In celebration of UC Berkeley’s 150th birthday, we’re exploring Berkeley-driven design innovation from 1868 to today. Over the course of the year, we’ll take a look at researchers, creators, and makers who have been part of Berkeley’s “perpetual renaissance,” drawing connections across this timeline. In this post, we’ll focus on innovation in infrastructure.
When the earliest precursors to today’s College of Engineering (then known as the colleges of Mechanic Arts, Mining, and Civil Engineering) were founded as part of the original University of California in 1868, a focus on infrastructure — power, bridges, and other essentials for a growing state — could be seen in various components of the core curriculum. The new university’s first students often applied their lessons in a hands-on setting: advanced engineering students were even responsible for keeping the university’s power plant running as part of their shop course.
These students, and their professors, played key roles as an era of technical innovations reshaped infrastructure in California and beyond. When California began to pioneer electrical infrastructure in the late 1800s (Berkeley’s neighboring city of San Francisco, for example, boasted the world’s first electric street lights), Berkeley professor Clarence Cory launched the university’s first electrical engineering courses, aimed at meeting the state’s growing demand in this area. Working with colleagues, Cory also established an electrical laboratory, supplying light and power to Berkeley’s campus. During this period on campus, the college’s engineers helped lead the development of high-voltage power transmission technologies, making it possible for San Francisco and Los Angeles to access hydroelectric power from the Sierra Nevada in the 1910s.
Perhaps it was unsurprising, then, that Berkeley innovators would also play pioneering roles a few decades later, as a new form of infrastructure — that of the fledgling field of computing—began to take shape. In 1977, for example, Berkeley graduate student Bill Joy (who would go on to co-found Sun Microsystems) played a key role in releasing Berkeley Software Distribution, an influential UNIX operating system. He encouraged hackers to improve on the software, laying the groundwork for a new approach to software development and distribution that would come to characterize the Open Source movement. As Open Source grew, developers contributed public, shared code that would be adapted for many uses, creating a broad base of what researchers term “digital infrastructure.”
Today, digital and physical infrastructure are increasingly linked: smart buildings automatically control systems like heating and security; urban planners look to insights from big data and predictive algorithms; residents find transportation with the help of smartphone apps. At Berkeley, design innovators are working at the cutting edge of this move toward hybrid infrastructure, often with a critical, human-centered eye — from College of Environmental Design faculty member Nicholas de Monchaux’s explorations of data and urban systems in Local Code to the Swarm Lab’s research on applications in the Internet of Things.
A student presents his team’s concept in Reimagining Mobility.
At the Jacobs Institute, this growing field has spurred the launch of new curriculum. A collaboration with Ford Motor Company, for example, has served as the foundation for Reimagining Mobility, an advanced Design Innovation course that was launched in fall 2016. In this course, students from diverse disciplines conceptualize novel interactions between people and transportation modes, often focusing on autonomous vehicles. Looking roughly a decade into the future, student teams consider trends that will shape infrastructure — from global urbanization to climate change—and propose concepts that have included an autonomous platform for transporting cargo, an interface for global nomads to access on-demand transit pods, and tools to increase the accessibility of autonomous vehicles for passengers with disabilities.
Elsewhere in Jacobs Hall, advanced civil and environmental engineering students are experimenting with new technologies to create devices and systems for smart infrastructure. In Design of Cyber-Physical Systems, a course taught by Scott Moura at Jacobs Hall, students design and prototype large-scale, technology-intensive systems for applications such as transportation and energy use, gaining skills with tools like sensors and microcontrollers in the process. Their projects have ranged from smart hydration monitors to a system for optimizing home energy-usage management.
As Berkeley and its fellow UC campuses look to the next 150 years, they aim to continue to lead in building infrastructure for California and the world. This includes the UC’s own home turf: in 2014, for example, the UC system opened a solar farm to help power its campuses, representing the largest university solar purchase to date and a step toward the university’s broader goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2025. It’s a far cry from the power plant that Berkeley students were tasked with running in the 1800s, but student leadership remains a constant: from designing transit solutions to prototyping smart energy monitors, Berkeley students are helping to build infrastructure that makes a difference for people and communities.
When the earliest precursors to today’s College of Engineering (then known as the colleges of Mechanic Arts, Mining, and Civil Engineering) were founded as part of the original University of California in 1868, a focus on infrastructure — power, bridges, and other essentials for a growing state — could be seen in various components of the core curriculum. The new university’s first students often applied their lessons in a hands-on setting: advanced engineering students were even responsible for keeping the university’s power plant running as part of their shop course.
These students, and their professors, played key roles as an era of technical innovations reshaped infrastructure in California and beyond. When California began to pioneer electrical infrastructure in the late 1800s (Berkeley’s neighboring city of San Francisco, for example, boasted the world’s first electric street lights), Berkeley professor Clarence Cory launched the university’s first electrical engineering courses, aimed at meeting the state’s growing demand in this area. Working with colleagues, Cory also established an electrical laboratory, supplying light and power to Berkeley’s campus. During this period on campus, the college’s engineers helped lead the development of high-voltage power transmission technologies, making it possible for San Francisco and Los Angeles to access hydroelectric power from the Sierra Nevada in the 1910s.
Perhaps it was unsurprising, then, that Berkeley innovators would also play pioneering roles a few decades later, as a new form of infrastructure — that of the fledgling field of computing—began to take shape. In 1977, for example, Berkeley graduate student Bill Joy (who would go on to co-found Sun Microsystems) played a key role in releasing Berkeley Software Distribution, an influential UNIX operating system. He encouraged hackers to improve on the software, laying the groundwork for a new approach to software development and distribution that would come to characterize the Open Source movement. As Open Source grew, developers contributed public, shared code that would be adapted for many uses, creating a broad base of what researchers term “digital infrastructure.”
Today, digital and physical infrastructure are increasingly linked: smart buildings automatically control systems like heating and security; urban planners look to insights from big data and predictive algorithms; residents find transportation with the help of smartphone apps. At Berkeley, design innovators are working at the cutting edge of this move toward hybrid infrastructure, often with a critical, human-centered eye — from College of Environmental Design faculty member Nicholas de Monchaux’s explorations of data and urban systems in Local Code to the Swarm Lab’s research on applications in the Internet of Things.
A student presents his team’s concept in Reimagining Mobility.
At the Jacobs Institute, this growing field has spurred the launch of new curriculum. A collaboration with Ford Motor Company, for example, has served as the foundation for Reimagining Mobility, an advanced Design Innovation course that was launched in fall 2016. In this course, students from diverse disciplines conceptualize novel interactions between people and transportation modes, often focusing on autonomous vehicles. Looking roughly a decade into the future, student teams consider trends that will shape infrastructure — from global urbanization to climate change—and propose concepts that have included an autonomous platform for transporting cargo, an interface for global nomads to access on-demand transit pods, and tools to increase the accessibility of autonomous vehicles for passengers with disabilities.
Elsewhere in Jacobs Hall, advanced civil and environmental engineering students are experimenting with new technologies to create devices and systems for smart infrastructure. In Design of Cyber-Physical Systems, a course taught by Scott Moura at Jacobs Hall, students design and prototype large-scale, technology-intensive systems for applications such as transportation and energy use, gaining skills with tools like sensors and microcontrollers in the process. Their projects have ranged from smart hydration monitors to a system for optimizing home energy-usage management.
As Berkeley and its fellow UC campuses look to the next 150 years, they aim to continue to lead in building infrastructure for California and the world. This includes the UC’s own home turf: in 2014, for example, the UC system opened a solar farm to help power its campuses, representing the largest university solar purchase to date and a step toward the university’s broader goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2025. It’s a far cry from the power plant that Berkeley students were tasked with running in the 1800s, but student leadership remains a constant: from designing transit solutions to prototyping smart energy monitors, Berkeley students are helping to build infrastructure that makes a difference for people and communities.
This spring, ten diverse student teams accessed project funding, Maker Passes, and other resources through a new grant program: the Jacobs Institute Innovation Catalysts. The program, made possible by the Eustace-Kwan Family Foundation, aims to help student designers unlock new potential in their projects. In classes, student organizations, and independently, students are constantly pitching ideas and producing rapid prototypes, and the Innovation Catalysts program provides a pathway for them to go further — whether that means building on an emerging idea or turning an early-stage prototype into a functional product.
The grant program, which is offered jointly by the Jacobs Institute and the CITRIS Invention Lab, is rooted in a focus on investing in Berkeley’s student design community. Reflecting this focus, the institute’s 14-member Student Advisory Board led the selection process for the program, learning about evaluation and grantmaking best practices before working to craft a portfolio of projects with strong potential for impact. “We wanted students to have the chance to empower their peers and gain experience in philanthropic giving,” explains Amy Dinh, the Jacobs Institute’s student services advisor and the manager of the Innovation Catalysts program. Working with the Jacobs Institute’s leadership, the Student Advisory Board selected ten project teams — collectively representing 18 campus departments, from physics to cognitive science — to join the program’s inaugural cohort.
Spark grantee Soravis Prakkamakul, whose project lets musicians control musical interfaces using facial expressions, presents during a cohort kickoff meeting.
Four of these teams received Spark grants: small grants, of up to $500, meant to support the exploration of open-ended concepts or the growth of nascent projects. These projects ranged widely, with teams taking on problems that included low-cost cancer screening and contamination in biochemical processing. Experimentation was encouraged: student Naser Abdelrahman drew from emerging medical research to conceptualize how developers might build customized solutions for people living with limb paralysis, for example, while Soravis Prakkamakul explored how musicians could control audio effects with just their facial expressions.
An additional six teams received Ignite grants, up to $2000, meant to push existing projects to the next stage. Many of these projects had first been developed in fall courses held at Jacobs Hall, including Bioengineering Senior Design Projects, Critical Practices, and Digital Fabrication Everywhere. The Ignite grant offered a structure for continuing work on these projects even after the semester’s end. “We wanted to help students sustain the momentum in their projects,” notes Dinh. “Many great first prototypes or ideas seen at the Jacobs Design Showcases remain in that stage because, even if passion and potential are there, it can be difficult to continue a project without the support provided by a course, funding, or teammates. We wanted to see how much more robust our grantees’ projects could get, if given several more months of work and other resources.”
The Bank of Hysteria installation at the Jacobs Spring Design Showcase.
Several projects supported through these grants focused on engagement with social issues, using creative design to promote conversation. The Climate Kids team, for example, used the semester to work on developing a project they had started in Kimiko Ryokai’s fall Tangible User Interfaces course, focused on using gamified interfaces to educate children about climate change. The spring term allowed them to think through the best form for their project, ultimately moving toward the concept of an interactive board game. Similarly, the team behind a project called the Bank of Hysteria spent the spring working to refine and scale up an interactive installation they had created in the fall. Using Maker Pass resources, they created a more polished and automated version of this physical installation, which aims to validate female anger by collecting messages from womxn, femmes, and gender-nonconforming community members and printing them as “rage receipts.” They also strove to expand their project’s impact beyond campus, launching a digital home for message collection and resources for emotional support. “One of the biggest parts that we’ve been working on is our website,” explains team member Phyllis Thai. “We know there are a lot of resources out there, but there isn’t really one space where they can be accessed.”
Another theme that emerged among the cohort was design for healthcare and clinical settings, an area ripe for impact-focused innovation. The SurgeCare team, which in the fall semester had developed a prototype for a low-cost method of surgical instrument reprocessing, used their grant to develop testing protocols and assembly instructions for their device, aimed at moving toward implementation in low-resource settings. Although they hit some unexpected obstacles along the way — unrest in Ethiopia posted significant challenges to communicating with their partners there, for example — they were thrilled when they learned that a group of graduate students at Ethiopia’s Jimma University had used their instructions to easily and affordably build their own version of the prototype.
Here in the Bay Area, fellow grantees Dan Beckerman and Billy Kim moved between Jacobs Hall’s makerspace and labs at UCSF and San Francisco General Hospital, exploring how best to 3D print anatomical models for orthopedic surgeons to use in surgery preparation, procedure simulation, and patient education. “The facilities at Jacobs Hall have been instrumental in conducting this project and bringing it to the place we are now…these [3D printers] are things that hospitals can’t just go out and acquire for testing,” says Beckerman. “We’re able to utilize these resources to test on these printers and inform hospitals on how to make better and more efficient investments.”
Above left, graduate students at Jimma University in Ethiopia demonstrate SurgeCare’s prototype, which they were able to easily and affordably build using the team’s presentation. Above right, sample 3D-printed precision bone models.
The availability of 3D printers and other makerspace tools played a major role in many projects’ development over the course of the spring. The team of students behind a project termed JARL (Just Another Robotic Limb), for example, used Jacobs Hall’s labs to refine their prototype for a low-cost, wheelchair-mounted robotic arm, which they are designing collaboratively with a local need-knower with quadriplegia. They are currently working on a slimmer iteration with metal parts, ultimately hoping to make the design open-source. Meanwhile, Aaron Pomerantz, a PhD student in integrative biology, has sought to use makerspace equipment to broaden access to science, developing a “Lab in a Backpack” equipped with low-cost scientific instruments. He used the spring grant period to conduct field testing in the Peruvian Amazon, using a centrifuge he designed and 3D-printed at Jacobs Hall, and to plan additions to to this affordable kit for field research and STEM education.
Aaron Pomerantz demonstrates low-cost scientific instruments at the Jacobs Spring Design Showcase.
While Pomerantz may have traveled the furthest, over the course of the semester teams ventured across and beyond campus to gather feedback, conduct field tests, and seek input, with Jacobs Hall and the Invention Lab serving as a home base. From the JARL team’s meetings with their need-knower to Beckerman and Kim’s surgery simulations in San Francisco, the teams kept their eyes trained on real-world context, engaging deeply with experts and potential users. “One of the highlights was the mid-semester check-in, when each grant team shared what they had been up to since the kickoff,” says Dinh. “I was impressed by how many people the grantees had reached out to for assistance — not just staff at Jacobs and the CITRIS Invention Lab, but also fellow students, professional game designers, and researchers at other universities. It can take a village to develop a new project.”
As the Innovation Catalysts program moves into a new academic year, Dinh hopes the program’s own “village” will continue to grow, with its inaugural cohort becoming mentors and sources of support to future grantees and to Berkeley’s student design community more generally. It’s well on its way: applications for the fall grant cohort will open this summer, inviting a new group of innovators to bring their ideas to life.
This spring, ten diverse student teams accessed project funding, Maker Passes, and other resources through a new grant program: the Jacobs Institute Innovation Catalysts. The program, made possible by the Eustace-Kwan Family Foundation, aims to help student designers unlock new potential in their projects. In classes, student organizations, and independently, students are constantly pitching ideas and producing rapid prototypes, and the Innovation Catalysts program provides a pathway for them to go further — whether that means building on an emerging idea or turning an early-stage prototype into a functional product.
The grant program, which is offered jointly by the Jacobs Institute and the CITRIS Invention Lab, is rooted in a focus on investing in Berkeley’s student design community. Reflecting this focus, the institute’s 14-member Student Advisory Board led the selection process for the program, learning about evaluation and grantmaking best practices before working to craft a portfolio of projects with strong potential for impact. “We wanted students to have the chance to empower their peers and gain experience in philanthropic giving,” explains Amy Dinh, the Jacobs Institute’s student services advisor and the manager of the Innovation Catalysts program. Working with the Jacobs Institute’s leadership, the Student Advisory Board selected ten project teams — collectively representing 18 campus departments, from physics to cognitive science — to join the program’s inaugural cohort.
Spark grantee Soravis Prakkamakul, whose project lets musicians control musical interfaces using facial expressions, presents during a cohort kickoff meeting.
Four of these teams received Spark grants: small grants, of up to $500, meant to support the exploration of open-ended concepts or the growth of nascent projects. These projects ranged widely, with teams taking on problems that included low-cost cancer screening and contamination in biochemical processing. Experimentation was encouraged: student Naser Abdelrahman drew from emerging medical research to conceptualize how developers might build customized solutions for people living with limb paralysis, for example, while Soravis Prakkamakul explored how musicians could control audio effects with just their facial expressions.
An additional six teams received Ignite grants, up to $2000, meant to push existing projects to the next stage. Many of these projects had first been developed in fall courses held at Jacobs Hall, including Bioengineering Senior Design Projects, Critical Practices, and Digital Fabrication Everywhere. The Ignite grant offered a structure for continuing work on these projects even after the semester’s end. “We wanted to help students sustain the momentum in their projects,” notes Dinh. “Many great first prototypes or ideas seen at the Jacobs Design Showcases remain in that stage because, even if passion and potential are there, it can be difficult to continue a project without the support provided by a course, funding, or teammates. We wanted to see how much more robust our grantees’ projects could get, if given several more months of work and other resources.”
The Bank of Hysteria installation at the Jacobs Spring Design Showcase.
Several projects supported through these grants focused on engagement with social issues, using creative design to promote conversation. The Climate Kids team, for example, used the semester to work on developing a project they had started in Kimiko Ryokai’s fall Tangible User Interfaces course, focused on using gamified interfaces to educate children about climate change. The spring term allowed them to think through the best form for their project, ultimately moving toward the concept of an interactive board game. Similarly, the team behind a project called the Bank of Hysteria spent the spring working to refine and scale up an interactive installation they had created in the fall. Using Maker Pass resources, they created a more polished and automated version of this physical installation, which aims to validate female anger by collecting messages from womxn, femmes, and gender-nonconforming community members and printing them as “rage receipts.” They also strove to expand their project’s impact beyond campus, launching a digital home for message collection and resources for emotional support. “One of the biggest parts that we’ve been working on is our website,” explains team member Phyllis Thai. “We know there are a lot of resources out there, but there isn’t really one space where they can be accessed.”
Another theme that emerged among the cohort was design for healthcare and clinical settings, an area ripe for impact-focused innovation. The SurgeCare team, which in the fall semester had developed a prototype for a low-cost method of surgical instrument reprocessing, used their grant to develop testing protocols and assembly instructions for their device, aimed at moving toward implementation in low-resource settings. Although they hit some unexpected obstacles along the way — unrest in Ethiopia posted significant challenges to communicating with their partners there, for example — they were thrilled when they learned that a group of graduate students at Ethiopia’s Jimma University had used their instructions to easily and affordably build their own version of the prototype.
Here in the Bay Area, fellow grantees Dan Beckerman and Billy Kim moved between Jacobs Hall’s makerspace and labs at UCSF and San Francisco General Hospital, exploring how best to 3D print anatomical models for orthopedic surgeons to use in surgery preparation, procedure simulation, and patient education. “The facilities at Jacobs Hall have been instrumental in conducting this project and bringing it to the place we are now…these [3D printers] are things that hospitals can’t just go out and acquire for testing,” says Beckerman. “We’re able to utilize these resources to test on these printers and inform hospitals on how to make better and more efficient investments.”
Above left, graduate students at Jimma University in Ethiopia demonstrate SurgeCare’s prototype, which they were able to easily and affordably build using the team’s presentation. Above right, sample 3D-printed precision bone models.
The availability of 3D printers and other makerspace tools played a major role in many projects’ development over the course of the spring. The team of students behind a project termed JARL (Just Another Robotic Limb), for example, used Jacobs Hall’s labs to refine their prototype for a low-cost, wheelchair-mounted robotic arm, which they are designing collaboratively with a local need-knower with quadriplegia. They are currently working on a slimmer iteration with metal parts, ultimately hoping to make the design open-source. Meanwhile, Aaron Pomerantz, a PhD student in integrative biology, has sought to use makerspace equipment to broaden access to science, developing a “Lab in a Backpack” equipped with low-cost scientific instruments. He used the spring grant period to conduct field testing in the Peruvian Amazon, using a centrifuge he designed and 3D-printed at Jacobs Hall, and to plan additions to to this affordable kit for field research and STEM education.
Aaron Pomerantz demonstrates low-cost scientific instruments at the Jacobs Spring Design Showcase.
While Pomerantz may have traveled the furthest, over the course of the semester teams ventured across and beyond campus to gather feedback, conduct field tests, and seek input, with Jacobs Hall and the Invention Lab serving as a home base. From the JARL team’s meetings with their need-knower to Beckerman and Kim’s surgery simulations in San Francisco, the teams kept their eyes trained on real-world context, engaging deeply with experts and potential users. “One of the highlights was the mid-semester check-in, when each grant team shared what they had been up to since the kickoff,” says Dinh. “I was impressed by how many people the grantees had reached out to for assistance — not just staff at Jacobs and the CITRIS Invention Lab, but also fellow students, professional game designers, and researchers at other universities. It can take a village to develop a new project.”
As the Innovation Catalysts program moves into a new academic year, Dinh hopes the program’s own “village” will continue to grow, with its inaugural cohort becoming mentors and sources of support to future grantees and to Berkeley’s student design community more generally. It’s well on its way: applications for the fall grant cohort will open this summer, inviting a new group of innovators to bring their ideas to life.
Since the Jacobs Institute’s launch in 2015, it has served as a gathering point for Berkeley’s diverse and ever-evolving design community. Students have long been at the center of this community, launching new clubs and initiatives in areas from human-centered methodology to virtual reality in the years leading up to the construction of Jacobs Hall. From the building’s opening, student leaders brought this energy to the space, immediately activating its studios with new ideas in courses, team meetings, hackathons, and more. Now, many of the students who were among the first to walk into Jacobs Hall have graduated, moving into new roles and forming the start of an alumni community that will continue to grow as each new class of Berkeley students connects with the Jacobs Institute and with the campus’ design ecosystem.
We talked to four members of this emergent group of alumni to learn about their design experiences at Berkeley — and how they’re drawing from these experiences as they move into roles beyond campus. The four recent graduates spotlighted here represent a broad swath of design fields and roles: collectively, they work in areas from user research to product design, for startups as well as large companies, and in cities from San Francisco to Detroit and even Amman, Jordan. Here’s what they had to say.
Jessica Chang ’17
Major: Cognitive Science
How were you involved with the Jacobs Institute and Berkeley’s design ecosystem as a student?
As a student, I was heavily involved with Jacobs in my last two years of college (2015–2017). I took a lot of the design classes held at Jacobs — Prototyping & Fabrication, Critical Making, Interactive Device Design, Bioinspired Design, Reimagining Slums, Navigating the Human Path, and Sketching & Visual Communication. I was also the communications designer at Jacobs and was heavily involved with designing templates for new Jacobs events.
What was your favorite design project you worked on while at Berkeley?
My favorite project I worked on was a bluetooth game controller. I had a lot of fun working with microcontrollers and accelerometers, and figuring out how to define heuristics for determining smooth rotations and jolts. I learned that I actually find maintaining messy electronics very fulfilling, even though many find it to be the most tedious process in building hardware. Maybe it’s the fact that I’d spend hours on tangling and untangling and soldering and debugging to finally end up with a tiny object that can do something way beyond its size.
What are you doing now? What does a typical day look like?
I’m currently a product designer at Samsara. We offer a full suite of sensors that monitors various data in fleets (such as in the trucking industry). A typical day starts with organizing the projects I’ll be working on that day, reading my emails, and looking through the resumes of designers I’ll be interviewing that day. After lunch, I have a few hours of heads-down design time, and I’ll schedule meetings with product managers or engineers to talk through my design. Depending on where I am in the design process, I could be showing them rough wireframes, mockups, or walking through use cases. Every day is different and we usually have fun after-work events towards the end of every week.
Were you always interested in going into the design field after graduation?
I knew I wanted to become a designer pretty early on in college. Initially I thought I wanted to be a software engineer, but after my first internship where I was able to design the feature I was working on, I decided that I had a lot more fun thinking about how to optimize the user experience and learning from how people use products. I spent the latter half of college doing various design internships and being exposed to various design roles — tech startups, service, creative agencies, etc.
Any advice for current Berkeley students who are interested in working in design or related fields after graduation?
Find what you’re interested in, whether it’s an industry or a specific part of design. Work on projects; they don’t even have to be associated with big names! Figure out your niche, or don’t if you don’t have one. Take internships at design agencies. Work abroad. Learn how to communicate with people, all kinds of people. I actually think that’s the most important quality of being a designer — being able to really understand people, being open-minded, and putting yourself in places you normally wouldn’t.
Ankita Joshi ’17
Major: Mechanical Engineering
How were you involved with the Jacobs Institute and Berkeley’s design ecosystem as a student?
I had been involved with Jacobs from the very beginning and in a number of different ways! In fact, one of my student organizations, Socially Engaged Engineers, hosted its Social Impact Design-a-thon at Jacobs right when it opened. Since then, I’ve used the space for hosting many more events and student club meetings. Some of my favorite classes — Introduction to Product Design, Reimagining Slums, and Mechatronics — were at Jacobs Hall. I’ve spent entire days in the workshop working on my research, class projects, and personal projects as well! Along with all this, I really miss the speaker events at the Jacobs Institute because they’d invite professionals in the design field who I look up to, and provide the opportunity to actually meet and network with them!
What was your favorite design project you worked on while at Berkeley?
My mechanical engineering capstone project — The Roborrito! It was a robot that automated the burrito manufacturing process to create warm burritos based on customers’ orders. I enjoyed the process of ideating this robot and building it at the machine shop in Etcheverry. Towards the end of the semester, we started working in Jacob Hall’s third-floor kitchen to test the design with food. The capstone expo was also held at Jacobs, and it was a big hit!
What are you doing now? What does a typical day look like?
I am now a Design Release Engineer at General Motors. It is really hard to describe a typical day because my role changes based on what stage of the vehicle development process we are in. Sometimes my day is packed with meetings with different teams, sometimes I am visiting suppliers and plants to troubleshoot issues, and there are times when I at my desk reviewing and making design changes on parts.
Were you always interested in going into the design field after graduation?
Yes — I have always been interested in the intersection of engineering design, design thinking, and social impact. Being engaged with the Jacobs Institute and the mechanical engineering community at Cal has really helped me gain a variety of experiences in these fields and plan my future career.
Any advice for current Berkeley students who are interested in working in design or related fields after graduation?
Design is a very broad term — it covers art, business strategy, social impact, engineering, architecture, research, and more! So spend time to explore these fields, and figure out what design means to you and why you want to practice that sort of design.
Adam Mansour ’17
Major: Anthropology
How were you involved with the Jacobs Institute and Berkeley’s design ecosystem as a student?
My deepest involvement in the design ecosystem at Berkeley was through Berkeley Innovation, a club that focuses on human-centered design and meets at Jacobs Hall. The opportunity to work with companies and other students on design challenges outside of a classroom was invaluable, especially when paired with learnings in the design classes offered at Berkeley as well.
What was your favorite design project you worked on while at Berkeley?
My favorite design project at Berkeley was one for Needfinding (UGBA 190T). With the prompt to understand stress culture at Berkeley, my team focused on addressing the stress that stems from procrastination guilt. While projects around student life often tend toward navel-gazing, the opportunity to explore and test solutions for a problem so many of our peers faced was a refreshing experience.
What are you doing now? What does a typical day look like?
Since graduating, I’ve been working as a UX researcher at Google, primarily on a recruiting app called Hire. Most of my day is spent working with a great team of designers and product managers to better understand our users’ needs through interviews, usability and concept testing, and usage analytics.
Were you always interested in going into the design field after graduation?
I’d known I was interested in product design long before going to Berkeley, but hadn’t been exposed to design research as a field until my freshman year. As I became more immersed in both design and anthropology, the overlaps in how the two study people pointed to a clear career path. To me, design research was the perfect intersection of my interests: a way to exercise the critical lens of anthropology within the generative environment of product development.
Any advice for current Berkeley students who are interested in working in design or related fields after graduation?
A question I hear often is how someone with little-to-no design experience can catch a break. One of Berkeley’s greatest strengths is the diversity of perspectives it hosts. Exposing yourself to unfamiliar perspectives can help you identify the challenges people outside your bubbles face and the types problems you find most engaging. Working on projects in those spaces not only yields compelling stories to tell when looking for a design job, but can shed light on how you can leverage design thinking in any field you pursue.
Julia Solano ’16
Major: Engineering + Architecture (self-designed)
How were you involved with the Jacobs Institute and Berkeley’s design ecosystem as a student?
As a student, I was on the advisory committee for the Jacobs Institute and helped craft the Maker Pass. I was really involved in different design clubs on campus — I was partnership chair for Berkeley Innovation and helped create and manage the SHED with Design Engineering Collaborative. I also was a member of Virtual Reality @ Berkeley and was pretty involved in the startup ecosystem. I created my own major to study Design through Engineering and Architecture, so I got to experience design from both the College of Environmental Design and College of Engineering perspectives.
What was your favorite design project you worked on while at Berkeley?
I really enjoyed building an energy-generating rocking chair through the Interactive Seating Design class and making a maple seed-inspired airdrop device through Bioinspired Design! I also have a love/hate relationship with many of my architecture studios.
What are you doing now? What does a typical day look like?
I’m co-founding a humanitarian startup focused on youth engagement and community development. We’re in the process of launching a video social media app for social good, called Dandi, in the Middle East. I’m currently based in Amman, Jordan, and I do everything design and then some — user research and testing, UX and UI design, branding, marketing, and growth. There is no such thing as a typical day — I often bounce between visiting high schools around Jordan, designing UI in Figma, communicating with team members in Singapore and San Francisco, and collaborating with copywriters, producers, and community leaders in cafes. All while eating lots and lots of hummus and shawerma.
Were you always interested in going into the design field after graduation?
When I first applied to Cal I didn’t know what design was. I knew I liked physics, wanted to be creative, and didn’t want to starve. Halfway through, I realized I really liked making things tangible — whether through building mobile apps, haptic jewelry, solar charging centers, museum exhibits, or chairs. I’m really thankful I had the opportunity to experience designing in different contexts before graduating: I worked on a finance startup while studying abroad in Tallinn, Estonia; as a UX/Design Thinking intern at a large tech company in the East Bay; and as a graphic and UX design intern at a production and design agency in San Francisco. I apply skills and lessons from each of those roles in my work today.
What got me really interested in designing for social good was working with an NGO called Saha Global to implement a solar charging center in a rural village two hours outside of Tamale, Ghana. It was that experience that opened my eyes to the power of community input in design. It amazed me how something done in as little as three months could bring a sustainable business and renewable energy to 600 people in a community.
Any advice for current Berkeley students who are interested in working in design or related fields after graduation?
Follow what you’re curious about — the stuff that isn’t due but still distracts you from your problem sets at 2am. Join clubs, befriend people who see the world differently from you, and work on side projects with them. Try everything and be bold. I dabbled in entrepreneurship, VR design, fashion design, UX/UI design, built tables, taught poetry — almost entirely outside of classes. Each experience shaped the way I saw the world and approached problem solving. Being a student is one of the few times where people don’t actually expect you to know what you’re doing (I’m not sure anyone ever really figures this out, but you’re at least expected to get better at pretending). Make the most of this.
At the end of the day, as a designer — digital or physical — you’re building for people. Talk to them, invite them into your design process, and solve real problems that matter.
The design world is evolving so quickly that there is no “right” way into it. As long as your work is authentic to you, useful and desirable to whoever you’re designing for, and you can present it in a portfolio, you should be golden.
Since the Jacobs Institute’s launch in 2015, it has served as a gathering point for Berkeley’s diverse and ever-evolving design community. Students have long been at the center of this community, launching new clubs and initiatives in areas from human-centered methodology to virtual reality in the years leading up to the construction of Jacobs Hall. From the building’s opening, student leaders brought this energy to the space, immediately activating its studios with new ideas in courses, team meetings, hackathons, and more. Now, many of the students who were among the first to walk into Jacobs Hall have graduated, moving into new roles and forming the start of an alumni community that will continue to grow as each new class of Berkeley students connects with the Jacobs Institute and with the campus’ design ecosystem.
We talked to four members of this emergent group of alumni to learn about their design experiences at Berkeley — and how they’re drawing from these experiences as they move into roles beyond campus. The four recent graduates spotlighted here represent a broad swath of design fields and roles: collectively, they work in areas from user research to product design, for startups as well as large companies, and in cities from San Francisco to Detroit and even Amman, Jordan. Here’s what they had to say.
Jessica Chang ’17
Major: Cognitive Science
How were you involved with the Jacobs Institute and Berkeley’s design ecosystem as a student?
As a student, I was heavily involved with Jacobs in my last two years of college (2015–2017). I took a lot of the design classes held at Jacobs — Prototyping & Fabrication, Critical Making, Interactive Device Design, Bioinspired Design, Reimagining Slums, Navigating the Human Path, and Sketching & Visual Communication. I was also the communications designer at Jacobs and was heavily involved with designing templates for new Jacobs events.
What was your favorite design project you worked on while at Berkeley?
My favorite project I worked on was a bluetooth game controller. I had a lot of fun working with microcontrollers and accelerometers, and figuring out how to define heuristics for determining smooth rotations and jolts. I learned that I actually find maintaining messy electronics very fulfilling, even though many find it to be the most tedious process in building hardware. Maybe it’s the fact that I’d spend hours on tangling and untangling and soldering and debugging to finally end up with a tiny object that can do something way beyond its size.
What are you doing now? What does a typical day look like?
I’m currently a product designer at Samsara. We offer a full suite of sensors that monitors various data in fleets (such as in the trucking industry). A typical day starts with organizing the projects I’ll be working on that day, reading my emails, and looking through the resumes of designers I’ll be interviewing that day. After lunch, I have a few hours of heads-down design time, and I’ll schedule meetings with product managers or engineers to talk through my design. Depending on where I am in the design process, I could be showing them rough wireframes, mockups, or walking through use cases. Every day is different and we usually have fun after-work events towards the end of every week.
Were you always interested in going into the design field after graduation?
I knew I wanted to become a designer pretty early on in college. Initially I thought I wanted to be a software engineer, but after my first internship where I was able to design the feature I was working on, I decided that I had a lot more fun thinking about how to optimize the user experience and learning from how people use products. I spent the latter half of college doing various design internships and being exposed to various design roles — tech startups, service, creative agencies, etc.
Any advice for current Berkeley students who are interested in working in design or related fields after graduation?
Find what you’re interested in, whether it’s an industry or a specific part of design. Work on projects; they don’t even have to be associated with big names! Figure out your niche, or don’t if you don’t have one. Take internships at design agencies. Work abroad. Learn how to communicate with people, all kinds of people. I actually think that’s the most important quality of being a designer — being able to really understand people, being open-minded, and putting yourself in places you normally wouldn’t.
Ankita Joshi ’17
Major: Mechanical Engineering
How were you involved with the Jacobs Institute and Berkeley’s design ecosystem as a student?
I had been involved with Jacobs from the very beginning and in a number of different ways! In fact, one of my student organizations, Socially Engaged Engineers, hosted its Social Impact Design-a-thon at Jacobs right when it opened. Since then, I’ve used the space for hosting many more events and student club meetings. Some of my favorite classes — Introduction to Product Design, Reimagining Slums, and Mechatronics — were at Jacobs Hall. I’ve spent entire days in the workshop working on my research, class projects, and personal projects as well! Along with all this, I really miss the speaker events at the Jacobs Institute because they’d invite professionals in the design field who I look up to, and provide the opportunity to actually meet and network with them!
What was your favorite design project you worked on while at Berkeley?
My mechanical engineering capstone project — The Roborrito! It was a robot that automated the burrito manufacturing process to create warm burritos based on customers’ orders. I enjoyed the process of ideating this robot and building it at the machine shop in Etcheverry. Towards the end of the semester, we started working in Jacob Hall’s third-floor kitchen to test the design with food. The capstone expo was also held at Jacobs, and it was a big hit!
What are you doing now? What does a typical day look like?
I am now a Design Release Engineer at General Motors. It is really hard to describe a typical day because my role changes based on what stage of the vehicle development process we are in. Sometimes my day is packed with meetings with different teams, sometimes I am visiting suppliers and plants to troubleshoot issues, and there are times when I at my desk reviewing and making design changes on parts.
Were you always interested in going into the design field after graduation?
Yes — I have always been interested in the intersection of engineering design, design thinking, and social impact. Being engaged with the Jacobs Institute and the mechanical engineering community at Cal has really helped me gain a variety of experiences in these fields and plan my future career.
Any advice for current Berkeley students who are interested in working in design or related fields after graduation?
Design is a very broad term — it covers art, business strategy, social impact, engineering, architecture, research, and more! So spend time to explore these fields, and figure out what design means to you and why you want to practice that sort of design.
Adam Mansour ’17
Major: Anthropology
How were you involved with the Jacobs Institute and Berkeley’s design ecosystem as a student?
My deepest involvement in the design ecosystem at Berkeley was through Berkeley Innovation, a club that focuses on human-centered design and meets at Jacobs Hall. The opportunity to work with companies and other students on design challenges outside of a classroom was invaluable, especially when paired with learnings in the design classes offered at Berkeley as well.
What was your favorite design project you worked on while at Berkeley?
My favorite design project at Berkeley was one for Needfinding (UGBA 190T). With the prompt to understand stress culture at Berkeley, my team focused on addressing the stress that stems from procrastination guilt. While projects around student life often tend toward navel-gazing, the opportunity to explore and test solutions for a problem so many of our peers faced was a refreshing experience.
What are you doing now? What does a typical day look like?
Since graduating, I’ve been working as a UX researcher at Google, primarily on a recruiting app called Hire. Most of my day is spent working with a great team of designers and product managers to better understand our users’ needs through interviews, usability and concept testing, and usage analytics.
Were you always interested in going into the design field after graduation?
I’d known I was interested in product design long before going to Berkeley, but hadn’t been exposed to design research as a field until my freshman year. As I became more immersed in both design and anthropology, the overlaps in how the two study people pointed to a clear career path. To me, design research was the perfect intersection of my interests: a way to exercise the critical lens of anthropology within the generative environment of product development.
Any advice for current Berkeley students who are interested in working in design or related fields after graduation?
A question I hear often is how someone with little-to-no design experience can catch a break. One of Berkeley’s greatest strengths is the diversity of perspectives it hosts. Exposing yourself to unfamiliar perspectives can help you identify the challenges people outside your bubbles face and the types problems you find most engaging. Working on projects in those spaces not only yields compelling stories to tell when looking for a design job, but can shed light on how you can leverage design thinking in any field you pursue.
Julia Solano ’16
Major: Engineering + Architecture (self-designed)
How were you involved with the Jacobs Institute and Berkeley’s design ecosystem as a student?
As a student, I was on the advisory committee for the Jacobs Institute and helped craft the Maker Pass. I was really involved in different design clubs on campus — I was partnership chair for Berkeley Innovation and helped create and manage the SHED with Design Engineering Collaborative. I also was a member of Virtual Reality @ Berkeley and was pretty involved in the startup ecosystem. I created my own major to study Design through Engineering and Architecture, so I got to experience design from both the College of Environmental Design and College of Engineering perspectives.
What was your favorite design project you worked on while at Berkeley?
I really enjoyed building an energy-generating rocking chair through the Interactive Seating Design class and making a maple seed-inspired airdrop device through Bioinspired Design! I also have a love/hate relationship with many of my architecture studios.
What are you doing now? What does a typical day look like?
I’m co-founding a humanitarian startup focused on youth engagement and community development. We’re in the process of launching a video social media app for social good, called Dandi, in the Middle East. I’m currently based in Amman, Jordan, and I do everything design and then some — user research and testing, UX and UI design, branding, marketing, and growth. There is no such thing as a typical day — I often bounce between visiting high schools around Jordan, designing UI in Figma, communicating with team members in Singapore and San Francisco, and collaborating with copywriters, producers, and community leaders in cafes. All while eating lots and lots of hummus and shawerma.
Were you always interested in going into the design field after graduation?
When I first applied to Cal I didn’t know what design was. I knew I liked physics, wanted to be creative, and didn’t want to starve. Halfway through, I realized I really liked making things tangible — whether through building mobile apps, haptic jewelry, solar charging centers, museum exhibits, or chairs. I’m really thankful I had the opportunity to experience designing in different contexts before graduating: I worked on a finance startup while studying abroad in Tallinn, Estonia; as a UX/Design Thinking intern at a large tech company in the East Bay; and as a graphic and UX design intern at a production and design agency in San Francisco. I apply skills and lessons from each of those roles in my work today.
What got me really interested in designing for social good was working with an NGO called Saha Global to implement a solar charging center in a rural village two hours outside of Tamale, Ghana. It was that experience that opened my eyes to the power of community input in design. It amazed me how something done in as little as three months could bring a sustainable business and renewable energy to 600 people in a community.
Any advice for current Berkeley students who are interested in working in design or related fields after graduation?
Follow what you’re curious about — the stuff that isn’t due but still distracts you from your problem sets at 2am. Join clubs, befriend people who see the world differently from you, and work on side projects with them. Try everything and be bold. I dabbled in entrepreneurship, VR design, fashion design, UX/UI design, built tables, taught poetry — almost entirely outside of classes. Each experience shaped the way I saw the world and approached problem solving. Being a student is one of the few times where people don’t actually expect you to know what you’re doing (I’m not sure anyone ever really figures this out, but you’re at least expected to get better at pretending). Make the most of this.
At the end of the day, as a designer — digital or physical — you’re building for people. Talk to them, invite them into your design process, and solve real problems that matter.
The design world is evolving so quickly that there is no “right” way into it. As long as your work is authentic to you, useful and desirable to whoever you’re designing for, and you can present it in a portfolio, you should be golden.
A view of WheelSense, an award-winning project created by Berkeley students.
In celebration of UC Berkeley’s 150th birthday, we’re exploring Berkeley-driven design innovation from 1868 to today. Over the course of the year, we’ll take a look at researchers, creators, and makers who have been part of Berkeley’s “perpetual renaissance,” drawing connections across this timeline. In this post, we’ll focus on innovation in assistive technology and prosthetic design.
Berkeley has a rich history at the intersection of design and health, from the disability rights movement’s reshaping of urban and educational infrastructure in the 1970s to the 1998 establishment of the campus’ bioengineering department, in which students and faculty link engineering design principles with biology to create new medical devices, biomaterials, and more. Today, campus community members across departments continue to drive innovation at this intersection, bringing impact-focused approaches to their work with emerging technologies — from advanced robotics to machine learning with big data — that are opening new possibilities and challenges for health and wellness.
One area in which Berkeley students are currently leading exciting work is the development of new prosthetics and other assistive devices. In this field, they certainly have local roots to draw from: Chuck Radcliffe, widely considered “the father of prosthetic biomechanics,” received a PhD in mechanical engineering from Berkeley and joined the faculty in the late 1950s. Leading the Prosthetics Research Group of the Biomechanics Laboratory for the next 35 years, he and his colleagues pioneered prosthetic limb design, investigating human locomotion and making major contributions to the quadrilateral socket, the four-bar prosthetic knee, and other influential prosthetic designs.
Enabletech members share their work at a public event at Jacobs Hall.
Today, student design innovators are using new technologies to broaden access to prosthetics and other assistive technologies, exploring options for making them more customizable and affordable. EnableTech, a student organization founded in 2015, focuses on designing and building technologies that address everyday challenges faced by people with disabilities. Like the students who founded the pioneering Disabled Students’ Program at Berkeley in 1970, Enabletech’s founders have drawn both from their own experiences and from the experiences of local community members as they have grown their club. The group currently leads a student-taught DeCal course at Jacobs Hall and has active projects that range from a a glove that improves grip strength to a lift for people with limited leg strength.
Meanwhile, courses like Designing for the Human Body, an upper-division course taught by Grace O’Connell, and the bioengineering department’s Senior Design Projectscapstone offering — both held in Jacobs Hall—provide opportunities for undergraduates to incorporate these kinds of design projects into their curriculum. In the most recent offering of Designing for the Human Body, several student teams drew from makerspace tools like consumer-grade 3D printers to prototype affordable prosthetics, with one group proposing a socket-based system that users could easily modify, imagining uses like painting or sports.
Even middle schoolers have gotten a taste of accessible prosthetic design through the College of Engineering’s Girls in Engineering program, in which participants have assembled prosthetic hands for children in sessions at the Jacobs Institute. The activity is part of a day in which the students receive an introduction to human-centered design, learn about the technology behind additive manufacturing processes like 3D printing, and get a hands-on opportunity to explore these tools’ potential for impact. With campus faculty, staff, and students helping facilitate these experiences, it’s a well-rounded introduction for a new generation — helping pave the way for the next 150 years of design innovation at Berkeley.
A Girls in Engineering participant works on assembling a 3D-printed prosthetic hand (image via College of Engineering).
A view of WheelSense, an award-winning project created by Berkeley students.
In celebration of UC Berkeley’s 150th birthday, we’re exploring Berkeley-driven design innovation from 1868 to today. Over the course of the year, we’ll take a look at researchers, creators, and makers who have been part of Berkeley’s “perpetual renaissance,” drawing connections across this timeline. In this post, we’ll focus on innovation in assistive technology and prosthetic design.
Berkeley has a rich history at the intersection of design and health, from the disability rights movement’s reshaping of urban and educational infrastructure in the 1970s to the 1998 establishment of the campus’ bioengineering department, in which students and faculty link engineering design principles with biology to create new medical devices, biomaterials, and more. Today, campus community members across departments continue to drive innovation at this intersection, bringing impact-focused approaches to their work with emerging technologies — from advanced robotics to machine learning with big data — that are opening new possibilities and challenges for health and wellness.
One area in which Berkeley students are currently leading exciting work is the development of new prosthetics and other assistive devices. In this field, they certainly have local roots to draw from: Chuck Radcliffe, widely considered “the father of prosthetic biomechanics,” received a PhD in mechanical engineering from Berkeley and joined the faculty in the late 1950s. Leading the Prosthetics Research Group of the Biomechanics Laboratory for the next 35 years, he and his colleagues pioneered prosthetic limb design, investigating human locomotion and making major contributions to the quadrilateral socket, the four-bar prosthetic knee, and other influential prosthetic designs.
Enabletech members share their work at a public event at Jacobs Hall.
Today, student design innovators are using new technologies to broaden access to prosthetics and other assistive technologies, exploring options for making them more customizable and affordable. EnableTech, a student organization founded in 2015, focuses on designing and building technologies that address everyday challenges faced by people with disabilities. Like the students who founded the pioneering Disabled Students’ Program at Berkeley in 1970, Enabletech’s founders have drawn both from their own experiences and from the experiences of local community members as they have grown their club. The group currently leads a student-taught DeCal course at Jacobs Hall and has active projects that range from a a glove that improves grip strength to a lift for people with limited leg strength.
Meanwhile, courses like Designing for the Human Body, an upper-division course taught by Grace O’Connell, and the bioengineering department’s Senior Design Projectscapstone offering — both held in Jacobs Hall—provide opportunities for undergraduates to incorporate these kinds of design projects into their curriculum. In the most recent offering of Designing for the Human Body, several student teams drew from makerspace tools like consumer-grade 3D printers to prototype affordable prosthetics, with one group proposing a socket-based system that users could easily modify, imagining uses like painting or sports.
Even middle schoolers have gotten a taste of accessible prosthetic design through the College of Engineering’s Girls in Engineering program, in which participants have assembled prosthetic hands for children in sessions at the Jacobs Institute. The activity is part of a day in which the students receive an introduction to human-centered design, learn about the technology behind additive manufacturing processes like 3D printing, and get a hands-on opportunity to explore these tools’ potential for impact. With campus faculty, staff, and students helping facilitate these experiences, it’s a well-rounded introduction for a new generation — helping pave the way for the next 150 years of design innovation at Berkeley.
A Girls in Engineering participant works on assembling a 3D-printed prosthetic hand (image via College of Engineering).
A reconfigurable lampshade, a portable scientific instrument, an affordable tool for surgery planning: these student projects may not seem to have much in common. Despite their wide-ranging focuses, however, all three are the products of courses that used resources in Jacobs Hall to explore digital fabrication technology during the fall 2017 semester. As the digital fabrication landscape — which encompasses a range of prototyping and manufacturing processes driven by computer-controlled machines, from 3D printing to waterjet cutting — rapidly evolves, interdisciplinary courses at Jacobs Hall are providing new opportunities for students to learn and create at the cutting edge of these technologies.
Digital fabrication is of great interest to Simon Schleicher, an assistant professor of architecture who studies how novel processes and overlooked structural behaviors can transform even inexpensive, flimsy materials into functional components. This fall, Schleicher led a graduate-level course, Flexible Hybrid Structures, in Jacobs Hall, prompting students to explore diverse materials’ properties through a mix of hands-on experimentation, background research, and digital simulation. Over the course of the semester, students were challenged to develop applications for easily available materials, using bending, assembly, and custom joinery — created using 3D printing and other digital technologies — to connect soft and elastic materials for augmented function. For Schleicher, this materials-driven assignment is fundamentally about “how you can design a shape, structure, form, and function when you don’t know what the final product is.” He notes that while this open-ended approach is familiar to most architecture students, “what’s relatively new to them is the availability of digital tools that can help them.”
An early design charrette allowed students to explore bending effects.
Flexible Hybrid Structures encouraged students to explore digital and physical realms simultaneously. As the semester progressed, students moved from playful charrettes (such as one in which they used wires and soap to explore bending) into research on inspirations ranging from pneumatic structures to Fibonacci numbers in plants, and finally into more systematic modeling and early prototyping. As they built on early ideas and began to hone in on potential applications for the materials and techniques they found compelling, they used equipment at Jacobs Hall — particularly the entry-level 3D printers, which allow for accessible, inexpensive experimentation — to push their prototyping further.
Jacobs Hall “allows us to quickly prototype and iterate designs over multiple stages,” says Schleicher, noting that the building enables students to easily move from early prototyping with entry-level equipment toward refinement with more advanced machines. “One can start really cheap and low-tech,” he says, “but along the way, as your project matures, you can grow into an infrastructure that provides you with better tools, better printers.” As students explored these tools and how they might advance their ideas, Jacobs Institute staff helped support these efforts, with design specialist Kent Wilson serving as a project mentor throughout the course.
Students explored materials and processes through digital modeling (above left), physical prototyping and 3D printing (above right), and more.
Ultimately, four distinct projects emerged from this process. Challenged to work at a 1:1 scale — in other words, to create objects at their actual size, rather than creating models for larger structures—student teams created wide-ranging standalone objects. Two groups created furniture projects: one team designed a reconfigurable lamp that allows users to reshape a lampshade in numerous formations, while another team used custom 3D-printed nodes to build a coffee table that could support a significant load while remaining lightweight and easy to disassemble. A third group considered shelter beyond the home, creating a portable “cocoon” to be used as a place to rest in outdoor environments. Finally, one team, which included students from architecture as well as electrical engineering and computer sciences, combined carbon fiber and bending sensors to make an interactive instrument they termed the “elastic harp,” allowing users to play with sound and light through simple sliding motions.
A student demonstrates the Elastic Harp.
These kinds of experimentations will continue this spring, as Schleicher leads a Flexible Hybrid Structures II course in Jacobs Hall. In this and future class iterations, Schleicher hopes to continue to build an interdisciplinary community, with particular interests in structural engineering, electrical engineering and computer sciences, and biology in addition to architecture. His approach to the Flexible Hybrid Structures course sequence centers on “building up a set of knowledge and a culture, so that the next class can benefit from the last one:” students can take both the fall and spring course, or choose to take just one, with options for students to take existing projects in new directions. As part of this ongoing evolution, Schleicher also hopes to expand his students’ use of equipment at Jacobs Hall, including digital fabrication tools like the building’s waterjet cutter and CNC router.
Elsewhere in Jacobs Hall, another advanced course explored this broad array of machines from a different angle this past fall. Digital Fabrication Everywhere, taught by Jacobs Institute faculty director Bjoern Hartmann, prompted graduate students from multiple departments to delve into the rapidly evolving digital fabrication landscape. Over the course of the semester, students surveyed this ecosystem, studying key research, gaining familiarity with relevant technologies, and trying out equipment in Jacobs Hall’s labs. As they got to know the technology, they also considered its deployment in industries that range from construction to healthcare, both currently and in the near future.
Students demonstrate an origami-inspired furniture design.
From there, the students began to develop and prototype their own concepts for applications of digital fabrication technologies. Their projects took wide-ranging directions, reflecting the course’s interdisciplinary makeup. Translational medicine students Daniel Beckerman and Billy Kim, working in collaboration with orthopedic surgeons at UCSF, used entry-level 3D printers to prototype scale models of patient bones for surgery planning and patient education. Laura Cuconati and Erik Jurisch drew from their architecture backgrounds as they experimented with Jacobs Hall’s waterjet cutter to create an origami-inspired table, while integrative biology student Aaron Pomerantz prototyped a hand-powered centrifuge that could serve as an affordable, portable instrument for scientific fieldwork and education.
A look at prototypes for a hand-powered centrifuge.
One student team focused its efforts on the lesser-known lab processes that surround advanced 3D printing, particularly cutting-edge 3D printers like the Carbon M1 that sits in Jacobs Hall’s advanced prototyping lab. Members of this project team, composed of mechanical engineering students Jacqueline Elwood, Ilbey Karakurt, and Eric Sweet, had previously used the advanced prototyping lab’s printers for research in areas like microfluidics, and noticed that the cleaning process (which involves the removal of resins) for prototypes made with the M1 could be improved to better allow for work at very small scales. Over the course of the semester, the team aimed to optimize this process, experimenting with new methods to facilitate their research and that of their fellow researchers in the advanced prototyping lab. It’s a project with real potential for impact: the lab is home to a growing user base, with students and faculty using the M1 and other tools for projects that include structural research and medical device development.
From emerging architects to scientific researchers, Berkeley students are helping drive new explorations of digital fabrication. At Jacobs Hall, diverse courses and programs provide opportunities for these students to experiment within an active community, connecting design innovators exploring emerging technologies and their applications for health, urban design, education, and much more. The hope is that this interdisciplinary exchange continues to grow, enabling students to link advanced technological exploration with a cross-section of design perspectives. “What’s really cool about Jacobs Hall,” says Schleicher, as he discusses the iteration of his Flexible Hybrid Structures course that will begin next week, “is that it gives these ambitions a location.”
A reconfigurable lampshade, a portable scientific instrument, an affordable tool for surgery planning: these student projects may not seem to have much in common. Despite their wide-ranging focuses, however, all three are the products of courses that used resources in Jacobs Hall to explore digital fabrication technology during the fall 2017 semester. As the digital fabrication landscape — which encompasses a range of prototyping and manufacturing processes driven by computer-controlled machines, from 3D printing to waterjet cutting — rapidly evolves, interdisciplinary courses at Jacobs Hall are providing new opportunities for students to learn and create at the cutting edge of these technologies.
Digital fabrication is of great interest to Simon Schleicher, an assistant professor of architecture who studies how novel processes and overlooked structural behaviors can transform even inexpensive, flimsy materials into functional components. This fall, Schleicher led a graduate-level course, Flexible Hybrid Structures, in Jacobs Hall, prompting students to explore diverse materials’ properties through a mix of hands-on experimentation, background research, and digital simulation. Over the course of the semester, students were challenged to develop applications for easily available materials, using bending, assembly, and custom joinery — created using 3D printing and other digital technologies — to connect soft and elastic materials for augmented function. For Schleicher, this materials-driven assignment is fundamentally about “how you can design a shape, structure, form, and function when you don’t know what the final product is.” He notes that while this open-ended approach is familiar to most architecture students, “what’s relatively new to them is the availability of digital tools that can help them.”
An early design charrette allowed students to explore bending effects.
Flexible Hybrid Structures encouraged students to explore digital and physical realms simultaneously. As the semester progressed, students moved from playful charrettes (such as one in which they used wires and soap to explore bending) into research on inspirations ranging from pneumatic structures to Fibonacci numbers in plants, and finally into more systematic modeling and early prototyping. As they built on early ideas and began to hone in on potential applications for the materials and techniques they found compelling, they used equipment at Jacobs Hall — particularly the entry-level 3D printers, which allow for accessible, inexpensive experimentation — to push their prototyping further.
Jacobs Hall “allows us to quickly prototype and iterate designs over multiple stages,” says Schleicher, noting that the building enables students to easily move from early prototyping with entry-level equipment toward refinement with more advanced machines. “One can start really cheap and low-tech,” he says, “but along the way, as your project matures, you can grow into an infrastructure that provides you with better tools, better printers.” As students explored these tools and how they might advance their ideas, Jacobs Institute staff helped support these efforts, with design specialist Kent Wilson serving as a project mentor throughout the course.
Students explored materials and processes through digital modeling (above left), physical prototyping and 3D printing (above right), and more.
Ultimately, four distinct projects emerged from this process. Challenged to work at a 1:1 scale — in other words, to create objects at their actual size, rather than creating models for larger structures—student teams created wide-ranging standalone objects. Two groups created furniture projects: one team designed a reconfigurable lamp that allows users to reshape a lampshade in numerous formations, while another team used custom 3D-printed nodes to build a coffee table that could support a significant load while remaining lightweight and easy to disassemble. A third group considered shelter beyond the home, creating a portable “cocoon” to be used as a place to rest in outdoor environments. Finally, one team, which included students from architecture as well as electrical engineering and computer sciences, combined carbon fiber and bending sensors to make an interactive instrument they termed the “elastic harp,” allowing users to play with sound and light through simple sliding motions.
A student demonstrates the Elastic Harp.
These kinds of experimentations will continue this spring, as Schleicher leads a Flexible Hybrid Structures II course in Jacobs Hall. In this and future class iterations, Schleicher hopes to continue to build an interdisciplinary community, with particular interests in structural engineering, electrical engineering and computer sciences, and biology in addition to architecture. His approach to the Flexible Hybrid Structures course sequence centers on “building up a set of knowledge and a culture, so that the next class can benefit from the last one:” students can take both the fall and spring course, or choose to take just one, with options for students to take existing projects in new directions. As part of this ongoing evolution, Schleicher also hopes to expand his students’ use of equipment at Jacobs Hall, including digital fabrication tools like the building’s waterjet cutter and CNC router.
Elsewhere in Jacobs Hall, another advanced course explored this broad array of machines from a different angle this past fall. Digital Fabrication Everywhere, taught by Jacobs Institute faculty director Bjoern Hartmann, prompted graduate students from multiple departments to delve into the rapidly evolving digital fabrication landscape. Over the course of the semester, students surveyed this ecosystem, studying key research, gaining familiarity with relevant technologies, and trying out equipment in Jacobs Hall’s labs. As they got to know the technology, they also considered its deployment in industries that range from construction to healthcare, both currently and in the near future.
Students demonstrate an origami-inspired furniture design.
From there, the students began to develop and prototype their own concepts for applications of digital fabrication technologies. Their projects took wide-ranging directions, reflecting the course’s interdisciplinary makeup. Translational medicine students Daniel Beckerman and Billy Kim, working in collaboration with orthopedic surgeons at UCSF, used entry-level 3D printers to prototype scale models of patient bones for surgery planning and patient education. Laura Cuconati and Erik Jurisch drew from their architecture backgrounds as they experimented with Jacobs Hall’s waterjet cutter to create an origami-inspired table, while integrative biology student Aaron Pomerantz prototyped a hand-powered centrifuge that could serve as an affordable, portable instrument for scientific fieldwork and education.
A look at prototypes for a hand-powered centrifuge.
One student team focused its efforts on the lesser-known lab processes that surround advanced 3D printing, particularly cutting-edge 3D printers like the Carbon M1 that sits in Jacobs Hall’s advanced prototyping lab. Members of this project team, composed of mechanical engineering students Jacqueline Elwood, Ilbey Karakurt, and Eric Sweet, had previously used the advanced prototyping lab’s printers for research in areas like microfluidics, and noticed that the cleaning process (which involves the removal of resins) for prototypes made with the M1 could be improved to better allow for work at very small scales. Over the course of the semester, the team aimed to optimize this process, experimenting with new methods to facilitate their research and that of their fellow researchers in the advanced prototyping lab. It’s a project with real potential for impact: the lab is home to a growing user base, with students and faculty using the M1 and other tools for projects that include structural research and medical device development.
From emerging architects to scientific researchers, Berkeley students are helping drive new explorations of digital fabrication. At Jacobs Hall, diverse courses and programs provide opportunities for these students to experiment within an active community, connecting design innovators exploring emerging technologies and their applications for health, urban design, education, and much more. The hope is that this interdisciplinary exchange continues to grow, enabling students to link advanced technological exploration with a cross-section of design perspectives. “What’s really cool about Jacobs Hall,” says Schleicher, as he discusses the iteration of his Flexible Hybrid Structures course that will begin next week, “is that it gives these ambitions a location.”
