Global Leadership

Within ten years of its founding, the lab is already incubating several globally significant projects.

World Design Capital Bid 

The Design Lab was one of the leading architects bidding for San Diego and Tijuana to be named as World Design Capital 2024. Every two years, the World Design Organization recognizes a city as the World Design Capital for its effective use of design to drive economic, social, cultural, and environmental development. When–after nearly ten years of planning and work–San Diego and Tijuana were jointly awarded the designation for 2024, it was the first time binational cities were awarded a joint designation. 

Over the course of the year, the output of this massive undertaking, which the Design Lab heavily support with thought leadership, logistics, and programming power, included seven signature international events and programming that encompassed six focus areas:

• Arts and Culture
• Climate and Sustainability
• Youth and Education
• Health and Wellbeing
• Planning and Placemaking
• Science and Technology

The year 2024 strengthened powerhouse partnerships between the Design Lab, Design Forward Alliance, Burnham Center for Community Advancement, The City of San Diego, the City of Tijuana, and hundreds of designers, creatives, and leaders on both sides of the border.

For more information, visit wdc2024.org.

Design for San Diego (D4SD.org)

The D4SD initiative seeks to support collective intelligence in the San Diego region to address important civic issues including mobility, public health, and housing. D4SD enables large-scale participation in a design process of framing human-centered problems, prototyping solutions, and building alliances to make local impact. The initiative helps connect key stakeholders such as domain experts, city officials, professional designers, business leaders, and community members while providing an educational opportunity that serves people from a diverse range of ages, backgrounds, and motivations.

D4SD 2017

2017 Civic Design Challenge: How do we create a San Diego where we all move freely?

D4SD 2020

2020 Civic Design Challenge: How can design help San Diego address COVID-19 and become more sustainable?

D4SD 2024

2024 Civic Design Challenge: How might we design resilient solutions to make a lasting impact on the housing crisis? 

Housing Alliance

The Housing Alliance connects and convenes housing researchers, practitioners, and decision-makers at UC San Diego and from across the San Diego-Tijuana Region. The UC San Diego Housing Alliance seeds deep collaborations across academic disciplines, sectors (non-profit, public, and private), and decision-makers to advance housing research to action.

Future of Design Education

The Future of Design Education seeks to create design education curricula for the 21st century that will equip designers with the skills and perspectives to design more inclusive, sustainable, equitable, and responsible future products, systems, organizations, and societies. Drawing upon the efforts of more than 100 design practitioners and educators, and informed by the suggestions of more than 700 participants worldwide, the initiative created a reference curriculum adaptable to a broad range of educational institutions, published in this special issue of She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation.

Educators Alliance

The Educators Alliance consists of educators who are using human-centered design in classes and projects from K-12 through four-year university, and including technology colleges, community colleges, continuing education, and co-curricular organizations.