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Smart Cities: Urban Innovation & Design Thinking

UC San Diego Design Lab Associate Director Michèle Morris recently joined venture capitalist, entrepreneur and author Greg Horowitt at a “Community Fireside Chat” hosted by SCALE. SCALE is a startup accelerator that provides funding to exceptional companies developing technology for urban innovation. SCALE partners with prominent local city officials, universities and corporations to provide “smart citizens” with the resources to tackle urban problems.

“Design thinking is critical to creating smart city solutions,” said Michèle Morris. “Design thinking involves group thinking for a multi-faceted approach that really looks to find the root of city problems.” The talk was held at one of San Diego’s premier co-working spaces, Downtown Works, and moderated by Daniel Obodovski, co-author of The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things, a book about the upcoming technology revolution. Mr. Obodovski was formerly the director of business development at Qualcomm and director of strategic marketing and business development at Motorola Germany. During the event, Morris and Horowitt helped clarify how startups can utilize human-centered design thinking and smart-city solutions to address urban problems.

The talk also included a lively discussion on how human-centered design can be applied to smart city technologies such as sensors, networks, data analytics, machine learning and robotics. Morris and Obodovski explained how these technologies are leading to new “smart city solutions” for transportation, parking, sustainability, climate action and open data city projects and proposals.

“We were thrilled to have Michèle Morris and Design Lab join us to help further our understanding of urban innovation and design,” said Obodovski. “At SCALE, we set our focus on helping entrepreneurs and start-up companies get to the next level in the urban innovation space. We believe we are at the perfect moment in time to bridge the divide between talent and technology, by providing support to entrepreneurs who are bringing great ideas to urban innovation,” he added.

IDEA LAB Spring 2021

In collaboration with UC San Diego The Design Lab and The Basement, the Idea Lab is a quarter-long foundational program designed to introduce students to the ideas of design thinking and how it complements entrepreneurship through hands-on experiences and collaborative work with students from a variety of academic disciplines, backgrounds, and perspectives. This program is ideal for both students who want to learn about design thinking and for students who need help getting “unstuck” from their current problem space. Participants who successfully complete the program requirements of the Idea Lab may have the option to continue their journey with a focus on entrepreneurship in The Basement’s Summer Converge Program.

Application opens Monday, Feb. 1st at 12PM noon, closes Sunday, Feb. 21st @ 11:59pm

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/Tijuana is finalist to become a World Design Capital

San Diego Union Tribune

The San Diego/Tijuana region is a finalist to become a World Design Capital that could mean a year-long promotion of the binational region.

Winners are chosen based on how each region effectively incorporates design across their economic, technological, social, cultural, political and environmental sectors . More than just having a fancy title, winning means a year of events to promote the region, including a street festival, a one-day celebration highlighting the winner’s designs and a design conference that should bring people from around the globe.

“This is an incredibly exciting opportunity to not only showcase our bi-national region as a longstanding design and innovation powerhouse,” she wrote, “but to also shape the narrative around what it means to be a 21st century metropolis, [says Michèle Morris, President of the Design Forward Alliance and Associate Director of UCSD Design Lab]."

J. Tanner Cusick joins the Design Lab as a Designer-in-Residence

When J. Tanner Cusick took a class called Social Architectures, he never expected that the trajectory of his career would change forever. While pursuing his MFA at UC San Diego, Cusick explains that it was in this class that he and his classmates designed “interventions” around campus. "Basically, we would change the environment and see how it influenced human behavior,” says Cusick. “I did a piece under Geisel that challenged people to use the space differently by creating a game of human Candy Land. I colored all the blocks beneath the library, and everyone came in costumes.” He reflects that what he didn’t realize at the time was that they were really practicing experience design.

It was the combination of this event and Cusick’s experience as a teaching assistant (TA) that taught him what User Experience (UX) was. “While I was a TA, I taught a digital art class and students were assigned The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman. I'd never read the book before and I was amazed by it," said Cusick. It was the ideas in the book that influenced Cusick to shift the context of his work. “I ended up teaching myself about the discipline and doing a lot of UX design and content design. And that's what I have been doing since then."