The students — 72 of whom saw presentations by Design Lab researchers — also represent various San Diego schools, such as Gompers Preparatory Academy and Morse High School.

“There is a big push to make San Diego a design city,” noted Joseph Ruanto-Ramirez,  the Access Programs Advisor of SPACES.  “These students are the populations that researchers are going to be interacting with.  Some students may have never heard of design or cognitive science as a major so I wanted to expose them [to] various skills and programs they can probably play around with in the future.”

The Design Lab’s Colleen Emmenegger, for example, presented the work she and a team led by UC San Diego Professor Jim Hollan are doing on autonomous vehicles.  Emmenegger described her group’s data collection techniques before discussing how they were going to further research by using a Wizard-Of-Oz research approach (where a human performs a task that appears to be controlled by a computer) to learn how pedestrians, human drivers, and bicyclists respond to driverless cars.

Vineet Pandey, also of the Design Lab, presented on Gut Instinct, a new online learning platform that enables people to simultaneously ask and answer questions and learn about the gut microbiome.  “I thought my project was a good fit,” he said, “because coming from a computer science background, I could tell them that online education is changing and by the time they go to college or go to graduate school, they might be taking a lot of classes online.  Gut Instinct and similar tools are supposed to inspire them and tell them more about health and the microbiome to spark some curiosity in them, so that they could follow up on it and can read more into it.”

“If they’re excited about the kind of work that we’re doing, then they might be excited enough to put the effort into school and looking for financial support and getting into college,” said Emmenegger.”  I think it’s more inspirational than actually teaching design.  It’s about getting them excited so that they’re actually willing to put the effort into going further in their education.”

Added Ruanto-Ramirez: “These are actual students from those communities that might go into design and know what the community has gone through, what they’ve struggled with, and what can benefit them, so there is an actual voice in the community and framework for their individual community to survive as the city moves forward.”

Who better to learn about good design than the people who will most benefit from it?

That was the driving idea behind the UC San Diego Design Lab’s decision to participate in the 15th annual Summer Summit, a summer residential program coordinated by SPACES (the Student Promoted Access Center for Education and Service).

Students in the program come from first generation low-income, immigrant and refugee families and represent diverse populations such as young women, Native Americans, LGBT, and students with disabilities.  The students — 72 of whom saw presentations by Design Lab researchers — also represent various San Diego schools, such as Gompers Preparatory Academy and Morse High School.

“There is a big push to make San Diego a design city,” noted Joseph Ruanto-Ramirez,  the Access Programs Advisor of SPACES.  “These students are the populations that researchers are going to be interacting with.  Some students may have never heard of design or cognitive science as a major so I wanted to expose them [to] various skills and programs they can probably play around with in the future.”

The Design Lab’s Colleen Emmenegger, for example, presented the work she and a team led by UC San Diego Professor Jim Hollan are doing on autonomous vehicles.  Emmenegger described her group’s data collection techniques before discussing how they were going to further research by using a Wizard-Of-Oz research approach (where a human performs a task that appears to be controlled by a computer) to learn how pedestrians, human drivers, and bicyclists respond to driverless cars.

Vineet Pandey, also of the Design Lab, presented on Gut Instinct, a new online learning platform that enables people to simultaneously ask and answer questions and learn about the gut microbiome.  “I thought my project was a good fit,” he said, “because coming from a computer science background, I could tell them that online education is changing and by the time they go to college or go to graduate school, they might be taking a lot of classes online.  Gut Instinct and similar tools are supposed to inspire them and tell them more about health and the microbiome to spark some curiosity in them, so that they could follow up on it and can read more into it.”

“If they’re excited about the kind of work that we’re doing, then they might be excited enough to put the effort into school and looking for financial support and getting into college,” said Emmenegger.”  I think it’s more inspirational than actually teaching design.  It’s about getting them excited so that they’re actually willing to put the effort into going further in their education.”

Added Ruanto-Ramirez: “These are actual students from those communities that might go into design and know what the community has gone through, what they’ve struggled with, and what can benefit them, so there is an actual voice in the community and framework for their individual community to survive as the city moves forward.”

Who better to learn about good design than the people who will most benefit from it?

That was the driving idea behind the UC San Diego Design Lab’s decision to participate in the 15th annual Summer Summit, a summer residential program coordinated by SPACES (the Student Promoted Access Center for Education and Service).

Students in the program come from first generation low-income, immigrant and refugee families and represent diverse populations such as young women, Native Americans, LGBT, and students with disabilities.  The students — 72 of whom saw presentations by Design Lab researchers — also represent various San Diego schools, such as Gompers Preparatory Academy and Morse High School.

“There is a big push to make San Diego a design city,” noted Joseph Ruanto-Ramirez,  the Access Programs Advisor of SPACES.  “These students are the populations that researchers are going to be interacting with.  Some students may have never heard of design or cognitive science as a major so I wanted to expose them [to] various skills and programs they can probably play around with in the future.”

The Design Lab’s Colleen Emmenegger, for example, presented the work she and a team led by UC San Diego Professor Jim Hollan are doing on autonomous vehicles.  Emmenegger described her group’s data collection techniques before discussing how they were going to further research by using a Wizard-Of-Oz research approach (where a human performs a task that appears to be controlled by a computer) to learn how pedestrians, human drivers, and bicyclists respond to driverless cars.

Vineet Pandey, also of the Design Lab, presented on Gut Instinct, a new online learning platform that enables people to simultaneously ask and answer questions and learn about the gut microbiome.  “I thought my project was a good fit,” he said, “because coming from a computer science background, I could tell them that online education is changing and by the time they go to college or go to graduate school, they might be taking a lot of classes online.  Gut Instinct and similar tools are supposed to inspire them and tell them more about health and the microbiome to spark some curiosity in them, so that they could follow up on it and can read more into it.”

“If they’re excited about the kind of work that we’re doing, then they might be excited enough to put the effort into school and looking for financial support and getting into college,” said Emmenegger.”  I think it’s more inspirational than actually teaching design.  It’s about getting them excited so that they’re actually willing to put the effort into going further in their education.”

Added Ruanto-Ramirez: “These are actual students from those communities that might go into design and know what the community has gone through, what they’ve struggled with, and what can benefit them, so there is an actual voice in the community and framework for their individual community to survive as the city moves forward.”

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Report: Military Remains Economic Bright Spot In San Diego

Report: Military remains economic bright spot in San Diego

Design Lab member Michael Meyer discusses San Diego's defense economy during Covid with ABC 10 News San Diego.

The coronavirus pandemic appears to have been no match for San Diego's defense economy, which a new report says keeps on growing.

The San Diego Military Advisory Council study says from the fiscal year 2020 to 2021, direct defense spending was $35.3 billion dollars, a 5.3 percent annual gain. Jobs grew 2 percent to nearly 349,112. In all, it made for a $55.2 billion dollar gross regional product.

"That means continued stability and economic prosperity for San Diego, buffered by, or provided by the military economy presence," said Michael Meyer, a professor at UC San Diego's Rady School of Management, which researched the report.

The study points out that military spending impacts more than the people employed by the federal government or serving on base or active duty. Instead, there's a multiplier effect in San Diego, with nearly 190,000 San Diegans employed by private companies contracting with the defense department -- such as in programming or shipbuilding.

"Retraining for electronics, computers, aviation, the engineering fields, the technical financial fields. That's all valuable and an effective way of getting into the military economy," Meyer said.

The Worst F&#%ing Words Ever

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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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San Diego council committee unanimously approves ordinances targeting surveillance technology

Photo courtesy of John Gibbins/The San Diego Union-Tribune

A City Council committee on Wednesday unanimously approved two proposed ordinances geared at governing surveillance technologies in the city, an action sparked by sustained pushback from activists and others who were surprised and upset last year when it was revealed that San Diego had quietly installed cameras on streetlights throughout the city.

Lilly Irani, an associate professor at UC San Diego (and Design Lab faculty) who specializes in the ethics of technology, called the vote “a win for better governance in the long term.”

Irani helped draft the ordinances and assisted the organized opposition dubbed the TRUST San Diego coalition, which focuses on responsible surveillance in the region. The coalition was born out of concerns about one specific technology — so-called smart streetlights — and ultimately landed a seat at the table to draft the proposals.

“Without Councilmember Monica Montgomery championing this... there would be no table,” Irani said.
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Designer in Residence & Social Psychologist Mikael Wahlström Leads Projects to Explore Autonomous Ships

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