Skip to content
ucsd designathon

Designathon Ideas Imagine New Trolley Stop as a Vibrant Destination

Designathon Ideas Imagine New Trolley Stop as a Vibrant Destination

Designathon Ideas Imagine New Trolley Stop as a Vibrant Destination

Autonomous scooters, interactive art, food shuttles, and cable cars are just a few of the creative ideas that emerged from a two-day public designathon event that will join the efforts to transform UC San Diego from a closed campus primarily designed for work and school to destination, inviting people to come, stay and explore what the  campus has to offer. “Anybody who comes to San Diego should have this campus as a destination in addition to Balboa Park or the Gaslamp district,” said UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla in a San Diego Union Tribune article.

In 2021, the UC San Diego Pepper Canyon Mobility Hub will become a major stop on a new trolley line that will connect the La Jolla campus with other major centers of activity in San Diego. In response to the incoming station, the UC San Diego Design Lab partnered with the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), UC San Diego Campus Planning office, UC San Diego’s Urban Studies and Planning’s student Young Planners’ Society, LIME scooters, and several other campus and community stakeholders to host a designathon on April 6-7, 2019. They asked teams of three to seven people to come up with ideas that would increase trolley user’s mobility and access to the campus. According to the event organizers, designathons are 24-hour challenges that invite participants to “practice human-centered design by engaging real world challenges through intensive problem finding, connecting with potential users, prototype development, and iteration.” April’s capacity event brought together more than 250 participants, including high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, community members, and faculty mentors.

With encouragement from a roster of guest speakers that included U.S. Congressman Scott Peters, Sr. Associate Vice Chancellor Robert Continetti, and council members from the cities of Carlsbad, La Mesa and San Diego, 33 teams – each with a designer, a storyteller, and an engineer – were tasked with tackling a problem and presenting a solution in one of three areas of focus:  urban designs, services and programs, or data and tech solutions. Although the resulting proposals were diverse in ideas and ranged from practical solutions, such as color-coded maps and mobile apps that help visitors learn about and navigate the campus, to more imaginative suggestions, such as a glow-in-the dark skate park that would provide open space and double as an art piece, all of the projects deliberately had one theme in common: a focus on the campus and trolley users.

“We asked that teams really think about all the potential users of the hub, such as veterans coming to the hospital, people with strollers, and others who might be underserved by the current infrastructure,” said Stephanie Sherman, event lead for the Design-a-thon and a graduate student for the Design Lab, which promotes user-centered design approaches. “A lot of thought went into not only social elements, but also the urban terrain, which is really complex and impressive.”

Of the 33 ideas submitted, 10 finalists presented their ideas to the public as part of the closing day’s ceremonies, and the following five concepts were selected as winners:

Best Prototyping: Autonomous Navigational Transit System (ANTS) by team Crows Nest Engineering (Alex Branch, Owen Getz, Nyla Hekier, Robert Huffstutler, Jade Muckler, Alexis Vergnet, David West) proposed designated traffic lanes for autonomous scooter-like mobility devices that have large platform areas big enough to carry both passengers and packages and can automatically adapt to surrounding traffic conditions.

Excellent Storytelling: The Conch by team Thotty for Scotty (Ludi Duhay, Jodi Lim, Kim Luong, Lauren Ring, Sara Mei-Yuen Wang, Whitney Tsai) would create a center for culture and student activity near the trolley hub that would be a place for students to linger after classes.

Ready to Launch: UC Socially Dynamic by Team Salt & Pepper (Gregoray Boscaiu, Zijian Ding, Xiru He, Kristi Lin, Jennifer Phelps, Sophie Siemsgluess, Priyan Vaithilingam) is a project that imagines interactive art, such as light shows, a public theater and nature benches as ways to engage the campus population.

Triton Spirit: Conchierge by team Design Time! (Sophia Boss, Alvaro Mejia, Griffin Mittleman, Kyle Mumm, Sicily Panattil, John JoungSeo Kim) attempts to make navigating around campus easier for freshman students and visitors through interactive kiosks that stay updated through social media and can provide recommendations for hot spots as well as directions.

Unique Concept: Foodie App by Team Yoo (Mingxuan Fan, Kaiyun Fu, Osgood Gunawan, Jiarui Han, Yiwen Hou, Dian Yu) solves the problem of hungry commuters with no time for breakfast by combining an app for ordering food from campus eateries with a pick-up shuttle service that will have the food waiting for commuters when they get off the trolley.

The Design Lab and the Campus Transportation office are now working together to present the five winning ideas to campus leadership and other stakeholders. However, all of the projects submitted during the designathon will impact the planning for the Pepper Canyon Mobility Hub by demonstrating the utility and potential of the site from perspectives not typically obtained through traditional development channels.

“[A designathon] provides us with a more in-depth understanding than through a traditional public engagement process,” said Danielle Kochman, Associate Regional Planner for SANDAG. “The participants provide a fresh set of eyes and out-of-the-box thinking to generate new and innovative solutions.”

A majority of the designathon participants were students, and their experience as both campus and technology users is exactly the perspective that organizers need to update the vision for the transportation hub, which has been 16 years in the making. Since planning began in 2003, innovations, such as e-bikes, scooters, ride sharing, and autonomous vehicles, have dramatically changed how people get around. Events like the designathon not only help planners to adapt to these changes, but they also provide a way to involve the community in the process.

“Designathons are a wonderful way for people to learn human-centered design while also producing end products and services that can actually be implemented, all with the aid of the people for whom the work is intended to serve,” said Don Norman, Director of the UC San Diego Design Lab.  “The success and popularity of these designathons encourages us to increase the number and scope of these events, partnering with other organizations to make the designathon’s emphasis on multi-disciplinary human-centered design of needed services and products a frequent and important part of UC San Diego’s activities.”

Autonomous scooters, interactive art, food shuttles, and cable cars are just a few of the creative ideas that emerged from a two-day public designathon event that will join the efforts to transform UC San Diego from a closed campus primarily designed for work and school to destination, inviting people to come, stay and explore what the  campus has to offer. “Anybody who comes to San Diego should have this campus as a destination in addition to Balboa Park or the Gaslamp district,” said UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla in a San Diego Union Tribune article.

In 2021, the UC San Diego Pepper Canyon Mobility Hub will become a major stop on a new trolley line that will connect the La Jolla campus with other major centers of activity in San Diego. In response to the incoming station, the UC San Diego Design Lab partnered with the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), UC San Diego Campus Planning office, UC San Diego’s Urban Studies and Planning’s student Young Planners’ Society, LIME scooters, and several other campus and community stakeholders to host a designathon on April 6-7, 2019. They asked teams of three to seven people to come up with ideas that would increase trolley user’s mobility and access to the campus. According to the event organizers, designathons are 24-hour challenges that invite participants to “practice human-centered design by engaging real world challenges through intensive problem finding, connecting with potential users, prototype development, and iteration.” April’s capacity event brought together more than 250 participants, including high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, community members, and faculty mentors.

With encouragement from a roster of guest speakers that included U.S. Congressman Scott Peters, Sr. Associate Vice Chancellor Robert Continetti, and council members from the cities of Carlsbad, La Mesa and San Diego, 33 teams – each with a designer, a storyteller, and an engineer – were tasked with tackling a problem and presenting a solution in one of three areas of focus:  urban designs, services and programs, or data and tech solutions. Although the resulting proposals were diverse in ideas and ranged from practical solutions, such as color-coded maps and mobile apps that help visitors learn about and navigate the campus, to more imaginative suggestions, such as a glow-in-the dark skate park that would provide open space and double as an art piece, all of the projects deliberately had one theme in common: a focus on the campus and trolley users.

“We asked that teams really think about all the potential users of the hub, such as veterans coming to the hospital, people with strollers, and others who might be underserved by the current infrastructure,” said Stephanie Sherman, event lead for the Design-a-thon and a graduate student for the Design Lab, which promotes user-centered design approaches. “A lot of thought went into not only social elements, but also the urban terrain, which is really complex and impressive.”

Of the 33 ideas submitted, 10 finalists presented their ideas to the public as part of the closing day’s ceremonies, and the following five concepts were selected as winners:

Best Prototyping: Autonomous Navigational Transit System (ANTS) by team Crows Nest Engineering (Alex Branch, Owen Getz, Nyla Hekier, Robert Huffstutler, Jade Muckler, Alexis Vergnet, David West) proposed designated traffic lanes for autonomous scooter-like mobility devices that have large platform areas big enough to carry both passengers and packages and can automatically adapt to surrounding traffic conditions.

Excellent Storytelling: The Conch by team Thotty for Scotty (Ludi Duhay, Jodi Lim, Kim Luong, Lauren Ring, Sara Mei-Yuen Wang, Whitney Tsai) would create a center for culture and student activity near the trolley hub that would be a place for students to linger after classes.

Ready to Launch: UC Socially Dynamic by Team Salt & Pepper (Gregoray Boscaiu, Zijian Ding, Xiru He, Kristi Lin, Jennifer Phelps, Sophie Siemsgluess, Priyan Vaithilingam) is a project that imagines interactive art, such as light shows, a public theater and nature benches as ways to engage the campus population.

Triton Spirit: Conchierge by team Design Time! (Sophia Boss, Alvaro Mejia, Griffin Mittleman, Kyle Mumm, Sicily Panattil, John JoungSeo Kim) attempts to make navigating around campus easier for freshman students and visitors through interactive kiosks that stay updated through social media and can provide recommendations for hot spots as well as directions.

Unique Concept: Foodie App by Team Yoo (Mingxuan Fan, Kaiyun Fu, Osgood Gunawan, Jiarui Han, Yiwen Hou, Dian Yu) solves the problem of hungry commuters with no time for breakfast by combining an app for ordering food from campus eateries with a pick-up shuttle service that will have the food waiting for commuters when they get off the trolley.

The Design Lab and the Campus Transportation office are now working together to present the five winning ideas to campus leadership and other stakeholders. However, all of the projects submitted during the designathon will impact the planning for the Pepper Canyon Mobility Hub by demonstrating the utility and potential of the site from perspectives not typically obtained through traditional development channels.

“[A designathon] provides us with a more in-depth understanding than through a traditional public engagement process,” said Danielle Kochman, Associate Regional Planner for SANDAG. “The participants provide a fresh set of eyes and out-of-the-box thinking to generate new and innovative solutions.”

A majority of the designathon participants were students, and their experience as both campus and technology users is exactly the perspective that organizers need to update the vision for the transportation hub, which has been 16 years in the making. Since planning began in 2003, innovations, such as e-bikes, scooters, ride sharing, and autonomous vehicles, have dramatically changed how people get around. Events like the designathon not only help planners to adapt to these changes, but they also provide a way to involve the community in the process.

“Designathons are a wonderful way for people to learn human-centered design while also producing end products and services that can actually be implemented, all with the aid of the people for whom the work is intended to serve,” said Don Norman, Director of the UC San Diego Design Lab.  “The success and popularity of these designathons encourages us to increase the number and scope of these events, partnering with other organizations to make the designathon’s emphasis on multi-disciplinary human-centered design of needed services and products a frequent and important part of UC San Diego’s activities.”

Autonomous scooters, interactive art, food shuttles, and cable cars are just a few of the creative ideas that emerged from a two-day public designathon event that will join the efforts to transform UC San Diego from a closed campus primarily designed for work and school to destination, inviting people to come, stay and explore what the  campus has to offer. “Anybody who comes to San Diego should have this campus as a destination in addition to Balboa Park or the Gaslamp district,” said UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla in a San Diego Union Tribune article.

In 2021, the UC San Diego Pepper Canyon Mobility Hub will become a major stop on a new trolley line that will connect the La Jolla campus with other major centers of activity in San Diego. In response to the incoming station, the UC San Diego Design Lab partnered with the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), UC San Diego Campus Planning office, UC San Diego’s Urban Studies and Planning’s student Young Planners’ Society, LIME scooters, and several other campus and community stakeholders to host a designathon on April 6-7, 2019. They asked teams of three to seven people to come up with ideas that would increase trolley user’s mobility and access to the campus. According to the event organizers, designathons are 24-hour challenges that invite participants to “practice human-centered design by engaging real world challenges through intensive problem finding, connecting with potential users, prototype development, and iteration.” April’s capacity event brought together more than 250 participants, including high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, community members, and faculty mentors.

With encouragement from a roster of guest speakers that included U.S. Congressman Scott Peters, Sr. Associate Vice Chancellor Robert Continetti, and council members from the cities of Carlsbad, La Mesa and San Diego, 33 teams – each with a designer, a storyteller, and an engineer – were tasked with tackling a problem and presenting a solution in one of three areas of focus:  urban designs, services and programs, or data and tech solutions. Although the resulting proposals were diverse in ideas and ranged from practical solutions, such as color-coded maps and mobile apps that help visitors learn about and navigate the campus, to more imaginative suggestions, such as a glow-in-the dark skate park that would provide open space and double as an art piece, all of the projects deliberately had one theme in common: a focus on the campus and trolley users.

“We asked that teams really think about all the potential users of the hub, such as veterans coming to the hospital, people with strollers, and others who might be underserved by the current infrastructure,” said Stephanie Sherman, event lead for the Design-a-thon and a graduate student for the Design Lab, which promotes user-centered design approaches. “A lot of thought went into not only social elements, but also the urban terrain, which is really complex and impressive.”

Of the 33 ideas submitted, 10 finalists presented their ideas to the public as part of the closing day’s ceremonies, and the following five concepts were selected as winners:

Best Prototyping: Autonomous Navigational Transit System (ANTS) by team Crows Nest Engineering (Alex Branch, Owen Getz, Nyla Hekier, Robert Huffstutler, Jade Muckler, Alexis Vergnet, David West) proposed designated traffic lanes for autonomous scooter-like mobility devices that have large platform areas big enough to carry both passengers and packages and can automatically adapt to surrounding traffic conditions.

Excellent Storytelling: The Conch by team Thotty for Scotty (Ludi Duhay, Jodi Lim, Kim Luong, Lauren Ring, Sara Mei-Yuen Wang, Whitney Tsai) would create a center for culture and student activity near the trolley hub that would be a place for students to linger after classes.

Ready to Launch: UC Socially Dynamic by Team Salt & Pepper (Gregoray Boscaiu, Zijian Ding, Xiru He, Kristi Lin, Jennifer Phelps, Sophie Siemsgluess, Priyan Vaithilingam) is a project that imagines interactive art, such as light shows, a public theater and nature benches as ways to engage the campus population.

Triton Spirit: Conchierge by team Design Time! (Sophia Boss, Alvaro Mejia, Griffin Mittleman, Kyle Mumm, Sicily Panattil, John JoungSeo Kim) attempts to make navigating around campus easier for freshman students and visitors through interactive kiosks that stay updated through social media and can provide recommendations for hot spots as well as directions.

Unique Concept: Foodie App by Team Yoo (Mingxuan Fan, Kaiyun Fu, Osgood Gunawan, Jiarui Han, Yiwen Hou, Dian Yu) solves the problem of hungry commuters with no time for breakfast by combining an app for ordering food from campus eateries with a pick-up shuttle service that will have the food waiting for commuters when they get off the trolley.

The Design Lab and the Campus Transportation office are now working together to present the five winning ideas to campus leadership and other stakeholders. However, all of the projects submitted during the designathon will impact the planning for the Pepper Canyon Mobility Hub by demonstrating the utility and potential of the site from perspectives not typically obtained through traditional development channels.

“[A designathon] provides us with a more in-depth understanding than through a traditional public engagement process,” said Danielle Kochman, Associate Regional Planner for SANDAG. “The participants provide a fresh set of eyes and out-of-the-box thinking to generate new and innovative solutions.”

A majority of the designathon participants were students, and their experience as both campus and technology users is exactly the perspective that organizers need to update the vision for the transportation hub, which has been 16 years in the making. Since planning began in 2003, innovations, such as e-bikes, scooters, ride sharing, and autonomous vehicles, have dramatically changed how people get around. Events like the designathon not only help planners to adapt to these changes, but they also provide a way to involve the community in the process.

“Designathons are a wonderful way for people to learn human-centered design while also producing end products and services that can actually be implemented, all with the aid of the people for whom the work is intended to serve,” said Don Norman, Director of the UC San Diego Design Lab.  “The success and popularity of these designathons encourages us to increase the number and scope of these events, partnering with other organizations to make the designathon’s emphasis on multi-disciplinary human-centered design of needed services and products a frequent and important part of UC San Diego’s activities.”

Read Next

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
UC San Diego Health Launches New Center To Spur Patient-Centered Technologies

UC San Diego Health Launches New Center to Spur Patient-Centered Technologies

On behalf of UCSD Design Lab and the Center for Health Design, we’re excited to support the launch of this collaborative innovation ecosystem designing healthcare with our community. From tele-monitoring patients with diabetes to using artificial intelligence to prevent sepsis, the newly launched Center for Health Innovation at UC San Diego Health will seek to develop, test and commercialize technologies that make a real, measurable difference in the lives and wellbeing of patients.

The new Center for Health Innovation will be located on the La Jolla campus of UC San Diego. Collaborators will include the UC San Diego Design Lab, Qualcomm Institute and Jacobs School of Engineering. It is modeled after the University Health Network’s (UHN) Techna Institute, jointly located within the organization’s hospital sites and at the University of Toronto, and has designed numerous products now used in hospitals and clinics.

“Doctors, nurses and medical teams know best where there are existing technology gaps in patient care,” said Christopher Longhurst, MD, chief information officer, UC San Diego Health. “With our proximity to the health and biotech sector as well as the cross-border region, the number of collaborative opportunities are immense.”

To learn more about the Center for Health Innovation, visit healthinnovation.ucsd.edu
Ucsd Logo Design Lab

Design Lab statement on protests, violence following George Floyd’s death

The Design Lab stands in solidarity with the Black community in the fight against racial injustice. We condemn all acts of police brutality and violence that led to the recent murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, David McAtee, and countless other members of the Black community.

We condemn all acts of discrimination. We fully support the Black Lives Matter movement and their efforts to bring justice, healing, and freedom to Black people across the globe. We recognize that these acts of violence are deeply rooted in a history of systemic racism, and we understand that design plays a large role in influencing whether our structures and technologies support or further oppress people of color. We vow to use our platform, position, and privileges to fight for a more equitable future. 

The Design Lab’s Srishti Palani Wins Google’s PhD Fellowship

In continuing excellence among UC San Diego Design Lab researchers, Srishti Palani, a PhD student and Department of Cognitive Science at the Design Lab, was named a 2021 Google PhD Fellow for her work in Human Computer Interaction focused on improving web search and intelligent guidance during creative work. The fellowship is open to researchers in computer science and related fields. Palani was one of 60 students throughout the world to be selected for a Google Fellowship–an award that supports outstanding and promising PhD candidates of all backgrounds who seek to influence the future of technology by providing funding, mentorship, collaboration and internship opportunities.

Palani’s research takes an interdisciplinary approach involving cognitive, computer, and learning sciences to better web search and intelligent scaffolding of complex creative information work. “We use web search almost every day to search things, and it affects how we learn and work and create and collaborate. I’m really passionate about researching this area and building novel computational techniques that integrate web search into people's larger work context. Google, of course, has the most state-of-the-art web search technology that has existed in my lifetime, so I’ve always wanted to collaborate with the researchers, software engineers, and data scientists there to understand how we can get a better web search when people want to search for more complex information needs.”
Ucsd Logo Design Lab

Design Lab statement on protests, violence following George Floyd’s death

The Design Lab stands in solidarity with the Black community in the fight against racial injustice. We condemn all acts of police brutality and violence that led to the recent murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, David McAtee, and countless other members of the Black community.

We condemn all acts of discrimination. We fully support the Black Lives Matter movement and their efforts to bring justice, healing, and freedom to Black people across the globe. We recognize that these acts of violence are deeply rooted in a history of systemic racism, and we understand that design plays a large role in influencing whether our structures and technologies support or further oppress people of color. We vow to use our platform, position, and privileges to fight for a more equitable future. 
Ford People-centered Automation

Ford Gifts $50K to Design Lab People-Centered Automation

Colleen Emmenegger, Head of People-Centered Automation at The Design Lab, was recently the recipient of a $50,000 grant from Ford Motor Company. The grant was awarded for her work regarding how drivers can understand, negotiate, and manage shared autonomy with their vehicles in a way that is accessible and easily translatable.

“We're trying to figure out if you can build a contract with the driver and her automated vehicle co-pilot so the driver knows exactly what they need to do and what the system does," says Emmenegger. "We're trying to build something that explicitly and continuously communicates, and that doesn't act as an invisible ‘controlling entity’ of the car. A system that provides dynamic, yet constant feedback to the driver and not sudden, startling warnings." 
Back To Top