Skip to content

An Introduction to Bill Fulton, The Design Lab’s Visiting Policy Designer

An Introduction to Bill Fulton, The Design Lab’s Visiting Policy Designer

An Introduction to Bill Fulton, The Design Lab’s Visiting Policy Designer

An Introduction to Bill Fulton, The Design Lab’s Visiting Policy Designer

How might we help San Diego leverage policy and design to impact the common good.

Policy and design are two important societal decision-making drivers that usually don’t go together. But together they can be very powerful – and The Design Lab hopes to combine the two in ways that will help move the important issues in the San Diego region forward.

Public policy is the art of crafting a course of action that government agencies can take in order to achieve a desired outcome – reducing homelessness, for example, or increasing the use of public transit in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The policy is usually crafted without those it affects – in a think tank, for example, or by legislative analysts in Sacramento, or thrown together in the political hothouse of a City-County or County Board of Supervisors meeting. The first can be too theoretical, not reflective of real-world experience, and too often driven by the ideological perspective of the think tank or the legislative committee. The second is usually the result of bargaining among politicians, meaning there’s not much focus on intentionality.

By introducing a design mindset into the policy process, policymakers can begin to overcome both of these limitations. They can get down and dirty in the real world to get more real-time feedback from what design calls “users” – perhaps not the right term, since individuals don’t always “use” policy even though it affects them. And together, we can bring more intentionality to the process of policymaking by creating a thoughtful feedback loop that elected officials will have a hard time ignoring – because users of policy are, after all, constituents as well.

On May 1, 2023, The Design Lab will add Bill Fulton to its staff as Visiting Policy Designer. Bill is an experienced urban planner and former elected official who has held leadership positions in the public, private, nonprofit, and academic sectors, including as Mayor of Ventura and Planning Director for the City of San Diego. He began to think deeply about how policy is designed – and how it could be designed better – when he stepped away from these intense public roles and entered academia full-time as Director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University in Houston.

Bill thought a lot about how public policy, especially at the local level, so often seems to fall short and doesn’t really achieve its intended outcome. This is especially true in the world of land use and housing, which he has both operated on and studied (often in collaboration with me) for many years. In his recent book, “Place and Prosperity: How Cities Help Us to Connect and Innovate”, Bill notes that sometimes, people in positions of influence want to adopt a policy in order to look good (or because they have to), but they don’t really want the outcome because it’s politically inconvenient.

Place and Prosperity by William Fulton | An Island Press book

All of this is why the Design Lab is the perfect place for Bill to try to improve the policy design process – and San Diego is the perfect region to test these ideas. We think it’s time to confront, head-on, the deficiencies in the traditional policymaking process at the local level and see how design methods and thinking can improve the process, the policies themselves, and the outcomes.

Because most of San Diego’s policymaking occurs downtown at the city, the county, and SANDAG (the regional planning agency), Bill will be setting up shop at UCSD’s Park & Market Building in Downtown San Diego, where he’ll be able to interact not just with people from UCSD but also from the Burnham Center for Community Advancement, the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation, and many others who are deeply involved in the policymaking process in San Diego. Working with others at the Design Lab and UCSD and many others in the community, he will explore how we can use a design lens to tackle major issues in the region, especially the persistent and difficult issue of housing affordability.

So if you’ve got a policy problem – or you are frustrated that policy around something you care about isn’t being crafted well or isn’t leading to the desired outcomes – contact Bill to talk and see whether there’s a way to use design more intentionally to craft public policy in San Diego that really works.

– Mai Nguyen, Director

An Introduction to Bill Fulton, The Design Lab’s Visiting Policy Designer

How might we help San Diego leverage policy and design to impact the common good.

Policy and design are two important societal decision-making drivers that usually don’t go together. But together they can be very powerful – and The Design Lab hopes to combine the two in ways that will help move the important issues in the San Diego region forward.

Public policy is the art of crafting a course of action that government agencies can take in order to achieve a desired outcome – reducing homelessness, for example, or increasing the use of public transit in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The policy is usually crafted without those it affects – in a think tank, for example, or by legislative analysts in Sacramento, or thrown together in the political hothouse of a City-County or County Board of Supervisors meeting. The first can be too theoretical, not reflective of real-world experience, and too often driven by the ideological perspective of the think tank or the legislative committee. The second is usually the result of bargaining among politicians, meaning there’s not much focus on intentionality.

By introducing a design mindset into the policy process, policymakers can begin to overcome both of these limitations. They can get down and dirty in the real world to get more real-time feedback from what design calls “users” – perhaps not the right term, since individuals don’t always “use” policy even though it affects them. And together, we can bring more intentionality to the process of policymaking by creating a thoughtful feedback loop that elected officials will have a hard time ignoring – because users of policy are, after all, constituents as well.

On May 1, 2023, The Design Lab will add Bill Fulton to its staff as Visiting Policy Designer. Bill is an experienced urban planner and former elected official who has held leadership positions in the public, private, nonprofit, and academic sectors, including as Mayor of Ventura and Planning Director for the City of San Diego. He began to think deeply about how policy is designed – and how it could be designed better – when he stepped away from these intense public roles and entered academia full-time as Director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University in Houston.

Bill thought a lot about how public policy, especially at the local level, so often seems to fall short and doesn’t really achieve its intended outcome. This is especially true in the world of land use and housing, which he has both operated on and studied (often in collaboration with me) for many years. In his recent book, “Place and Prosperity: How Cities Help Us to Connect and Innovate”, Bill notes that sometimes, people in positions of influence want to adopt a policy in order to look good (or because they have to), but they don’t really want the outcome because it’s politically inconvenient.

Place and Prosperity by William Fulton | An Island Press book

All of this is why the Design Lab is the perfect place for Bill to try to improve the policy design process – and San Diego is the perfect region to test these ideas. We think it’s time to confront, head-on, the deficiencies in the traditional policymaking process at the local level and see how design methods and thinking can improve the process, the policies themselves, and the outcomes.

Because most of San Diego’s policymaking occurs downtown at the city, the county, and SANDAG (the regional planning agency), Bill will be setting up shop at UCSD’s Park & Market Building in Downtown San Diego, where he’ll be able to interact not just with people from UCSD but also from the Burnham Center for Community Advancement, the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation, and many others who are deeply involved in the policymaking process in San Diego. Working with others at the Design Lab and UCSD and many others in the community, he will explore how we can use a design lens to tackle major issues in the region, especially the persistent and difficult issue of housing affordability.

So if you’ve got a policy problem – or you are frustrated that policy around something you care about isn’t being crafted well or isn’t leading to the desired outcomes – contact Bill to talk and see whether there’s a way to use design more intentionally to craft public policy in San Diego that really works.

– Mai Nguyen, Director

An Introduction to Bill Fulton, The Design Lab’s Visiting Policy Designer

How might we help San Diego leverage policy and design to impact the common good.

Policy and design are two important societal decision-making drivers that usually don’t go together. But together they can be very powerful – and The Design Lab hopes to combine the two in ways that will help move the important issues in the San Diego region forward.

Public policy is the art of crafting a course of action that government agencies can take in order to achieve a desired outcome – reducing homelessness, for example, or increasing the use of public transit in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The policy is usually crafted without those it affects – in a think tank, for example, or by legislative analysts in Sacramento, or thrown together in the political hothouse of a City-County or County Board of Supervisors meeting. The first can be too theoretical, not reflective of real-world experience, and too often driven by the ideological perspective of the think tank or the legislative committee. The second is usually the result of bargaining among politicians, meaning there’s not much focus on intentionality.

By introducing a design mindset into the policy process, policymakers can begin to overcome both of these limitations. They can get down and dirty in the real world to get more real-time feedback from what design calls “users” – perhaps not the right term, since individuals don’t always “use” policy even though it affects them. And together, we can bring more intentionality to the process of policymaking by creating a thoughtful feedback loop that elected officials will have a hard time ignoring – because users of policy are, after all, constituents as well.

On May 1, 2023, The Design Lab will add Bill Fulton to its staff as Visiting Policy Designer. Bill is an experienced urban planner and former elected official who has held leadership positions in the public, private, nonprofit, and academic sectors, including as Mayor of Ventura and Planning Director for the City of San Diego. He began to think deeply about how policy is designed – and how it could be designed better – when he stepped away from these intense public roles and entered academia full-time as Director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University in Houston.

Bill thought a lot about how public policy, especially at the local level, so often seems to fall short and doesn’t really achieve its intended outcome. This is especially true in the world of land use and housing, which he has both operated on and studied (often in collaboration with me) for many years. In his recent book, “Place and Prosperity: How Cities Help Us to Connect and Innovate”, Bill notes that sometimes, people in positions of influence want to adopt a policy in order to look good (or because they have to), but they don’t really want the outcome because it’s politically inconvenient.

Place and Prosperity by William Fulton | An Island Press book

All of this is why the Design Lab is the perfect place for Bill to try to improve the policy design process – and San Diego is the perfect region to test these ideas. We think it’s time to confront, head-on, the deficiencies in the traditional policymaking process at the local level and see how design methods and thinking can improve the process, the policies themselves, and the outcomes.

Because most of San Diego’s policymaking occurs downtown at the city, the county, and SANDAG (the regional planning agency), Bill will be setting up shop at UCSD’s Park & Market Building in Downtown San Diego, where he’ll be able to interact not just with people from UCSD but also from the Burnham Center for Community Advancement, the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation, and many others who are deeply involved in the policymaking process in San Diego. Working with others at the Design Lab and UCSD and many others in the community, he will explore how we can use a design lens to tackle major issues in the region, especially the persistent and difficult issue of housing affordability.

So if you’ve got a policy problem – or you are frustrated that policy around something you care about isn’t being crafted well or isn’t leading to the desired outcomes – contact Bill to talk and see whether there’s a way to use design more intentionally to craft public policy in San Diego that really works.

– Mai Nguyen, Director

Read Next

SAP collaborates with Design Lab students

In December, UC San Diego Design Lab students wrapped up two major projects with SAP,…

UCSD & Design Lab Students Participate In The Civic Digital Fellowship Program

UCSD & Design Lab Students participate in The Civic Digital Fellowship Program

Irene Guo, Neve Foresti, and Eric Richards, former and current UC San Diego Design Lab students, participated in the Civic Digital Fellowship Program, a ten-week program that equips students in different fields of technology (from data scientists to designers) to utilize their technical skills for public service; these students are referred to as Civic Digital Fellows. This program is the very first of its kind, and is modeled on four principles: the fellows must be compensated for their hard work through monetary gains, they tackle work with a high impact, their professional careers are developed, and finally, their community is cohort-based. 
Design Lab Michele Morris Forward

Why Does Design Matter: A Q&A With Design Forward Founder Michèle Morris

Michèle Morris currently serves as the Associate Director of the Design Lab at UC San Diego. She…

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.”
UX Design Tips From Experience Designer Emilia Pucci

UX Design Tips from Experience Designer Emilia Pucci | Design Chats

Emilia Pucci, Design Lab Designer-in-Residence, shares some useful tips on User Experience Research and Prototyping.

Design Chats is a video series where we sit down with design practitioners to answer questions about how they utilize human-centered design.

View our Design Chats playlist on the Design Lab YouTube Channel
Bennett Peji

Meet Designer-in-Residence Bennett Peji

When Bennett Peji was asked to join The Design Lab as a Designer-in-Residence, he immediately said yes. “It was a natural fit,” he explains. “The Design Lab is composed of so many talented people, both in leadership and in its students, who have tremendous technical abilities, but also a big heart for using that expertise for the greater good.” Peji works with the Community team at The Design Lab, working on ways to define what it means for San Diego to be a global city. He is the Chief Innovation Officer at several businesses and Chairman of California Humanities. “Seeing us all collectively as being a very unique region in the world is one distinguishing factor in developing the opportunities that we have here. My role is to be a connector and a bridge builder to organizations who are like-minded. Like-minded in terms of seeing our region holistically and working for more ways to collaborate and create greater economic opportunities and access.”

Peji is a walking example of practicing what he preaches in order to present San Diego as a unique, diverse, global city. He emphasizes that it is not enough to just be welcoming. We must be truly inclusive. “The real work is to include and empower the folks who have never been to the table, who don't think and act and see the world the way we do, so that we can all have a more profound way of looking at the problems.” To do this, Peji has not been afraid to be the one swimming upstream. “We all have to find our way in this world called America and do the best we can. But since I’ve been on this journey for so long now, it has become so clear that it is not about assimilating [but instead] finding your own voice and expressing your own unique and distinct identity.”
Back To Top