The problem of poverty is far from a clear-cut issue. In the new age of globalization and technology, future generations must develop the skills needed to critically think about the complexities of inequality in order to overcome the world’s most challenging obstacles.
Since its formation 2007, the Global Poverty and Practice minor at the University of California Berkeley trains students to understand contemporary forms of poverty, wealth, and inequality through invaluable academic coursework and a worthwhile practice experience. GPP has become one of the largest, most popular minors on campus, with about 350 students regularly enrolled in the program.
At the core of the minor lies the “Practice Experience”, a fieldwork opportunity where students apply the theoretical approaches they learned in their coursework to aiding local and international populations by partnering with a non-governmental organization, government agencies, and other poverty or development groups around the world. In addition to utilizing theory in the field, students learn from the organizations on how they approach poverty in action.
GPP invites all students from different majors and backgrounds to gain a critical edge and a unique opportunity to supplement their field of study.
Priya Natarajan, a 4th year linguistics major, completed her Practice Experience in the summer of 2017 with KIVA, an international nonprofit dedicated to alleviating global poverty through microfinancing. According to her, the GPP curriculum allows for a diverse range of students from multiple disciplines to come together, which changes the perspective of each individual student and fosters a more holistic approach to learning about inequality.
“Sometimes you look at a problem and you’re like ‘Ok this is it. Let’s tackle it’, but we fail to consider a lot of different factors that are causing the problem in the first place […] I think GPP really pushes you to explore the different roots of the problem rather than just the surface level problem and I’ve really appreciated that and that’s really helped me in different parts of my life, not just in school,” said Natarajan.
Check out the GPP website to learn more about the minor! If you have any questions about the application process or the program in general, feel free to attend any GPP info sessions. Best of luck to our incoming freshmen and returning students. Go bears!
On May 3 and 4, students from 17 courses held in Jacobs Hall — along with clubs and student-taught DeCals that use the building’s resources—presented projects at the 2017 Jacobs Spring Design Showcase. The showcase capped a semester of design innovation that saw students develop sustainable products, prototype innovations in space research, apply technology to pressing challenges like violent extremism, and more. Here’s a glimpse at what students created at Jacobs Hall this semester.
In introductory courses, students explored core skills and conceptsfor design processes. Prototyping and Fabrication, for example,provided opportunities for students to gain hands-on experience with techniques like 3D printing, laser-cutting, and electronics, working their way from small projects to their final assignment: designing and fabricating bluetooth-controlled vehicles. At the spring showcase, the students put these vehicles to the test on an obstacle course, using cell phones to guide their creations through a series of ramps and curves.
Students — and their bluetooth-controlled vehicles—take on an obstacle course.
Other introductory courses allowed students to gain skills in a range of fundamental processes. Sketching and Visual Communication students explored elements like line, color, and story, while engineering students enrolled in Introduction to Manufacturing and Tolerancing applied course lessons to developing original 3D-printed bridge designs.
Student work from Sketching and Visual Communication, left, and Introduction to Manufacturing and Tolerancing, right.
Elsewhere in the showcase, upper-division students from a variety of disciplines shared advanced projects that linked design skills with domain expertise. Computer science students in User Interface Design built conversational interfaces for Amazon Alexa, creating apps to complete tasks as diverse as cooking, budget management, and fire safety guidance. In Industrial Design and Human Factors (an industrial engineering and operations research course), meanwhile, students applied principles of ergonomics to designing products meant to help with work in vineyards. “I enjoyed how open-ended [the assignment] was, and the ability to be creative,” noted Sergey Mann, whose team worked on a haptic navigation interface for vineyard workers.
Students demonstrate their mechatronic spotting device for weightlifting.
In Introduction to New Product Development, students worked with clients from diverse industries to prototype novel products, considering business models and sustainability along with their products’ designs. The results included prototypes for internet connectivity on the open ocean, fetal health monitoring, information security, and much more.
Reflecting Jacobs Hall’s role as a campuswide hub, many of the courses showcasing work involved collaboration across a wide range of fields. Students from diverse departments, for example, participated in Bioinspired Design, a lower-division integrative biology course in which they applied biological research to developing new product ideas. Over the course of the semester, natural adaptations, like spider silk and bird wings, became the inspiration behind ideas for products from hydration systems to drones.
A prototype from Bioinspired Design.
Another course, Collaborative Innovation, represented a uniquely cross-disciplinary approach, with faculty coming to the course from the departments of Art Practice; Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; and the Haas School of Business. Students interwove these perspectives as they created interventions that addressed social issues, such as fostering creative spaces on campus and challenging inequity in K-12 education.
Projects in Collaborative Innovation focused on creative spaces on campus (left), normalizing shyness (right), and more.A student presents her team’s User Experience Design project: a speculative tool for social media management.
A number of projects aimed not to provide straightforward utility, but to serve as entry points for questions or dialogue. In User Experience Design, students trained a design lens on considering our relationships with emerging technologies. Projects included a concept for a “connection cafe” that would reimagine human connection through artificial intelligence and a tool for monitoring online shopping and consumption patterns.
Critical Making students also used design and fabrication techniques to spark unexpected interactions, treating physical objects as starting points for cultural commentary. After a semester of exploring the intersection of technology and socially engaged art, students presented novel wearable designs, such as “identity armor” to protect biosignals and inflatable clothing that challenged norms around fashion and body type. Instructor Eric Paulos, speaking to his students as they looked ahead to summer and, for some, graduation, encouraged them to continue to explore unexpected paths in their design projects. “Keep taking risks,” he urged.
Projects from Critical Making reimagined topics from fast fashion (left) to casts for kids (right).
Beyond projects from courses, the showcase also featured work from clubs and student-taught DeCals, highlighting student initiatives and extracurricular learning. FEMTech members told visitors about their work creating opportunities in tech for women from all majors, for example, while CalSTAR and STAC demonstrated new ideas for space technology. Across these diverse teams, students reflected on the growing design community at Jacobs Hall, mentioning resources for prototyping and opportunities to exchange ideas with fellow students. They also emphasized that their work was far from done: many already had ideas for launching new programs, tinkering with designs, and expanding their impact. “That’s the good thing about projects like these,” observed one Pioneers in Education member as his showcase session wrapped up. “There’s always room to grow.”
Students from CalSTAR (left), the Intro to iOS Development DeCal (center), and FEMTech (right) shared recent work.
“I think something that’s really important to us is our story.”
— Ruth McGee, R I S ☰ Project Manager
Every two years, collegiate teams from across the nation gather to participate in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon. Launched in 2002, the competition challenges teams to design, build, and operate a full-scale, solar-powered home centered on energy-efficient principles and innovative design technologies. True to its name, the challenge involves ten contests, which evaluate areas ranging from cost-effective design and market potential to energy production and the house’s function as a livable home. The next competition will take place in October 2017 — and, for the first time, UC Berkeley will be among the 14 teams showcasing a fully functional product at the event.
As it enters the competition, Berkeley’s team, which calls itself R I S ☰, will be bringing a distinctly Bay Area perspective with it. The Solar Decathlon requires each team to address issues specific to its location, prompting students to expand their awareness of their own environments. For R I S ☰, the story that has shaped their design process is rooted in the needs of Berkeley’s surrounding communities.
Aligning with UC Berkeley’s commitment to public service and innovative social impact, R I S ☰ hopes to combat the challenges associated with overcrowding and environmental issues by creating a sustainable, net-zero home designed specifically for the densely populated areas of Richmond. “We are trying to build for Richmond and genuinely care about their needs — and we are hoping to leave a lasting and sustainable impact,” says R I S ☰ project manager Ruth McGee, a third-year civil and environmental engineering student. It’s an ambitious challenge: unlike teams that have previously participated in the Solar Decathlon, R I S ☰ is taking on the competition as an upstart, with no history of Berkeley entries to draw upon.
R I S ☰ began as a self-initiated project after cofounders Brenton Krieger and Sam Durkin first heard about the Solar Decathlon competition while attending an Engineers for a Sustainable World conference two years ago. “We were in our sophomore year and hadn’t had many practical experiences yet. We thought it would be a fulfilling and interesting experience to take on. Little did we know how much work it would be, and how much it would shape our career paths,” says Krieger, now in his fourth year in civil engineering. Without any previous structures or examples to reference, one of R I S ☰’s main challenges has been learning how to build from the ground up. Third-year civil engineering student Joan Gibbons, the team’s construction project manager, explains, “We’re coming from a different standpoint of starting as a team, raising our own funds…we’ve been learning a lot as we go.”
Though R I S ☰ may be starting new, they see that not as a disadvantage, but as an opportunity to take initiative, get creative, and leverage the larger community. This energy has been particularly important as they’ve delved into the technical requirements of solar house design, gaining a breadth of new knowledge and skills. Nicolai Sponholtz, a second-year student on the water team, gives an example of this complexity, noting, “Being on the water team, one of the biggest challenges is learning about the different kinds of plumbing systems you can have in a house — what’s the most sustainable, what functions the best, and what’s going to cost the least.” Alexander Sundt, a third-year electrical engineering and computer sciences student and the team’s electrical team head, adds, “You can design a system theoretically, but as for the logistics in how its it’s implemented, there’s not a lot of information I could find — which has been an unexpected difficulty.”
R I S ☰ has addressed this challenge by connecting with a rich local ecosystem, linking their members with experts at Berkeley and in the broader Bay Area. “We’ve reached out to people in various industries and they’ve been very helpful in getting us on board,” says Sundt. Guests come in once a week to speak to the team about sustainable design practices, on topics ranging from solar installation techniques to the benefits of wool insulation in homes.
Today, R I S ☰ is the largest it’s ever been, with roughly 40 members whose academic focuses include civil and environmental engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, architecture, environmental design, marketing, legal studies, economics, business, and more. This diverse team is split into seven sub-teams: landscaping, architecture, structure, project management, water, solar, and electrical. Each week, the entire team gets together to check in on their current status, see what the other teams have been up to, and address the next steps for the project. This structure helps each team work in concert as the design process unfolds. “[It’s a] workshop-structured meeting, where all the teams are in the same space at the same time and questions can be answered easily,” notes Joan Gibbons. “What you’re designing doesn’t affect just your system, but all of them intertwined.”
A cross-functional structure allows team members to analyze problems with diverse perspectives and to formulate solutions collaboratively, a pivotal component of the design process. This often results in productive iteration: “As soon as you think that one design would work properly, you talk to the architecture team and have to go back to the drawing board,” says Nicolai Sponholtz. In this way, team members not only gain hands-on experience applying concepts from their respective fields, but also seek to gain a holistic understanding of the project’s components. “A fun aspect of the competition is how wide a range of knowledge each of us get, just by being exposed to other team members,” notes Sam Durkin. “I wouldn’t know as much about architecture, or the electrical systems, if it weren’t for them being a part of the team.”
The experience has provided team members with broadly applicable lessons in effective collaboration. Reflecting on R I S ☰’s growth over the past two years, Brenton Krieger observes, “It’s been interesting being here since the beginning, and trying out so many iterations of [team] structures that have worked and that haven’t. I’m really happy with how it is now and how collaborative it is.” He observes that recognizing each other’s areas of expertise and learning to facilitate cross-team interactions, while challenging, has been central to the team’s success. Gibbons adds, “It’s been such a unique opportunity. It’s not just hands-on experience in one aspect of engineering — it’s hands-on experience doing an entire project that incorporates business, marketing, design, architecture.”
This interdisciplinary process has led R I S ☰ to a modular, flexible design that leverages passive technology and is meant to be “ready for real people in the real world.” Asked about their current progress, Durkin explains, “We now have our design solidified. What we’re working on right now is what products are going to be in our home and how they’re going to be integrated on a full scale.” Shifting to R I S ☰’s current positioning as an organization, he continues, “We’re [also] looking to increase the size of the team. We’ve added a student-taught class at Jacobs Hall, now probably at about 40 students, which has been great, and are branching out into a bunch of different disciplines.” As they move toward their next major phase leading up to the competition — building the house at the Richmond site — the team is focusing on meaningful engagement with the Richmond community. “We’re involving Richmond schools. We’re actually starting an after-school class for Richmond students in high school, in their engineering academy, to learn about their current needs. We met with the mayor’s office in Richmond, too,” says Ruth McGee.
Rooted in this focus on connecting with community, the team hopes to build a sustainable foundation for ongoing work on smart energy practices, in Richmond and on campus. They also hope that they will be the first of many Solar Decathlon teams at Berkeley. “I’d like to make an impact on this team and let it further grow after this competition,” says Alex Sundt. As I speak to other team members, it’s clear that this eye on the future is a shared motivation. “What’s been the most rewarding part of participating in Solar Decathlon?,” I ask. “Well,” answers McGee, “I think it’s still to come.”
This fall brought an exciting mix of speakers to Jacobs Hall, through our Jacobs Design Conversations series and a new pop-up series of informal talks, Design Field Notes. Over the course of the semester, we heard from wide-ranging voices on design projects, practices, and possibilities. Here are three themes we heard in this season of talks.
The physical and the digital are continuing to blur — and that’s an opportunity for designers.
In a September talk, James Tichenor and Joshua Walton, part of the team behind Microsoft HoloLens, explored intersections of the physical and the digital. Tichenor and Walton are no strangers to navigating these intersections: prior to their work on HoloLens, they created interactive spaces as part of The LAB at Rockwell Group, working on projects that ranged from Google’s Interactive Spaces to an award-winning lobby installation that brought digital art and narrative to large panels in Las Vegas’ Cosmopolitan Hotel. If these projects involved infusing physical spaces—lobbies, offices, parks—with digital interactivity, at HoloLens, they’re taking the flip-side approach: “Now,” Walton explained, “we can begin to give digital things more physical properties.” In the mixed-reality experiences that HoloLens makes possible, users can interact with digital content in a tactile way, incorporating it into the physical spaces of their daily lives. This reflects a moment, Tichenor and Walton noted, in which distinctions between physical and digital are becoming increasingly porous, giving way to rich new forms of interaction.
The speakers pointed out that this new physical/digital frontier opens major possibilities for designers, who are in the business of “reshaping interactions between people, environments, and objects.” In talks from designers throughout the semester, we got glimpses of these possibilities, from smart assistive hardware to tools that bring augmented reality to the wood shop. Like Tichenor and Walton, these guests spoke to designers’ roles as creative fusionists, connecting and remixing elements to make something new. As the blurring of physical and digital continues, designers who can navigate this terrain, comfortably moving between technologies and contexts, will be central in shaping 21st-century experiences.
Now more than ever, design helps drive products’ value (and values help drive design).
In November, Tesla co-founder Marc Tarpenning visited the Jacobs Institute, sharing insights on opportunities for meaningful innovation, particularly in the arena of sustainability. As part of this talk, he walked us through his experiences in the electric vehicle space, charting the thinking and the “questioning of assumptions” that ultimately led to the development of Tesla. In discussing how electric vehicles evolved from the unsuccessful offerings of the 1990s to the in-demand Tesla models, he highlighted the importance of understanding context — both in terms of systems like energy markets and public policy and in terms of customers’ feelings and the journeys that lead them to particular choices. The Tesla, he noted, reflects an effort to understand the complex values that people associate with their cars, from status signaling to personal expression. In many ways, it has been Tesla’s distinctive design, informed by this understanding of what people most want from their cars, that has drawn customers and reshaped narratives around electric vehicle technology, bringing this technology into the lives of people who otherwise may have not considered it.
Here at the Jacobs Institute, we think a lot about design’s role in bringing new technologies to daily life, and Tarpenning’s insights provided a compelling example. In other fall talks from design practitioners, we heard echoes of the ideas that Tarpenning laid out, applied in diverse contexts. One of our guests, LUNAR head of innovation strategy Misha Cornes, offered a birds-eye view, underlining how design serves as a powerful differentiator in a turnover-heavy marketplace and pointing to statistics that show design-led companies significantly over-performing. Layering these big-picture observations with experiences with products ranging from ice cream scoops to smart thermostats, Cornes noted that companies increasingly see design not as an outcome, but as a process — and they’re eager to get better at it. His talk and Tarpenning’s, along with others this fall, highlighted design’s central role in today’s market, and how design —deeply informed by users’ contexts and beliefs—can create lasting value.
Democratizing access to tools for innovation, and thoughtfully designing for collective innovation, can be a game-changer.
From the maker movement to crowdsourcing, the goal of democratizing access to information and tools is a common thread in conversations around design innovation. But what does it look like on the ground? In an October talk, Northwestern associate professor and Design for America (DFA) founder Liz Gerber dug into these questions, discussing how organizations can design structures and resources to facilitate collective innovation. She emphasized four factors that are central to enabling this kind of innovation, distributed across platforms and places: roles, communication, trust, and reputation. Drawing from her experiences with DFA, she pointed to student projects that have effectively managed these factors, using collective approaches to broaden access to design processes in areas from healthcare to civic engagement. As she argued for the impact that can stem from well-designed collective innovation, Gerber closed her talk with a quote from President Obama: “We need not only the folks at MIT or Stanford or the NIH” — or Berkeley, Gerber added to smiles from the crowd— “but also the mom in West Virginia tinkering with a 3-D printer, the girl on the South Side of Chicago learning to code, the dreamer in San Antonio seeking investors for his new app, the dad in North Dakota learning new skills so he can help lead the green revolution.”
Over the course of the semester, a wide range of speakers at the Jacobs Institute added to Obama’s list, pointing to new entry points to the tools of innovation — from Amy Wibowo, who visited us to talk about how she frames computer science inclusively with BubbleSort Zines, to Mark Hatch, who discussed his time leading TechShop and highlighted the societal changes that democratized fabrication can catalyze. These voices, and the broader stands of access and collective creation that we heard in Gerber’s talk, will continue to spark thought as the Jacobs Institute heads into a new year of lively experimentation, invention, and dialogue.
Self-driving cars that pick your kids up from school. An app that smoothes your public transit experience, from starting point to final destination. A network of autonomous, modular pods that allow you to travel the world, bringing your life along with you.
These futuristic-sounding ideas may not be so far away: they’re all concepts that students developed and prototyped in Reimagining Mobility, a course launched this fall at the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation. Supported by the Ford Motor Company and its Bay Area-based Research & Innovation Center, the new course attracted advanced undergraduates and master’s students from diverse fields, ranging from mechanical engineering to anthropology. Collectively, these students came to the class with internship and research experience in areas like public health, robotics, vehicle design, and business planning, creating what instructor Rob Hennigar called “an amazing mix of students.”
Over the course of the semester, Hennigar led these students in envisioning meaningful interactions between people and new transit modes. Together, the students explored emerging trends and technologies, identified needs and opportunities, and turned their insights into prototypes of novel transportation systems. In the process, they forged connections between their fields of expertise and a toolkit of design skills — bringing this integrated perspective to the frontier of a rapidly shifting mobility landscape.
As the semester began in late August, students familiarized themselves with the mobility innovations that have been filling headlines and reshaping industries in recent years: autonomous vehicles, alternative energy, ride-sharing, new public transportation infrastructure, and more. From the start, they approached these advances with a design lens, considering how communities might interact with a new technology, or how global trends might affect a given person. “There’s so much potential when you think about the human aspect, how people accept and relate to these big technological changes,” says Patrick Hartmann, a master of engineering student who brought a background in automotive engineering to the course. To design effectively, he adds, “You need to actually go out and talk to people.”
Images from early stages of the design process, by the SmartBART team (Jose Calderon, Vy Ly, Sonali Verma).
With this in mind, student teams — each composed of students from various disciplines — set out to conduct interviews and observation sessions on campus and throughout the Bay Area, investigating student biking patterns, BART and bus ridership, interactions between Uber drivers and customers, and much more. They charted their findings using tools like empathy maps, noting what the people they talked to said and did, and what they might be thinking and feeling. From these conversations and observations, it quickly became clear that exploring mobility involved mapping complex networks.
“When we think about mobility, we also think about systems,” noted Hennigar during one early class session. Students’ reports on their research highlighted this, touching on systems from employment patterns to family structures. Their findings also pointed to nuanced feelings surrounding mobility innovations. One group, who had seen a gap between the state of autonomous vehicle technology and the discomfort many of their interviewees expressed around the idea of self-driving cars, commented, “We’re not just investigating technology — we’re investigating emotions.”
Grounded in these human-centered insights, the teams began to start brainstorming potential innovations that would reflect users’ contexts and needs. Each group came up with 50 ideas, using this rapid exercise to surface thoughts that could be remixed or refined. From there, the teams converged on more targeted concepts, sketching out their ideas and creating lo-fi prototypes. As the semester advanced, they immersed themselves in an often cyclical design process, toggling between research, prototype development, and user testing as they moved through iterations. With the students encouraged to explore wide-ranging ideas, a diverse mix of prototypes — encompassing videos, app mockups, CAD models, 3D prints, and more—began to take shape.
Early sketches from the Carpt team (Lexian Guo, Patrick Hartmann, Advaita Patel, Anosh Sethna), left, and an image from a rendered CAD model of their autonomous platform, right.
In early December, the course’s six student teams gathered to present their prototypes to Hennigar and to guests from Ford. Leveraging their members’ varied skill sets and an array of rapid-prototyping tools, each team had prepared a prototype that interwove physical and digital components, as well as some business planning. Several groups imagined how self-driving cars could reshape daily routines, prototyping ideas from an automated ride-sharing system for kids to an augmented commuting experience. One team, connecting the emerging technology around autonomous vehicles with social trends in employment and travel, proposed a system of modular pods (and an accompanying social network) that would empower people to roam the world freely, bringing their homes with them. Other groups conceptualized 21st-century approaches to infrastructure, such as an autonomous platform that could transport traditional cars, cargo, and more, and an app that would facilitate better experiences on BART.
Mockups from the Nomad team (Leland Lee, Cody Little, Adam Mansour, Brandon Van Ryswyk), which envisioned a system of modular pods, and an accompanying app, that could enable new travel and living styles.
These wide-ranging projects reflected a freedom — both to explore various angles of the issue of mobility and to develop concepts that might not be immediately feasible—that students found liberating. “This isn’t a class you see every day,” said one student. “It didn’t limit us.” One common thread, however, ran through all of the projects: a focus on linking sophisticated technology with a thoughtful, holistic approach to how a user would experience this technology. The teams approached their prototypes as ecosystems: a team that proposed a system for customizable, on-demand self-driving cars, for example, outlined not just what the cars would be like, but how a user would interact with the system’s mobile app, the emotional comforts a car’s interior might offer, the behind-the-scenes implementation modes that would make the system possible, and the multi-tiered business model that would help the service gain traction and sustain itself. “Doing things like making a business plan really helped us bind our ideas together, with context,” notes team member Kylon Chiang. “We were thinking, ‘How would this really go into the world?’”
A lo-fi model of one of the Vroom team’s proposed implementation modes.
The Ford team, which is on the front lines of efforts to bring emerging mobility technology into the world, was impressed by the students’ ideas. “Ford gave carte blanche to the Jacobs Institute to visualize the vehicle as the solution to problems of energy, environment, economy, and wellbeing,” says Nico Thetard, design manager for advanced interior experience at Ford. “The students exceeded our expectations with revolutionary, ingenious solutions.” This fruitful semester has proved to be the opening of an ongoing collaboration: Reimagining Mobility participants have been invited to present work at the Ford Research & Innovation Center, and the course will run again in the spring semester. For students at the Jacobs Institute, this engagement with the cutting edge of mobility is a unique opportunity, allowing them to apply design approaches to systems that powerfully shape local and global experiences. As Berkeley students continue to imagine new directions for mobility, they will be adding their voices, and their ideas, to a conversation that is transforming our world and the ways we move through it.
“This class involved delving into whole new fields for me,” says Sara Sampson. With a laugh, she continues, “But we figured things out along the way.”
Sampsonis speaking in December 2016, as her team wraps up their project for Bioengineering Senior Design Projects, a course taught by Amy Herr and held in Jacobs Hall. The course serves as a capstone experience for undergraduate students in bioengineering, a field that the department’s website defines as “the application of engineering principles to biological systems.” This description continues, “A very broad area of study, bioengineering can include elements of electrical and mechanical engineering, computer science, materials, chemistry and biology.”
For students like Sampson, UC Berkeley is a fruitful place to bring these elements together. On Berkeley’s campus and in the broader Bay Area community, researchers explore the interlocking bases of bioengineering — engineering principles and biological systems—from myriad angles. The Senior Design Projects course offers students a chance to tie this diverse research activity to design methods, conceptualizing and prototyping approaches to real-world challenges. Providing both classroom space and access to cutting-edge equipment, Jacobs Hall offers a rich environment in which to do this: from 3D-printed prosthetics and microfluidics projects to bioinspired robotics, researchers and makers here are pushing in new directions at intersections of engineering, biology, and health.
This past fall’s Senior Design Projects students relished the opportunity to push in new directions themselves. Working with “clients” and partners in the local community (including doctors, medical researchers, and nonprofits), students prototyped solutions for diverse issues, ranging from vital signs monitoring in under-resourced hospitals to mobility for senior citizens. Over the course of the semester, they completed interviews and observations; developed, prototyped, and tested concepts; and presented this work to peers and partners, getting an up-close experience of biomedical innovation in the process.
As student teams moved through the design process, identifying core challenges and iterating on ideas, many found themselves trying out new technologies. With the help of Maker Passes and other campus resources, teams gained skills in areas from electronics to 3D printing, which many students had no prior experience using. Sometimes, this experimentation with new tools sparked unexpected realizations. “This was supposed to be round, perfectly circular — and the 3D print failed and cut off half of it,” says Aran Bahl, holding up a 3D-printed prototype of a patch for vital signs monitoring, meant to help nurses in under-resourced hospitals. “But as we sat there looking at it,” he continues, “we realized, ‘maybe this could be beneficial somehow.’” Analyzing the print, which had ended up with one straight edge rather than a fully rounded form, the team realized that the unintended shape could facilitate both better resolution for EKG data and more intuitive orientation for nurses placing the patch on a patient’s body. “This failed 3D print was a stroke of good luck,” explains teammate Karthik Prasad.
In the course of this iterative prototyping process, students also ventured beyond campus, finding inspiration in surprising places. A group focused on developing a tool that would help seniors safely get in and out of cars, for example, observed elders as they completed this common motion — some shifted their bodies to try to accommodate mobility issues, while others used makeshift implements like trash bags to help them slide onto a seat. Considering how they might add mechanical assistance to this equation, the student team began to look not only at existing assistive technologies, but also at designs applied in other contexts. At one point, they made a trip to a local REI, studying kayak and bike racks to see how these devices used vehicle features as built-in anchors. “We spent a lot of time adapting existing mechanisms to our own needs,” notes team member Katelyn Greene. “We learned about being open-minded, seeing what already exists elsewhere.” Ultimately, ideas adapted from these products found their way into the team’s final design, a stability handle that can be easily transported and connected to parts of a car when needed.
Students Matthew Chan, Karthik Prasad, and Sara Sampson presenting their work to hospital administrators at Kiruddu Hospital in Uganda.
Underlying these wide-ranging explorations was a focus on the connections between biological systems and the physical and social environments in which people experience health issues. By interviewing and observing target users and experts over the course of the semester, the student teams were able to link research findings with contextual insights. The team working on vital signs monitoring, for example, spoke with experts throughout the semester, following this up with a January trip to several hospitals in Uganda. There, they met with staff and got a fuller sense of the hospital’s layout, day-to-day workflows, and details like power and wifi reliability. Now back in Berkeley, they’re working to incorporate this research and feedback on their device into their next iterations, refining design features and project plans.
Another team — focused on tremor monitoring for Parkinson’s patients to help gauge the effects of individualized treatment plans, which can involve difficult adjustment periods — quickly got a sense of the complex systems surrounding health issues. As they met with patients, caretakers, families, doctors, and physical therapists, they realized that the core needs for a symptom monitoring system included flexibility and convenience. For patients already facing challenges in daily life, a discreet device that could be easily worn in multiple settings and required only passive inputting on their part (unlike systems that required patients to manually log their hours) could make a big difference.
With this in mind, they prototyped an approach that would use an emerging technology — wearable circuits, in the form of thin-film metal temporary tattoos that can collect and share sensor data — to make symptom monitoring less intrusive. This elegant solution was the product of a highly iterative, often cyclical design process. “One of the big things that this class has given me is an appreciation for how much thought goes into everything. Going through the real design process to develop this one small device makes you realize that,” says Katherine Spack, a student who worked on the project. She adds, “It was good to have the chance to apply theory myself and to see, ‘oh, this is how these pieces really go together.’”
Bringing concepts together is a familiar practice at Jacobs Hall. From Bioinspired Design, a lower-division integrative biology class that draws from nature to inform product design, to upper-level courses like Bringing Biomedical Devices to Market, the building houses diverse explorations around biology, health, and design. Outside of courses, many students are seeking out — and creating—opportunities to learn about design, seeing it as a powerful complement to expertise in a field like bioengineering. The Berkeley Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), for example, has a growing committee focused on design. While this committee has generally focused on graphic design projects related to the club’s programs, it’s increasingly interested in areas like hardware innovation and how students can gain hands-on skills to enhance what they learn in class. “I never thought an engineering club would focus on design processes, creative processes,” says Tiffany Ma, who helps lead design efforts for BMES. “It’s really rewarding to have this opportunity to learn.”
Students in Bioinspired Design.
Other projects underway at Jacobs Hall provide new opportunities to work across disciplines in tackling health challenges. Computer science students have prototyped health-focused smartwatch apps in User Interface Design, while budding social entrepreneurs have worked on public health initiatives for both local and global settings. Some of these efforts have extended beyond the campus, such as Navigating the Human Path, a spring 2016 course in which undergraduates and elders from the local community collaborated to design for healthy, affordable aging. This month, student group EnableTech, in partnership with Tikkun Olam Makers, will host a makeathon at Jacobs Hall, connecting need-knowers (community members with disabilities or needs for assistive devices) with student makers to create open-source assistive technologies.
In a time when myriad developments—from the rise of big data to advances in biomaterials—are reshaping approaches to health, design offers modes of connecting emerging technology with real human needs. Learning from each other as they apply design tools to pressing health challenges, Berkeley students are preparing to help lead the way in this ever-evolving field. With skills honed at Berkeley, says student Giang Ha, “We’re able to go into the real world, find a problem, and bring something to life.”
On March 17, nearly 100 innovators gathered at the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation to kick off a weekend makeathon focused on developing custom solutions for everyday challenges encountered by people with disabilities. The event, called TOM: Berkeley, was presented by UC Berkeley student group EnableTech as part of the global Tikkun Olam Makers community, with support from the Jim Joseph Foundation. Using space and equipment in Jacobs Hall and the CITRIS Invention Lab, 11 teams worked with need-knowers to create prototypes over 48 hours. Here’s a look at the innovations they brought to life.
Speech Translator
Malia is 11 years old and has severe cerebral palsy, which often makes it difficult for people to understand her when she speaks. To help Malia communicate more accurately and fully, the speech translator team — made up of a combination of Berkeley students and Googlers — developed an algorithm to learn from and adapt to her voice, understand what she is saying, and translate it to others around her.
Auto Shift
Alvaro, an MBA student at the Haas School of Business, is quadriplegic with limited motion in his shoulders. He enjoys hand cycling, but current gear shifting mechanisms rely heavily on wrist and grip strength. For Alvaro, this means that going for a ride requires a second cyclist to ride alongside him, shifting his bike’s gears for him as needed. The auto shift team developed a gear shift mechanism that allows him to use his elbows, and they hope to work on developing a voice-activated solution as a next step.
Grocery Helper
Bliss, a mom to three kids and a full-time doctor who lives in San Francisco, is hemipalegic. When Bliss takes her children grocery shopping, she finds it difficult to manage both her kids and the groceries while navigating city streets in her wheelchair. She had seen bulky devices that might help, but hoped to find a solution that would allow for flexibility. The grocery helper team — all brothers of the professional engineering fraternity Theta Tau — developed a solution with only one permanent component: a small metal plate mounted to the back of Bliss’ chair, to which a swinging basket can be easily added and removed.
Autism Letterboard
To communicate at school, many children with autism rely on a physical letterboard: a laminated sheet of paper on which students can point out letters, which are then relayed by an aide. To help facilitate more autonomy in the classroom, the autism letterboard team developed a digitized touchscreen letterboard powered by a Raspberry Pi. Rather than pointing out a letter to an aide, the digital letterboard allows students to touch letters that are then recorded instantly by the computer, both speeding up the process of communication and reducing reliance on aides.
Makeup Applicator
Since sustaining an injury eight years ago, Ligia has been unable to apply makeup by herself. Until this weekend, she would apply her makeup by asking a caretaker or one of her sons to hold and position her brushes, pencils, and lipsticks while she would move her face and apply her own makeup. While she had become very skilled at using this system, it would slow down her morning routine, and she was looking for a way to put on makeup more independently. The Makeup Applicator team created a solution that holds her applicators, allowing her to apply makeup with autonomy.
HouseAUTO
Owen, a Berkeley-based filmmaker and self-taught engineer, can only interface with technology when in his wheelchair, using a customized joystick controlled by his chin. Because Owen spends a lot of time at home outside of his wheelchair, this quickly becomes limiting. But as an engineer, Owen doesn’t like to think small — in addition to a non-wheelchair-exclusive technology interface, he also wants to automate devices around his house through an app. To tackle Owen’s multi-faceted challenge, the HouseAUTO team worked on projects like developing a mechanical arm to attach to Owen’s wheelchair, connecting his joystick to a tablet interface, and setting up a server to control peripheral devices.
Gripper
Longtime Berkeley resident Bonnie loves to spend time outside, enjoying local trails and working with the Bay Area Outreach and Recreation Program. Currently, she relies on a grabber arm to pick up things from her wheelchair. Most of these grabbers rely heavily on wrist and grip strength, making them impossible for Bonnie to operate with one hand. Current devices also have difficulty picking up objects heavier than one pound, forcing Bonnie to rely on maneuvering a converted dustbin to lift heavy objects. Take a look at Bonnie’s experience at the makeathon here.
Leg Bag Emptier
Rafe, who sustained a spinal cord injury ten years ago, uses a leg bag connected to a catheter. If the mechanism breaks, Rafe must send in the device to be repaired, leaving him without an autonomous solution for a week or longer. Some current devices are also unreliable in determining whether or not the leg bag is full — and if the detector mechanism fails, urine can become backed up in the user’s bladder, potentially leading to serious health complications. The Leg Bag Emptier team aimed to develop an easy-to-use and reliable solution for this challenge. They created a system in which sensors on the bag (controlled by an Arduino) connect to Rafe’s iPhone, where he can use an app to monitor the time elapsed since the bag was last emptied and its current fullness level.
Tendon Glove
As a result of a spinal cord injury, Marcos, a Berkeley architecture student, has no function in his hands and relies on exoskeleton-type devices (which can be bulky or unstable) to grab objects. The tendon glove team developed a rigid glove, which provides Marcos with increased grip strength between his thumb and index finger. Unlike existing devices, the team’s solution forms to the shape of Marcos’ hand for easier usability and more flexibility.
JARL
For people with limited to no arm and leg function, a robotic arm attached to a wheelchair can serve as a backup working limb. However, solutions currently on the market can cost upwards of $50,000, making them inaccessible for many people, and cheaper desktop arms don’t provide the same strength and range of motion. Need-Knower Jade, who had created an early prototype of a solution with Owen (the Need-Knower for HouseAUTO) before the makeathon, took the idea further with the JARL team over the weekend. They created a model equipped with two degrees of freedom and a laser pointer, to make operation easier and more accurate. The team’s minimum viable product is a robotic limb that can press elevator buttons.
Travel Commode
When Jill’s parents travel, taking their toilet and shower chair with them is difficult — most models aren’t made for portability and can be heavy and cumbersome. To facilitate easier, hassle-free travel, the travel commode team developed an inexpensive and lightweight commode that can be easily broken down into parts that fit into a standard backpack or carry-on bag. Once Jill’s parents have arrived at their destination, the device is easy to reassemble without needing a screwdriver or any tools besides a small hex wrench. The team’s device is also much less expensive than similar products on the market.
Instructions for building these custom, affordable solutions will be made freely available online, with the aim of helping other people with disabilities around the world. For the students and community members who participated, the makeathon provided a valuable chance to apply their knowledge to real challenges. “The Jacobs Institute was made for a makeathon like this,” said George Anwar, a lecturer at UC Berkeley, adding, “This event is so much greater than a grade, and it teaches our students to put the person in need first.”
Learn more about the makeathon at berkeley.tomglobal.org. TOM:Berkeley is a local community for student makers, designers, developers, and engineers working together with people with disabilities to develop technological solutions for everyday challenges. This event was co-organized by the student group EnableTech at UC Berkeley, who will also be providing support for projects to continue after the event. By mobilizing TOM Communities worldwide, TOM:Tikkun Olam Makers seeks to address neglected challenges and develop millions of affordable technological solutions for people with disabilities around the globe. Established in 2014, TOM is a strategic initiative of the Reut Group.
Content for this recap came from Tikkun Olam Makers and from Jacobs Institute student storytellers Dapree Doyle and Nicole Kim.
James Pierce approaches design from multiple angles. With an academic background in human-computer interaction (he holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in this field), he is a designer and researcher who explores speculative design, design theory, and everyday social practices. At the Jacobs Institute, he teaches two courses that reach students at different points in their undergraduate pathways: Discovering Design offers an entry point to the field of design for lower-division students from across campus, while User Experience Design is an upper-level course that equips students with skills for designing information systems and other interactive experiences. Linking these courses — and all of James’ work —is a focus on thoughtful, creative inquiry. We asked James a few questions.
You both design and study interactive technology, and your work spans many activities, including making, researching, writing, and teaching. How does this hybrid perspective on design inform your work?
Often in my research I use making things as a mode of studying things — so the process of designing and making artifacts is a tool or technique for understanding, exploring, and critiquing. This way of doing research is sometimes referred to as research through design, critical making, or design inquiry. One consequence of this extremely hybrid way of working is that no two projects ever really feel the same, as each often requires its own unique synthesis of methods, techniques, perspectives, and intellectual frameworks. When it comes to teaching, I draw on this full range of perspectives. Oftentimes in a single class we will move from researching users, to conceptual explorations, to physical prototypes, to critiquing projects.
Some of your work has included thinking about how designers might creatively grapple with the implications of new technologies. Here at the Jacobs Institute, one of the things we often talk about is finding balance between what can be and what should be. Could you share some thoughts on that balance, and designers’ role with regards to it?
No matter what area of design you work in, it is always necessary to frame and reframe the problem or issue at hand, particularly at the early stages of design. And this is no less true when a client comes to you with a very clearly defined problem! Often they don’t know what they want or need until they see some different options or possible final solutions. One of the challenges I face in teaching, particularly students who come from an engineering background, is that students often want to jump straight to a solution. My job is to help them learn to slow down and really grapple with the problems and constraints — and consider different possible outcomes and effects, or a particular line of inquiry or outcome, before they start building circuits or deciding which buttons go where.
Given UC Berkeley’s rich history with social activism and ethical issues, my classes also encourage students to think about the broader implications of their work. Students are taught to consider not only expected users, but also the many other stakeholders or constituents that may be directly or indirectly affected.
You teach classes with an interdisciplinary perspective, including Discovering Design, which is open to students across campus and serves as an entry point to the broad world of design. Can you tell us a bit more about that class? Do any “discoveries” stand out to you from this experience?
Discovering Design is an extremely enjoyable class to teach because it introduces so many facets of design — graphic design, interaction design, product design, speculative design, design methods, architecture, art, and more. Each area is introduced with hands-on activities, ranging from short design projects, to form studies, to observation activities. What stands out for me is seeing students discover which aspects of design they are most drawn to. Some students realize they are most interested in interaction design and use their course projects to develop their interaction design portfolios and apply for jobs in the field. Others find they are more interested in user research and design methods, and pursue graduate programs in these areas. It’s exciting to see students continue to take Jacobs coursework after getting their hands dirty playing around in the different areas of design that this course introduces them to.
What are you working on, or thinking about, right now? Any projects you’re particularly excited about?
At the moment I’m working on a project exploring the Internet of Things (IoT). But instead of starting with all of the hopeful aspects of IoT, we start with various points of anxiety: overstimulation, distrust, creepiness, and so on. From there I’ve been designing a wide range of artifacts designed to engage outside participants in discussing network anxieties. These early stages of a project are always quite exciting — as well as anxious — because it is unclear where exactly where the work will end up.
UC Berkeley provides a unique context for design. Does this context play a role in your work? What insights or advice would you give to someone interested in exploring Berkeley’s design ecosystem?
In Discovering Design we devote an entire week to discussing and analyzing the politics and ethics of design, from everyday things like high heels and toothpicks to more specialized and sometime hidden things like 3D printable guns and redlining practices. I find Berkeley students to be particularly adept at engaging design and innovation from a political and ethical perspective, perhaps because of the university’s emphases on both societal impact and innovation. My own work almost always explicitly engages these political and ethical dimensions of design. But every designer must consider these aspects to some extent.
My recommendation to undergraduate students who are interested in continuing to explore design opportunities at Berkeley is that they start with the obvious and consider all of the different courses offered at Jacobs. But after that, I always advise my students to forge connections between other class and disciplines on campus. For example, taking an anthropology class is useful for design anthropology and user research. Cognitive science classes can make you a better usability expert.
I also stress that the design skills and mindsets learned at Jacobs are applicable to virtually any area in which they end up working and practicing, because design can also be understood as a fundamental sort of human activity. So I encourage students to also be on the lookout for ways to apply design thinking and techniques to other areas, including their major area of study and other interests they have — whether that’s social activism, a startup idea, or how they organize their desk and closet.
The Bay Area is a global center of design activity, from Silicon Valley innovations to the urban manufacturing projects that marry craft and technology in San Francisco and Oakland. For Berkeley students, opportunities to explore this rich local ecosystem can powerfully complement their coursework, offering close-up looks at design concepts in practice. This spring, a pair of program series at the Jacobs Institute — Design Field Notes, a talk series that invites practitioners to share their work in a Jacobs Hall studio, and Design Field Trips, which allow students to visit professional design spaces — aimed to expand these opportunities, linking the institute’s student community with the Bay Area’s constant flow of new ideas.
The Design Field Notes series, which first launched in fall 2016, comprised nine talks over the course of the spring semester. Reflecting the series’ goal of offering insights into practices across a broad design landscape, speakers shared work in architecture, product design, design research, and a range of other fields. In an informal studio setting, their audiences, which included students from diverse departments, got an inside look at these speakers’ recent projects, often adding their own questions or ideas to the conversation.
Pearl Automation’s Jorge Fino and Tyler Mincey (left) were among the speakers; students looked at Pearl products (center). The talks drew wide-ranging audiences (right).
While the speakers’ backgrounds spanned a wide range of fields,common themes appeared across the talks. Many speakers touched on the role of cultural contexts in design, from 99% Invisibleproducer Avery Trufelman, who explored the concept of “drift” as she traced how objects had taken on different meanings throughout their lifetimes, to Montaag principal Per Selvaag, who prompted audience members to think through their own cultural positioning and its effects on the designs they produced.
A number of talks also explored the hybrid processes that shape 21st-century practice, offering insights into areas like smart product design. Matter Global’s Justin Porcano, for example, walked the audience through the design processes behind two recent projects that linked industrial and interface design (a showerhead that tracks water usage and a wearable for Carnival cruise passengers), while Pearl Automation’s Jorge Fino and Tyler Mincey outlined how the tools they build for cars reflect a set of core design values that guide both software and hardware decisions. Beyond the realm of smart consumer products, this emphasis on linking physical and digital design emerged in a variety of talks, with practitioners offering their takes on navigating an increasingly hybrid design landscape.
For students hoping to get an on-the-ground view of this landscape, the launch of the Design Field Trips series offered a unique opportunity. While DesignField Notes talks bring discussions of real-world processes into a Jacobs Hall studio, the Design Field Trips series serves as the flip side of that equation,offering students a chance to see the sites in which these processes play out. “If you can actually go and see a design process, it’s a lot easier to grasp and be inspired by it,” says Amy Dinh, the Jacobs Institute’s student services advisor and the coordinator of the Design Field Trips series.
Students at the field trip to Cooper’s offices (photo courtesy of Haruko Ayabe).
Over the spring semester, students headed to three unique sites of design activity: the San Jose Museum of Art, to see the exhibition Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial; the new offices of design firm Cooper; and Autodesk’s Pier 9 facility. The three trips offered opportunities to explore both products and processes of interdisciplinary design innovation — and to contextualize these experiences in relation to their work at Berkeley. At the San Jose Museum of Art, for example, students saw works from wide-ranging design fields, from architecture to textiles, as a docent discussed the techniques and technologies involved in creating them. Particularly for students interested in novel intersections of design and cutting-edge technology, the inclusion of projects like 3D-printed glass vessels provided inspiring reference points.
Other reference points came in moments of interaction with practitioners themselves. At Cooper, students took part in a workshop, getting a feel for how design firm employees might approach a client project, before talking to Cooper team members — including a Berkeley alumna—about career paths within the field. “Going to a design firm, seeing people who are doing this professionally, was really good for students to see,” says Dinh. “They talked about the design process, the pathways to become a designer—all these things that students have a lot of questions about.”
For many students, the tangibility of these experiences added to their impact. At Pier 9, students made connections between the tools they use at Jacobs Hall and Autodesk’s more advanced machines, passing around project samples as they discussed different fabrication processes. For Emily Hill, a first-year student in cognitive science, these examples offered a look at how she might connect different interests. “Our guide showed us a model drone made with Project Dreamcatcher, a smart CAD system developed under Autodesk. Dreamcatcher solves design problems by optimizing design solutions based on given goals and constraints,” she explains. “I am passionate about both design and machine learning, and have always been looking for joint applications between these two areas. And Eureka! This is it!”
As both the Design Field Trips and Design Field Notes series continue to grow, facilitating these “Eureka!” moments will remain central to the programs’ goals. Both students and practitioners who have participated in the two series speak to the value of venturing beyond their everyday settings and exchanging ideas. For Olivia Ting, an MFA student in art practice, participating in field trips this spring fostered newfound “access and awareness of these places in the Bay Area design scene.” She notes that these experiences have had continuing influence as she develops her practice on campus: “[The events] that I attended,” she says, “offered me much inspiration for future projects.”
Work in design in the Bay Area? Interested in hosting a Design Field Trip or giving a Design Field Notes talk? Let us know — we’d love to connect!
Adam Hutz is a doctoral candidate in rhetoric, whose research focuses on the ways in which we map virtual spaces. When he’s not working on that research, he can often be found at Jacobs Hall or the CITRIS Invention Lab: he’s woven hands-on making into his graduate experience, participating in Jacobs Institute Chief Learning Officer Eric Paulos’ Critical Makingcourse (first as a student, and more recently as a graduate student instructor) and taking on projects like developing assistive technologies. We talked to Adam about how rhetoric and design relate, and what he’s learned from bringing them together.
You work across a wide range of practices and disciplines, from critical theory to hands-on making. Does your work in your home department — rhetoric — inform your work in design and fabrication? On the flip side, do design and fabrication practices inform your work in rhetoric?
Adam in a Critical Making course session.
I think, in an abstract sort of way, that “design” and “rhetoric” have a lot in common from the very beginning, and so I see them as being in constant dialogue with each other. Both disciplines concern themselves with “appearances” — how things come across to particular readers in particular contexts — and this is true whether you’re looking at a monument, a painting, a poem, or a political speech. Stepping back a bit, it’s easy to see how the disciplines of “rhetoric” and “design” actually study the same basic building blocks of expression: artisans combine signs to explore ideas of greater and greater complexity. And this works across the board, whether you’re thinking about the specific tessellations in the marble blocks that make up the Taj Mahal; or how particular rhythms invoked in a Fleetwood Mac outro unsettle the rest of the song; or even how a smartphone’s beveled screen makes an argument for or in contrast with the phone’s prior generations.
And the similarities between design and rhetoric don’t end at the level of semiology, either: both disciplines are difficult to define (and explain!), and both seem to at least attempt to describe nearly everything that there is in the world. If design is the study of “all things human-produced,” then rhetoric must be the study of “all things human-expressed” — which may, now that I think about it, actually comfortably include the former.
When I first took Eric Paulos’ course Critical Making in spring 2015, every new skill registered as a new kind of language to me: you would learn the “discourse” of the laser cutter, and then the discourse of the 3D printer, and so on until you knew all of the languages of making. This is, for me, one important way that rhetoric informs making — the fact that I will think of each new kind of “making” in the language of language itself. Making informs rhetoric, on the other hand, by reminding me that the physical world is ultimately responsible for nearly all of the lines of inquiry I produce. That is to say, in the ivory tower it’s easy forget that only through the specific material actions of the body do thoughts become manifest in the world, and only through an understanding of the physical processes behind reading, writing, speaking, and thinking can one fully engage with philosophy.
Your research has looked at virtual spaces and the ways that we map these spaces. In the design field, technologies from augmented/virtual reality to novel conversational interfaces are currently raising interesting conversations around notions of space and how spaces are designed and experienced. Could you talk a bit about your interests in virtual spaces, and how this might relate to work in design and technology?
One of my favorite “authors of the virtual” is a scholar named Jonathan Crary, and one of the reasons I like him so much is that he somehow manages to write compellingly about our current epoch while almost never mentioning any technology built after the mid-1800s. But in a rare move in an introductory chapter of probably his most well-known book, Techniques of the Observer, he breaks away from his historian’s oculus and asks a few dense questions about what it means to “observe” in the 21st century:
“The most urgent questions, though, are larger ones. How is the body, including the observing body, becoming a component of new machines, economies, apparatuses, whether social, libidinal, or technological? In what ways is subjectivity becoming a precarious condition of interface between rationalized systems of exchange and networks of information?”
These (admittedly tough to parse) lines betray Crary’s feeling that the “human” can be easily washed away by the tumult of the 21st century. He argues in his book that, where once the eye could be taken as the dominant and undisputed arbiter of reality, where seeing was believing and believing seeing, today we have become adrift in incomprehensible streams of data, built environments, white noise, alienating social networks, labor divorced from the physical, and an unyielding array of interpellations by distant and often synthetic beings. What even are humans anymore among all of this new chatter? And, moreover, where are they?
I’m interested in how we map virtual spaces because “mapping” seems to me to be what people do in order to understand where they are in the world, and it also seems to be a subject profoundly complicated by the introduction of virtual space into the human experience. Where are we when the land fades away to reveal the limitless Cartesian grid of the holodeck? Do we continue to “map” the virtual until the very process of mapping breaks down? And what then? These are all questions I obsess over — questions of “place” — in my own writing and research.
Identity Armor, a prototype from the spring 2017 Critical Making course.
This past spring, you were the GSI (graduate student instructor) for Critical Making, a course taught by the Jacobs Institute’s chief learning officer, Eric Paulos. Can you tell us a bit more about that class, and your experience helping facilitate it?
For me, Critical Making was the beginning of a kind of awakening towards the material I underwent about halfway through my doctoral career at Berkeley — and also incidentally the first course I took in any building north of Moffitt. The class had been in development for only a few semesters, and was at that point still taught in the Invention Lab. We didn’t yet have access to the massive reservoir of tools and resources provided by the Jacobs Institute. For 3D printers, we had three Afinia H-Series models to choose among. Still, they were enough to communicate what I feel is the most powerful idea behind 3D printing: that, with a little training, the right software, and a few hours of access, any person with a creative spirit can draw objects directly out of the ether of their imagination and into the world of things.
This past semester I had the unique pleasure of watching 37 students make all of the discoveries I made, plus many, many more, empowered as they were by the full might of the Jacobs Institute’s brilliant staff and trove of cutting-edge tools. Following Dr. Paulos’ guidance, our students were invited to push the envelope of what was possible (and sometimes also what was advisable) to discover and develop new ways of challenging the status quo in all areas of society. One group created “growable clothing” to undermine and critique fast fashion; one group created a haunting monument of a hand that, when touched, would vocalize the desensitized emails students get disclosing where assaults had taken place on campus; one group made a fully-functional rickshaw and accompanying app, called “Uberik,” to call attention to the labor practices of an unnamed company in Silicon Valley; one group created “identity armor,” which, at the push of a button, would raise dark shades and a voice modulator in front of the user’s face to protect them against iris scans and voice capture — insinuating the possibility of a dystopian future (and present) where such protections are essential; and dozens more provocative, thoughtful, and technically demanding projects too numerous to name here.
Critical Making strives to push against the presumption students sometimes have going into prototyping courses that design has to be assistive, or at least “pleasing,” by alternatively asking: “What if a design was willfully difficult? Inconvenient? Needlessly complex? Or called attention to an absurdity that’s often overlooked?” The results, I can safely say, have been illuminating.
What are you working on right now? Any pet projects?
Always! This weekend, incidentally, I was working on an assistive walker for my dog, Irma (yes, a “pet project”… please forgive me). I used Fusion to model the device, Illustrator to finish the cut files, and a Jacobs-provided laser cutter to punch out the pieces from plywood. I then tested the mockup for fit, and plan to use Jacobs’ OMAX waterjet cutter (on which I was just recently trained!) to cut the final design out of aluminum when I’m certain the files are ready.
Another piece of enabling technology I’m working on right now is a personal elevator to be used for helping individuals with limited leg strength ascend from the floor after falls. I’m developing this machine in league with Berkeley’s EnableTech, a club that meets in Jacobs during the spring and fall semesters, and we’re excited to report we just ran our first few successful test-lifts with our need-knower at the end of last semester. Our next goal is to make the lift more portable by replacing the heavy frame with aluminum (as opposed to water-jet steel), and power it using pneumatics.
Finally, I’ve been assisting with a project called “Helping Hands: Playground Edition” to help build a modular prosthetic device for kids that, in contrast to most prosthetic hands available today, can be used in playground settings for hanging, swinging, throwing, and catching.
What’s your favorite thing that you’ve made while at Berkeley?
For my team’s final Critical Making project in 2015, I did the mechanical development for Hugwear, a “wearable pet” designed to help calm down kids with difficulty managing their emotions. It’s a simple device: it curls up and makes sad noises when it detects its user is upset, and uncurls and makes happy noises when pet. But it was my first introduction to the world of animatronics, and I had a lot of fun showing off the creature to dozens of kids at two different Maker Faires — one in San Mateo, and one in Washington, D.C. — and it is still one of my favorite ideas to date.
