design lab designatucsd adobe wish salesforce

Design at UCSD Students Visit Leading Silicon Valley Companies

Design at UCSD Students Visit Leading Silicon Valley Companies

Design at UCSD Students Visit Leading Silicon Valley Companies

Design thinking and user-centered design continue to rapidly gain traction across a diversity of fields.  As such, it is extremely important that students are equipped with the design tools necessary to succeed in industry today.  The leadership team of Design at UCSD, the largest pre-professional design thinking organization at UC San Diego, recently embarked on their annual Bay Area trip to tour and speak with experienced designers at leading Silicon Valley companies.  Sponsored by UCSD Design Lab, board members were presented with the incredible opportunity to explore the offices of Adobe, Wish, and Salesforce in San Francisco over Presidents’ Day weekend. In previous years, the student group has toured companies such as IDEO, Google, and Workday.

The first stop of the trip was Adobe, where board members caught a glimpse of the artistic and energetic atmosphere of a company that has designed many of the creative tools that power our world today.  From the company’s gradient elevator corridor to the striking wall that reads “make” in a multitude of vibrant post-its, every corner of the office space is infused with creativity to inspire and motivate Adobe employees.  Following the office tour, board members spoke with a Senior Director of Design, user researchers, and interaction designers to learn about Adobe’s rich design process and understand how each group uniquely incorporates various principles of user-centered design in their cross-functional roles.

After visiting Adobe, the group headed to Wish, the fast-growing eCommerce startup in the heart of downtown San Francisco.  To kick-off the visit, Wish organized a lunch and networking session for Wish designers and board members to meet before sharing a presentation about the integral role that designers play at the company.  Next, board members were invited to participate in an interactive design sprint focused on conceptualizing and designing an app based on a specific user scenario and real-world constraints. The design sprint was followed by a critique session on a new feature for the Wish app where board members were welcomed to provide feedback and suggestions.  These immersive interactions helped board members to get a glimpse of the day-to-day life of a product designer at Wish.

The day concluded with an alumni mixer at Salesforce where board members had the opportunity to reconnect with Design at UCSD alumni.  The evening featured a recap of Design at UCSD’s current initiatives in addition to alumni presentations by Paula Le, a User Experience Designer at IBM, and Ed Ngai, a User Experience Engineer at Salesforce.  Le highlighted her journey navigating a career in design while Ngai shared meaningful advice about building a framework for designing one’s personal and professional design system.

It is a priority for both Design at UCSD and the Design Lab to identify opportunities to connect UCSD students with real-world design applications and exposure to potential employers.  This year’s Bay Area trip is another example of that commitment and provided board members with newfound insights and practices to share with the growing UC San Diego design community and beyond.

 

Design thinking and user-centered design continue to rapidly gain traction across a diversity of fields.  As such, it is extremely important that students are equipped with the design tools necessary to succeed in industry today.  The leadership team of Design at UCSD, the largest pre-professional design thinking organization at UC San Diego, recently embarked on their annual Bay Area trip to tour and speak with experienced designers at leading Silicon Valley companies.  Sponsored by UCSD Design Lab, board members were presented with the incredible opportunity to explore the offices of Adobe, Wish, and Salesforce in San Francisco over Presidents’ Day weekend. In previous years, the student group has toured companies such as IDEO, Google, and Workday.

The first stop of the trip was Adobe, where board members caught a glimpse of the artistic and energetic atmosphere of a company that has designed many of the creative tools that power our world today.  From the company’s gradient elevator corridor to the striking wall that reads “make” in a multitude of vibrant post-its, every corner of the office space is infused with creativity to inspire and motivate Adobe employees.  Following the office tour, board members spoke with a Senior Director of Design, user researchers, and interaction designers to learn about Adobe’s rich design process and understand how each group uniquely incorporates various principles of user-centered design in their cross-functional roles.

After visiting Adobe, the group headed to Wish, the fast-growing eCommerce startup in the heart of downtown San Francisco.  To kick-off the visit, Wish organized a lunch and networking session for Wish designers and board members to meet before sharing a presentation about the integral role that designers play at the company.  Next, board members were invited to participate in an interactive design sprint focused on conceptualizing and designing an app based on a specific user scenario and real-world constraints. The design sprint was followed by a critique session on a new feature for the Wish app where board members were welcomed to provide feedback and suggestions.  These immersive interactions helped board members to get a glimpse of the day-to-day life of a product designer at Wish.

The day concluded with an alumni mixer at Salesforce where board members had the opportunity to reconnect with Design at UCSD alumni.  The evening featured a recap of Design at UCSD’s current initiatives in addition to alumni presentations by Paula Le, a User Experience Designer at IBM, and Ed Ngai, a User Experience Engineer at Salesforce.  Le highlighted her journey navigating a career in design while Ngai shared meaningful advice about building a framework for designing one’s personal and professional design system.

It is a priority for both Design at UCSD and the Design Lab to identify opportunities to connect UCSD students with real-world design applications and exposure to potential employers.  This year’s Bay Area trip is another example of that commitment and provided board members with newfound insights and practices to share with the growing UC San Diego design community and beyond.

 

Design thinking and user-centered design continue to rapidly gain traction across a diversity of fields.  As such, it is extremely important that students are equipped with the design tools necessary to succeed in industry today.  The leadership team of Design at UCSD, the largest pre-professional design thinking organization at UC San Diego, recently embarked on their annual Bay Area trip to tour and speak with experienced designers at leading Silicon Valley companies.  Sponsored by UCSD Design Lab, board members were presented with the incredible opportunity to explore the offices of Adobe, Wish, and Salesforce in San Francisco over Presidents’ Day weekend. In previous years, the student group has toured companies such as IDEO, Google, and Workday.

The first stop of the trip was Adobe, where board members caught a glimpse of the artistic and energetic atmosphere of a company that has designed many of the creative tools that power our world today.  From the company’s gradient elevator corridor to the striking wall that reads “make” in a multitude of vibrant post-its, every corner of the office space is infused with creativity to inspire and motivate Adobe employees.  Following the office tour, board members spoke with a Senior Director of Design, user researchers, and interaction designers to learn about Adobe’s rich design process and understand how each group uniquely incorporates various principles of user-centered design in their cross-functional roles.

After visiting Adobe, the group headed to Wish, the fast-growing eCommerce startup in the heart of downtown San Francisco.  To kick-off the visit, Wish organized a lunch and networking session for Wish designers and board members to meet before sharing a presentation about the integral role that designers play at the company.  Next, board members were invited to participate in an interactive design sprint focused on conceptualizing and designing an app based on a specific user scenario and real-world constraints. The design sprint was followed by a critique session on a new feature for the Wish app where board members were welcomed to provide feedback and suggestions.  These immersive interactions helped board members to get a glimpse of the day-to-day life of a product designer at Wish.

The day concluded with an alumni mixer at Salesforce where board members had the opportunity to reconnect with Design at UCSD alumni.  The evening featured a recap of Design at UCSD’s current initiatives in addition to alumni presentations by Paula Le, a User Experience Designer at IBM, and Ed Ngai, a User Experience Engineer at Salesforce.  Le highlighted her journey navigating a career in design while Ngai shared meaningful advice about building a framework for designing one’s personal and professional design system.

It is a priority for both Design at UCSD and the Design Lab to identify opportunities to connect UCSD students with real-world design applications and exposure to potential employers.  This year’s Bay Area trip is another example of that commitment and provided board members with newfound insights and practices to share with the growing UC San Diego design community and beyond.

 

Read Next

LAUNCH_Design Lab

LAUNCH: A new community innovation platform will empower rural cancer patients

A new web platform released by LAUNCH (Linking & Amplifying User-Centered Networks through Connected Health), a public-private collaboration of which the University of California San Diego Design Lab is a founding member, will enable community-led connected cancer innovation. The platform, “LAUNCHPAD,” may be found at launchhealth.org.

"This contextual research demonstrates the complexity of community-based design. It shows how faith, independence, and family are critical to understanding healthcare. Many standard methods of applying community-based workers completely ignore these issues." - Don Norman, Design Lab Director

Autodesk teams up with David Kirsh and the Design Lab on Dreamcatcher, a Next-Generation Design Tool

The Design Lab recently teamed up with Autodesk, a California-based corporation that makes software for…

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.”

San Diego Regional EDC teams up with Design Lab on Link2 Project

Kate Gallagher with the San Diego Economic Development Corporation (EDC) needed a website redesign for…

Seda Evis

Designer in Residence: Seda Evis

While Seda Evis participates as a Designer-in-Residence at UC San Diego with The Design Lab, and is VP of Strategy & Growth at FreshForm Interactive—an experience design and innovation consultancy—she also claims to have what she refers to as a superpower: her hybrid mind, which she describes as the combination of two worlds: the business side and the design side.

As a Designer-in-Residence at The Design Lab,  Evis enjoys working in an interdisciplinary setting, which she says enhances her existing skillset. “Academia tends to be quite separate from how the practice is done,” she explains. “I find ways of doing interdisciplinary work, as well as cross industry work, very important for innovation because that’s how you actually get seeds from different places.” As of now, most of Evis’s work at The Design Lab has been working with the Community Team on the now winning bid for the World Design Capital 2024 (WDC) designation. Her work dovetails with her role on the Board of  Directors for the Design Forward Alliance–a non-profit organization started by the Lab in partnership with the regional design community and one of the partners co-leading the HOME 2024 WDC efforts alongside the Design Lab, Burnham Center for Community Advancement, the City of San Diego and the City of Tijuana.   The designation puts the San Diego-Tijuana region in a prestigious international cohort recognized for the “effective use of design to drive economic, social, cultural and environmental development.”  Even the proposal theme is significant, Evis says. “Home” not only refers to the immense and diverse communities of San Diego and Tijuana that form one, but also serves as an acronym for Human-centered, Open, Multi-disciplinary/Multi-cultural, and Experimental. For Evis, participating in HOME2024 signifies her career “coming full circle.” 
Design Lab Ucsd Elderly

Design for older people sucks. Here are four ways to fix it

Digital Arts editorial with Stefan Sagmeister and Design Lab Director Don Norman on designing for sixty-somethings.

Beginning in May, Alive Ventures launched a series of ongoing panels titled “Old People are Cool, Design for Them Sucks”, aiming to open up a discussion with the design community on how to better design for older adults. John Zapolski, founder of Alive Ventures, and design thought leader Ayse Birsel of Birsel + Seck, hosted the series of discussions, with guests including design luminaries such as Stefan Sagmeister and Don Norman.

“When I would visit him in retirement homes, I would see people who needed walkers and wouldn’t use them because it was a stigma,” said Norman. “They were so ugly and it sort of shouts out to the world, ‘Hey I’m old and crippled and therefore probably feeble minded as well,’ right? Well no, it’s wrong. And so I noticed that, but I didn’t pay much attention until I myself reached my eighties and started looking at my friends and other things and realised that, yes, people shunned a lot of things that are being made to help them because they don’t like to admit publicly they have problems.” - Don Norman
Back To Top