The Design Lab is launching the Global Scholars program this spring quarter, an exciting new initiative for graduate-student learning.

Known for creating human-centered design solutions that focus heavily on users’ needs and behaviors, the Design Lab, located within the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego, is home to an impressive team of interdisciplinary designers, engineers, technologists, scientists and business leaders who work on large-scale complex socio-technical challenges regionally and beyond.

I was just in Germany, in Herzogenaurach to be precise, at Adidas headquarters. (Hardly anyone knows where Herzogenaurach is — it’s a 20 minute taxi from Nuremberg.) I was at a conference organized by my old friend (and co-author) Roberto Verganti, from the business school at Politecnico di Milano. Years ago, he and I had a debate in Milan about the value of Human-Centered Design (HCD) and the way it is normally practiced. To the audience’s great surprise, we both agreed:

1. HCD is a powerful tool for improving existing products. That is, it is a powerful tool for incremental innovation.
2. HCD, by its very nature (hill-climbing plus a kind of design by committee), is a really bad tool for radical innovation.

Design Lab participants: Faculty member Eliah Aronoff-Spencer and Post-Doc Melanie McComsey

The Federal Communications Commission's Connect2Health Task Force and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health convened a groundbreaking meeting at FCC headquarters in Washington, DC, with senior thought leaders from both the public and private sectors and across the country. The broad expertise included representatives from government, academia, industry, healthcare systems, public health, biotechnology, design and innovation, and telecommunications. The day-long meeting was designed to usher in the next phase of the L.A.U.N.C.H. initiative by gathering information and individual expert input related to the initiative's efforts to date.