Category: Jacobs Institute News

This fall, we welcomed a diverse group of speakers to Jacobs Hall for the Jacobs Design Conversations and Design Field Notes speaker series. With speakers ranging from artists to product managers, these talks’ topics covered a broad swath of the design field. Across these wide-ranging discussions, here are some common themes we heard.

Today’s designers should strive to understand the interwoven systems that shape global product development processes.

In a November talk, PCH Lime Lab co-founder Andre Yousefi provided an up-close look at a global product ecosystem. Lime Lab works with design firms, major companies, and startups to bring products to market, weaving a focus on design for manufacturing and assembly through services from prototyping to packaging engineering. In his talk, Yousefi walked us through how these processes unfold across Lime Lab’s hubs in San Francisco and in Shenzhen, China, noting that in Shenzhen, teams are no more than three hours away from factories and no more than three days away from shipping to 90% of consumers. Several case studies, from Lime Lab’s work with L’Oreal on prototyping smart skincare products to its strategies for optimizing fulfillment systems, illustrated the role of integrated strategies in making or breaking a product’s success. Particularly given the high cost of hardware projects, Yousefi emphasized, products need more than just great design to succeed: they need to be aligned with user needs, markets, and the logistics of a globalized economy.

University of Michigan assistant professor Silvia Lindtner also trained a lens on Shenzhen’s hardware production ecosystem in a talk at the Jacobs Institute this semester. Lindtner’s research focuses in part on the culture and politics of making and entrepreneurship in urban China, and in 2013, she spent a year embedded in a Shenzhen-based hardware accelerator, conducting ethnographic research. In her talk, she shared insights from this research, pointing to the idealism of the maker movement while asking how we might balance this idealism with thoughtful consideration of persistent inequities along race, class, and gender lines. Her talk underlined the complex cultural ecosystems in which global design and production exist — and of which designers and technologists should be conscious.

As the semester came to a close, Steve Vassallo joined us for a talk that, in many ways, brought together the themes raised by Yousefi and Lindtner. Vassallo is a general partner at Foundation Capital; his previous roles have included serving as VP of product and engineering at Ning and leading projects at design firm IDEO. Drawing from this background, his talk laid out a set of principles, along with concrete advice, for designer-led entrepreneurship (read more in his book, The Way to Design, available as a PDF here). Like Yousefi, he encouraged designers to familiarize themselves with the ins and outs of business, complementing their craft with an understanding of how their work will interact with markets. Considering the global scope of these markets, he also emphasized the need to study social, economic, and cultural systems more broadly, arguing for a focus on critically engaged systems thinking in an increasingly interconnected world.

The intersection of design and biology continues to be a rich space for exploration and experimentation — and for meaningful impact.

As part of the Design Field Notes series, Berkeley architecture associate professor M. Paz Gutierrez joined us on this side of campus this fall. In her talk, she shared her genre-bending projects, which often draw from nature for inspiration and materials. Explaining that she sees structures as living laboratories, she took us behind the scenes of projects that exemplify this viewpoint — such as a project in which she has studied bamboo-based craft practices in the Amazon and worked with communities to translate these practices into 3D printing processes, experimenting with materials like palm powders and bamboo/PLA filament mixes that might preserve ecological and cultural benefits while remaining cost-effective.

We explored another intersection of biology and design in a talk from Andreas Bastian, senior research scientist at Autodesk and founder of LimbForge. LimbForge is a nonprofit that develops tools and training for providing patients with 3D-printed prosthetics. In his talk, Bastian delved into the organization’s approach and lessons learned, highlighting how LimbForge has built not just standalone items, but a system of customizable modules and resources that can be applied to match “pretty much any anatomy on earth.” He underlined the role of understanding culture alongside biology, noting that prosthetic care is ultimately not about replacing specific anatomy, but rather about replacing functionality — and that patients’ priorities will vary based on factors like occupation and location. Together, Bastian’s and Gutierrez’s talks presented a compelling view of future interplay between design and biology, as hybrid materials and tools prompt new interactions with structures ranging from sustainable buildings to the human body.

Just as storytelling shapes design, design tools and approaches open new possibilities for storytelling.

In the Jacobs Design Conversations series’ first season, curator Ellen Lupton spoke on design and stories in a precursor to her recent book, Design is Storytelling. In her talk, she discussed how the arcs and techniques of narrative can shape designed interactions. This fall, the flip side of that equation seemed to underlie several talks at Jacobs Hall, as speakers pointed to how design and technology tools are shaping new forms of storytelling.

Early in the semester, Stamen’s Eric Rodenbeck joined us to speak on “telling stories with data.” Stamen is a data visualization design studio that works with clients that have ranged from art museums and scientists to the Dalai Lama, and Rodenbeck’s talk traced the ways that the studio has approached using data to tell stories across these diverse areas. Emphasizing that no visualization can map all information or tell all stories, Rodenbeck explained that Stamen’s team approaches a project as “a visual artifact to ask a specific question about.” From a map of vibrations in a fiber optic cable to a visualization of the influx of global populations to the Bay Area over 150 years, he shared how using design tools to make data visible can prompt new questions, surfacing untold stories in the process.

Later in the semester, we heard another perspective on how design and technology tools are shaping storytelling from Pixar artist Tim Evatt, who has worked as a set designer (and occasionally character designer) on films like Toy Story 3, The Good Dinosaur, and the just-released Coco. At Jacobs Hall, Evatt emphasized how much of this work comes down to problem-solving: dimensions and angles need to fit together, the elements that make up a set (from a janitor’s cart in a Toy Story 3 scene to the tiles lining the plazas in Coco) need to meaningfully reflect context, and everything needs to come together to drive the story forward. As he walked us through how these elements come together in collaborative processes at Pixar, moving from hand sketches into complex software environments, he highlighted creative problem-solving at intersections of art and engineering —pointing to a shared skill set that enables effective design in the movies and far beyond.

As we head into the spring semester, the Jacobs Institute community will be continuing to explore these themes, from the students who will travel to Hong Kong and Shenzhen as part of Global Product Development to new designers exploring biology, storytelling, and more in entry-level courses like Bioinspired Design and Visual Communication and Sketching. We’ll also be back in January with a new season of talks: sign up for our newsletter to be the first to hear when we announce the spring lineup.

By Laura Mitchell

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Fall talks at Jacobs Hall: Three themes for design innovators was originally published in Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Source link

This fall, we welcomed a diverse group of speakers to Jacobs Hall for the Jacobs Design Conversations and Design Field Notes speaker series. With speakers ranging from artists to product managers, these talks’ topics covered a broad swath of the design field. Across these wide-ranging discussions, here are some common themes we heard.

Today’s designers should strive to understand the interwoven systems that shape global product development processes.

In a November talk, PCH Lime Lab co-founder Andre Yousefi provided an up-close look at a global product ecosystem. Lime Lab works with design firms, major companies, and startups to bring products to market, weaving a focus on design for manufacturing and assembly through services from prototyping to packaging engineering. In his talk, Yousefi walked us through how these processes unfold across Lime Lab’s hubs in San Francisco and in Shenzhen, China, noting that in Shenzhen, teams are no more than three hours away from factories and no more than three days away from shipping to 90% of consumers. Several case studies, from Lime Lab’s work with L’Oreal on prototyping smart skincare products to its strategies for optimizing fulfillment systems, illustrated the role of integrated strategies in making or breaking a product’s success. Particularly given the high cost of hardware projects, Yousefi emphasized, products need more than just great design to succeed: they need to be aligned with user needs, markets, and the logistics of a globalized economy.

University of Michigan assistant professor Silvia Lindtner also trained a lens on Shenzhen’s hardware production ecosystem in a talk at the Jacobs Institute this semester. Lindtner’s research focuses in part on the culture and politics of making and entrepreneurship in urban China, and in 2013, she spent a year embedded in a Shenzhen-based hardware accelerator, conducting ethnographic research. In her talk, she shared insights from this research, pointing to the idealism of the maker movement while asking how we might balance this idealism with thoughtful consideration of persistent inequities along race, class, and gender lines. Her talk underlined the complex cultural ecosystems in which global design and production exist — and of which designers and technologists should be conscious.

As the semester came to a close, Steve Vassallo joined us for a talk that, in many ways, brought together the themes raised by Yousefi and Lindtner. Vassallo is a general partner at Foundation Capital; his previous roles have included serving as VP of product and engineering at Ning and leading projects at design firm IDEO. Drawing from this background, his talk laid out a set of principles, along with concrete advice, for designer-led entrepreneurship (read more in his book, The Way to Design, available as a PDF here). Like Yousefi, he encouraged designers to familiarize themselves with the ins and outs of business, complementing their craft with an understanding of how their work will interact with markets. Considering the global scope of these markets, he also emphasized the need to study social, economic, and cultural systems more broadly, arguing for a focus on critically engaged systems thinking in an increasingly interconnected world.

The intersection of design and biology continues to be a rich space for exploration and experimentation — and for meaningful impact.

As part of the Design Field Notes series, Berkeley architecture associate professor M. Paz Gutierrez joined us on this side of campus this fall. In her talk, she shared her genre-bending projects, which often draw from nature for inspiration and materials. Explaining that she sees structures as living laboratories, she took us behind the scenes of projects that exemplify this viewpoint — such as a project in which she has studied bamboo-based craft practices in the Amazon and worked with communities to translate these practices into 3D printing processes, experimenting with materials like palm powders and bamboo/PLA filament mixes that might preserve ecological and cultural benefits while remaining cost-effective.

We explored another intersection of biology and design in a talk from Andreas Bastian, senior research scientist at Autodesk and founder of LimbForge. LimbForge is a nonprofit that develops tools and training for providing patients with 3D-printed prosthetics. In his talk, Bastian delved into the organization’s approach and lessons learned, highlighting how LimbForge has built not just standalone items, but a system of customizable modules and resources that can be applied to match “pretty much any anatomy on earth.” He underlined the role of understanding culture alongside biology, noting that prosthetic care is ultimately not about replacing specific anatomy, but rather about replacing functionality — and that patients’ priorities will vary based on factors like occupation and location. Together, Bastian’s and Gutierrez’s talks presented a compelling view of future interplay between design and biology, as hybrid materials and tools prompt new interactions with structures ranging from sustainable buildings to the human body.

Just as storytelling shapes design, design tools and approaches open new possibilities for storytelling.

In the Jacobs Design Conversations series’ first season, curator Ellen Lupton spoke on design and stories in a precursor to her recent book, Design is Storytelling. In her talk, she discussed how the arcs and techniques of narrative can shape designed interactions. This fall, the flip side of that equation seemed to underlie several talks at Jacobs Hall, as speakers pointed to how design and technology tools are shaping new forms of storytelling.

Early in the semester, Stamen’s Eric Rodenbeck joined us to speak on “telling stories with data.” Stamen is a data visualization design studio that works with clients that have ranged from art museums and scientists to the Dalai Lama, and Rodenbeck’s talk traced the ways that the studio has approached using data to tell stories across these diverse areas. Emphasizing that no visualization can map all information or tell all stories, Rodenbeck explained that Stamen’s team approaches a project as “a visual artifact to ask a specific question about.” From a map of vibrations in a fiber optic cable to a visualization of the influx of global populations to the Bay Area over 150 years, he shared how using design tools to make data visible can prompt new questions, surfacing untold stories in the process.

Later in the semester, we heard another perspective on how design and technology tools are shaping storytelling from Pixar artist Tim Evatt, who has worked as a set designer (and occasionally character designer) on films like Toy Story 3, The Good Dinosaur, and the just-released Coco. At Jacobs Hall, Evatt emphasized how much of this work comes down to problem-solving: dimensions and angles need to fit together, the elements that make up a set (from a janitor’s cart in a Toy Story 3 scene to the tiles lining the plazas in Coco) need to meaningfully reflect context, and everything needs to come together to drive the story forward. As he walked us through how these elements come together in collaborative processes at Pixar, moving from hand sketches into complex software environments, he highlighted creative problem-solving at intersections of art and engineering —pointing to a shared skill set that enables effective design in the movies and far beyond.

As we head into the spring semester, the Jacobs Institute community will be continuing to explore these themes, from the students who will travel to Hong Kong and Shenzhen as part of Global Product Development to new designers exploring biology, storytelling, and more in entry-level courses like Bioinspired Design and Visual Communication and Sketching. We’ll also be back in January with a new season of talks: sign up for our newsletter to be the first to hear when we announce the spring lineup.

By Laura Mitchell

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Fall talks at Jacobs Hall: Three themes for design innovators was originally published in Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Source link

This fall, passersby on the top floor of Jacobs Hall might have seen an unusual sight: a large net dropped down from the ceiling, with a mini-drone buzzing around inside it. This would be a class session of Introduction to Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (ME 136), a new course held in Jacobs Hall this semester. Designed and taught by mechanical engineering professor Mark Mueller, the course aims to offer undergraduate students a chance to delve into research on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)— and to apply this learning in work with a real system.

For Mueller, this integrated study and application of core concepts lies at the heart of the course’s appeal. “Because we focus on UAVs,” he explains, “we get to highlight why certain ideas are important, using a system that we develop throughout the semester.” Over the course of the semester, lectures covered topics from the kinematics and dynamics of rotations to typical control strategies, with students applying these topics in accompanying labs that built up to creating a controller for a quadcopter UAV.

Mueller’s research interests include robotics and UAV control, and he’s excited about the interplay between this research and students’ interests in the rapidly growing UAV field, which has potential for impact in areas from emergency services to wildlife conservation. “That’s something we want to tap into — this excitement among the undergrads,” says Mueller. This fall’s course participants included several members of the student group UAVs @ Berkeley, which serves as a resource hub for students interested in UAVs and leads activities like a DeCal and fly days. While the majority of students in the course were mechanical engineering students, participants’ majors also included civil engineering, nuclear engineering, and physics, pointing toward interdisciplinary collaboration. Mueller hopes that the course experience will help build on this energy, prompting students to pursue further research opportunities on campus and beyond.

As the fall semester progressed, students moved from early labs focused on elements like modeling and sensor usage into activities like experimenting with destabilizing their team’s mini-UAV, providing tangible experience with control design and stability effects. In the semester’s final weeks, they began flight experiments, using the mesh net that had been hung from the studio’s ceiling as a flight cage. “The space at Jacobs is ideal for this,” says Mueller. “It’s a big open space — you have tall ceilings, so students can actually fly and have enough space to move around.” These experiments culminated in a final competition that put students’ controllers to the test: bringing together all of the concepts the course had covered, teams guided their UAVs in the flight cage, competing for maximum hover length and attempting acrobatics. At the competition’s end, the winning team’s members each took home a sponsored prize: a DJI Spark mini-drone. The following week, several teams shared their work with a broad public audience at the Jacobs Winter Design Showcase — part of an ongoing conversation about this emerging technology that many students hope to continue to explore, from the lab to the flight test.

Get a glimpse of the course in the video below. Curious about upcoming classes at Jacobs Hall? Check out spring 2018 course listings.

https://medium.com/media/9ffba5d5ea25bde558ad85013a73f28a/href

Story by Laura Mitchell | Video by Junaid Maknojia

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New course takes flight at Jacobs Hall was originally published in Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Source link

This fall, passersby on the top floor of Jacobs Hall might have seen an unusual sight: a large net dropped down from the ceiling, with a mini-drone buzzing around inside it. This would be a class session of Introduction to Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (ME 136), a new course held in Jacobs Hall this semester. Designed and taught by mechanical engineering professor Mark Mueller, the course aims to offer undergraduate students a chance to delve into research on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)— and to apply this learning in work with a real system.

For Mueller, this integrated study and application of core concepts lies at the heart of the course’s appeal. “Because we focus on UAVs,” he explains, “we get to highlight why certain ideas are important, using a system that we develop throughout the semester.” Over the course of the semester, lectures covered topics from the kinematics and dynamics of rotations to typical control strategies, with students applying these topics in accompanying labs that built up to creating a controller for a quadcopter UAV.

Mueller’s research interests include robotics and UAV control, and he’s excited about the interplay between this research and students’ interests in the rapidly growing UAV field, which has potential for impact in areas from emergency services to wildlife conservation. “That’s something we want to tap into — this excitement among the undergrads,” says Mueller. This fall’s course participants included several members of the student group UAVs @ Berkeley, which serves as a resource hub for students interested in UAVs and leads activities like a DeCal and fly days. While the majority of students in the course were mechanical engineering students, participants’ majors also included civil engineering, nuclear engineering, and physics, pointing toward interdisciplinary collaboration. Mueller hopes that the course experience will help build on this energy, prompting students to pursue further research opportunities on campus and beyond.

As the fall semester progressed, students moved from early labs focused on elements like modeling and sensor usage into activities like experimenting with destabilizing their team’s mini-UAV, providing tangible experience with control design and stability effects. In the semester’s final weeks, they began flight experiments, using the mesh net that had been hung from the studio’s ceiling as a flight cage. “The space at Jacobs is ideal for this,” says Mueller. “It’s a big open space — you have tall ceilings, so students can actually fly and have enough space to move around.” These experiments culminated in a final competition that put students’ controllers to the test: bringing together all of the concepts the course had covered, teams guided their UAVs in the flight cage, competing for maximum hover length and attempting acrobatics. At the competition’s end, the winning team’s members each took home a sponsored prize: a DJI Spark mini-drone. The following week, several teams shared their work with a broad public audience at the Jacobs Winter Design Showcase — part of an ongoing conversation about this emerging technology that many students hope to continue to explore, from the lab to the flight test.

Get a glimpse of the course in the video below. Curious about upcoming classes at Jacobs Hall? Check out spring 2018 course listings.

https://medium.com/media/9ffba5d5ea25bde558ad85013a73f28a/href

Story by Laura Mitchell | Video by Junaid Maknojia

---

New course takes flight at Jacobs Hall was originally published in Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Source link

Purin Phanichphant is an artist and designer whose work spans broad areas: he has served as a product and interaction designer with clients from Levi’s to Genentech at design firm IDEO, led design efforts at speech AI startup Gridspace, and developed an inventive art practice that focuses on “creating things that are more simple, more playful, and more interactive.” While not juggling creative projects, Purin teaches Visual Communication and Sketching, an introductory Design Innovation course open to students from all majors, at the Jacobs Institute. We asked him about his work and approach to teaching.

Your background is quite wide-ranging. What common threads run through your work, across different contexts like a startup or an art studio?

If there are such things as superpowers, I believe mine is “making abstract ideas tangible.” I do this through hand sketches, physical prototypes, graphic design pieces, and visual stories. This particular superpower has contributed the successes of many projects I have been involved in.

However, when I looked back at some of my work from high school and early college years, I realized that I didn’t always have this superpower. Instead, I had acquired these skills over years of exposure to good design and practice. This is why I set out to demystify the notion that designers were born with innate gifts (talents). By reverse-engineering my own designs, I was able to extract tips and tricks that I have learned over the years and package them into gifts (presents) that I give my students.

Another common thread that I see is that in design, which I define as creative problem-solving for people, I strive for simplicity and user-friendliness. And as I develop my own independent art practice, which I define as my personal statements to the world, I find myself crafting interactive experiences that are simple and user-friendly. There are moments when I see this consideration for viewers and audiences as a disadvantage, because my medium doesn’t allow me to be as expressive as, say, abstract painters. However, I’m slowly coming to terms with how my unique background in design makes my art work mine and only mine.

Your work tends to be collaborative. Have your experiences with creative collaboration had an impact on how you approach teaching?

In the context of design innovation, collaboration and teamwork are extremely crucial. My advisor, David Kelley, once said that there was a time when design was an individual sport, like running or swimming, where the spotlight often shone on rockstar designers like Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles and Ray Eames, or Karim Rashid. However, in the current climate, design is more of a team sport, like soccer or basketball, where designers, engineers, and businesspeople need to collaborate effectively to have any chance of success. Having had first-hand experiences at startups, consultancies, corporations, and even creating interactive art pieces with collaborators, the latter analogy cannot be more true.

And with collaboration comes communication, particularly visual communication of ideas and concepts. Brainstorms can build enthusiasm and quickly generate portfolio of options; concept one-pagers help you communicate your ideas to teammates and clients; and visually stunning slide decks always beat poorly designed ones, even when you are presenting the exact same content. In my course, I cover topics like how to create good post-its that captures the essence of an idea using the fewest lines possible, how to amp up an otherwise mediocre concept one-pager to look like you had spent four years in an industrial design program, and how to create slide decks as if you had a professional graphic designer do the work for you. Having these “hard” skills on top of “soft” skills like interpersonal communications, giving and receiving feedback, and time management all add up to better design innovators who can help solve the increasingly complex problems of our time.

At the Jacobs Institute, you teach a course, Visual Communication and Sketching, in which many of the core tools students might use are “analog” tools, like pen and paper. At the same time, much of your background has involved areas like human-computer interaction and new technologies, and the Jacobs Institute itself is positioned at the intersection of design and technology. How do you think about digital technology in relation to sketching or other creative processes?

Both analog and digital tools have their advantages and disadvantages, and I teach my students to be mindful of when to use which. Sketching offers speed and flexibility, allowing you to express your ideas extremely fluidly and at lower fidelities. In the beginning stages of design, it is much more time-efficient to grab a pen and a piece of paper or post-it and start sketching out ideas (as opposed to jumping into digital tools, 3D modeling programs, or code right away). With the tips and tricks I teach in my class, students can easily turn mediocre sketches into something that might wow their teammates.

Digital tools, from Photoshop, Illustrator, and Sketch to Fusion 360, Premiere Pro, and AfterEffects, allow you to further refine and polish your ideas, but significantly slow down the creative process. In my class, we utilize Keynote, PowerPoint, and iMovie, all with gradual learning curves, to quickly and effectively create professional-quality visual communication pieces.

A good analogy might be cutting a piece of wood: there are scenarios where using a table saw or even a hand saw would be much more time-efficient compared to using a laser cutter or a CNC router, and there would be scenarios where the computer-controlled tools are worth painstakingly setting up the files and the settings for. Ultimately, being mindful of the process and knowing which tool to use is a skill that is acquired through practice over time.

What do you most hope your students take away from Visual Communication and Sketching?

Ultimately, I want my students to see any visual communication tasks (sketching, designing a slide deck, designing an app, or even making a product video) and say, “Of course I can do that!” Good visual design is not rocket science but rather: one, following simple rules and shortcuts (such as lining visual elements up); two, knowing where and how to find the right resources (hint: Google); and three, practicing. I want my students to believe, as I do, that visual communication is 1% gift and 99% learnable, and that these skills are extremely valuable in all aspects of life.

I can proudly say that even though the semester hasn’t come to an end, I have witnessed the transformation in many of my students: they have significantly improved their abilities to sketch, redesigned bad posters into something visually stunning, and made compelling product videos in a matter of hours. Seeing these transformations is very addictive, and that’s why I enjoy teaching so much.

Outside of your work at the Jacobs Institute, what’s a current or recent project that you’re excited about right now?

I’ve been super busy lately: on the art front, I’ve recently curated and participated in a group pop-up art exhibit titled “Artificial Intelligence,” at a venue in Mountain View in early November. Among many pieces shown were my collaborations with computer scientist friends to create a 3D projection map of an artificial brain scan, an interactive font map organized by A.I., and another interactive piece that reveals how messages get lost in Google’s machine translation algorithm.

I’m currently curating and organizing another group show coming up on December 9, titled “Interactive Statements,” in an empty warehouse in Richmond, CA, with 10 participating artists. For this show, I will also be showing a new interactive piece that I’m working on, titled “The Medium Is The Message.”

On the design front, currently I am freelancing at MasterClass, giving product design directions, developing a coherent visual design style guide, and helping foster a design culture at this rapidly expanding startup. Last week, we launched seven new classes with Stephen Curry, Alice Waters, Ron Howard, Thomas Keller, Marc Jacobs, Helen Mirren, and Wolfgang Puck.

Last but not least, I have another side project designing a website to promote connection and dialogue among stakeholders of an economic approach to climate change. Last week, we launched http://www.airminers.org — an index of companies and projects mining carbon from the air.

More of Purin’s work can be viewed at http://purin.co. Follow his process and what inspires him at his Instagram account: @purin.co.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

By Laura Mitchell

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Making abstract ideas tangible: Five questions with Purin Phanichphant was originally published in Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Source link

“From the beginning, we’ve had the intention to create a culture through our staff.” — Joey Gottbrath, technical labs lead, Jacobs Institute

Jacobs Hall is an active site of hands-on making for UC Berkeley students, staff, and faculty. As the institute has grown in the two years since its opening, its team has aimed to build an inclusive culture that enables this growth while fostering collaboration and creativity. A key element of this approach has been the development of an integrated shop staff, with students and professional staff working together to support the space’s users.

Five professional design specialists, who collectively bring a wealth of technical knowledge and creative backgrounds in fields from robotics to glass sculpture, manage day-to-day shop operations as well as a host of education and mentorship activities, from designing and leading equipment trainings to providing one-on-one project guidance for students. Complementing this professional staff is a team of student supervisors, who have opportunities to apprentice with design specialists and serve as peer resources for their fellow makerspace users. Together, these team members help build a culture of hands-on learning, trying out new tools for themselves and sharing insights with others throughout the makerspace community.

Take a look at the video below, originally produced for ISAM 2017, to learn more about how the institute has approached building this integrated team, with an eye toward culture and shared values.

https://medium.com/media/ba76161d0c69aae305cddca11efce894/href

Want to learn more? Visit our website for more info on Jacobs Hall’s labs, resources, and team.

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Building a team, building culture was originally published in Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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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 concepts for 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Want to learn more about design at Jacobs Hall and how you can get involved? Explore the Jacobs Institute’s design ecosystem here.

By Laura Mitchell

Photos: Roland Saekow & Nicole Kim

Nicole Kim contributed reporting for this story.

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A look at the Jacobs Spring Design Showcase was originally published in Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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“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.”

Learn more about RIS☰ here.

By Kirra Dickinson

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Spotlight on: R I S ☰, Berkeley’s Solar Decathlon Team was originally published in Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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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.

Spring 2017 will bring a new season of talks to Jacobs Hall. Want to be the first to hear about them? Sign up to receive the Jacobs Institute’s newsletter and periodic event updates.

By Laura Mitchell

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A season of talks at Jacobs Hall: Three themes we heard was originally published in Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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