Category: Jacobs Institute News

Self-driving cars that pick your kids up from school. An app that smoothes your public transit experience, from starting point to final destination. A network of autonomous, modular pods that allow you to travel the world, bringing your life along with you.

These futuristic-sounding ideas may not be so far away: they’re all concepts that students developed and prototyped in Reimagining Mobility, a course launched this fall at the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation. Supported by the Ford Motor Company and its Bay Area-based Research & Innovation Center, the new course attracted advanced undergraduates and master’s students from diverse fields, ranging from mechanical engineering to anthropology. Collectively, these students came to the class with internship and research experience in areas like public health, robotics, vehicle design, and business planning, creating what instructor Rob Hennigar called “an amazing mix of students.”

Over the course of the semester, Hennigar led these students in envisioning meaningful interactions between people and new transit modes. Together, the students explored emerging trends and technologies, identified needs and opportunities, and turned their insights into prototypes of novel transportation systems. In the process, they forged connections between their fields of expertise and a toolkit of design skills — bringing this integrated perspective to the frontier of a rapidly shifting mobility landscape.

As the semester began in late August, students familiarized themselves with the mobility innovations that have been filling headlines and reshaping industries in recent years: autonomous vehicles, alternative energy, ride-sharing, new public transportation infrastructure, and more. From the start, they approached these advances with a design lens, considering how communities might interact with a new technology, or how global trends might affect a given person. “There’s so much potential when you think about the human aspect, how people accept and relate to these big technological changes,” says Patrick Hartmann, a master of engineering student who brought a background in automotive engineering to the course. To design effectively, he adds, “You need to actually go out and talk to people.”

With this in mind, student teams — each composed of students from various disciplines — set out to conduct interviews and observation sessions on campus and throughout the Bay Area, investigating student biking patterns, BART and bus ridership, interactions between Uber drivers and customers, and much more. They charted their findings using tools like empathy maps, noting what the people they talked to said and did, and what they might be thinking and feeling. From these conversations and observations, it quickly became clear that exploring mobility involved mapping complex networks.

“When we think about mobility, we also think about systems,” noted Hennigar during one early class session. Students’ reports on their research highlighted this, touching on systems from employment patterns to family structures. Their findings also pointed to nuanced feelings surrounding mobility innovations. One group, who had seen a gap between the state of autonomous vehicle technology and the discomfort many of their interviewees expressed around the idea of self-driving cars, commented, “We’re not just investigating technology — we’re investigating emotions.”

Grounded in these human-centered insights, the teams began to start brainstorming potential innovations that would reflect users’ contexts and needs. Each group came up with 50 ideas, using this rapid exercise to surface thoughts that could be remixed or refined. From there, the teams converged on more targeted concepts, sketching out their ideas and creating lo-fi prototypes. As the semester advanced, they immersed themselves in an often cyclical design process, toggling between research, prototype development, and user testing as they moved through iterations. With the students encouraged to explore wide-ranging ideas, a diverse mix of prototypes — encompassing videos, app mockups, CAD models, 3D prints, and more—began to take shape.

In early December, the course’s six student teams gathered to present their prototypes to Hennigar and to guests from Ford. Leveraging their members’ varied skill sets and an array of rapid-prototyping tools, each team had prepared a prototype that interwove physical and digital components, as well as some business planning. Several groups imagined how self-driving cars could reshape daily routines, prototyping ideas from an automated ride-sharing system for kids to an augmented commuting experience. One team, connecting the emerging technology around autonomous vehicles with social trends in employment and travel, proposed a system of modular pods (and an accompanying social network) that would empower people to roam the world freely, bringing their homes with them. Other groups conceptualized 21st-century approaches to infrastructure, such as an autonomous platform that could transport traditional cars, cargo, and more, and an app that would facilitate better experiences on BART.

These wide-ranging projects reflected a freedom — both to explore various angles of the issue of mobility and to develop concepts that might not be immediately feasible—that students found liberating. “This isn’t a class you see every day,” said one student. “It didn’t limit us.” One common thread, however, ran through all of the projects: a focus on linking sophisticated technology with a thoughtful, holistic approach to how a user would experience this technology. The teams approached their prototypes as ecosystems: a team that proposed a system for customizable, on-demand self-driving cars, for example, outlined not just what the cars would be like, but how a user would interact with the system’s mobile app, the emotional comforts a car’s interior might offer, the behind-the-scenes implementation modes that would make the system possible, and the multi-tiered business model that would help the service gain traction and sustain itself. “Doing things like making a business plan really helped us bind our ideas together, with context,” notes team member Kylon Chiang. “We were thinking, ‘How would this really go into the world?’”

The Ford team, which is on the front lines of efforts to bring emerging mobility technology into the world, was impressed by the students’ ideas. “Ford gave carte blanche to the Jacobs Institute to visualize the vehicle as the solution to problems of energy, environment, economy, and wellbeing,” says Nico Thetard, design manager for advanced interior experience at Ford. “The students exceeded our expectations with revolutionary, ingenious solutions.” This fruitful semester has proved to be the opening of an ongoing collaboration: Reimagining Mobility participants have been invited to present work at the Ford Research & Innovation Center, and the course will run again in the spring semester. For students at the Jacobs Institute, this engagement with the cutting edge of mobility is a unique opportunity, allowing them to apply design approaches to systems that powerfully shape local and global experiences. As Berkeley students continue to imagine new directions for mobility, they will be adding their voices, and their ideas, to a conversation that is transforming our world and the ways we move through it.

By Laura Mitchell

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Reimagining Mobility 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 class involved delving into whole new fields for me,” says Sara Sampson. With a laugh, she continues, “But we figured things out along the way.”

Sampson is speaking in December 2016, as her team wraps up their project for Bioengineering Senior Design Projects, a course taught by Amy Herr and held in Jacobs Hall. The course serves as a capstone experience for undergraduate students in bioengineering, a field that the department’s website defines as “the application of engineering principles to biological systems.” This description continues, “A very broad area of study, bioengineering can include elements of electrical and mechanical engineering, computer science, materials, chemistry and biology.”

For students like Sampson, UC Berkeley is a fruitful place to bring these elements together. On Berkeley’s campus and in the broader Bay Area community, researchers explore the interlocking bases of bioengineering — engineering principles and biological systems—from myriad angles. The Senior Design Projects course offers students a chance to tie this diverse research activity to design methods, conceptualizing and prototyping approaches to real-world challenges. Providing both classroom space and access to cutting-edge equipment, Jacobs Hall offers a rich environment in which to do this: from 3D-printed prosthetics and microfluidics projects to bioinspired robotics, researchers and makers here are pushing in new directions at intersections of engineering, biology, and health.

This past fall’s Senior Design Projects students relished the opportunity to push in new directions themselves. Working with “clients” and partners in the local community (including doctors, medical researchers, and nonprofits), students prototyped solutions for diverse issues, ranging from vital signs monitoring in under-resourced hospitals to mobility for senior citizens. Over the course of the semester, they completed interviews and observations; developed, prototyped, and tested concepts; and presented this work to peers and partners, getting an up-close experience of biomedical innovation in the process.

As student teams moved through the design process, identifying core challenges and iterating on ideas, many found themselves trying out new technologies. With the help of Maker Passes and other campus resources, teams gained skills in areas from electronics to 3D printing, which many students had no prior experience using. Sometimes, this experimentation with new tools sparked unexpected realizations. “This was supposed to be round, perfectly circular — and the 3D print failed and cut off half of it,” says Aran Bahl, holding up a 3D-printed prototype of a patch for vital signs monitoring, meant to help nurses in under-resourced hospitals. “But as we sat there looking at it,” he continues, “we realized, ‘maybe this could be beneficial somehow.’” Analyzing the print, which had ended up with one straight edge rather than a fully rounded form, the team realized that the unintended shape could facilitate both better resolution for EKG data and more intuitive orientation for nurses placing the patch on a patient’s body. “This failed 3D print was a stroke of good luck,” explains teammate Karthik Prasad.

In the course of this iterative prototyping process, students also ventured beyond campus, finding inspiration in surprising places. A group focused on developing a tool that would help seniors safely get in and out of cars, for example, observed elders as they completed this common motion — some shifted their bodies to try to accommodate mobility issues, while others used makeshift implements like trash bags to help them slide onto a seat. Considering how they might add mechanical assistance to this equation, the student team began to look not only at existing assistive technologies, but also at designs applied in other contexts. At one point, they made a trip to a local REI, studying kayak and bike racks to see how these devices used vehicle features as built-in anchors. “We spent a lot of time adapting existing mechanisms to our own needs,” notes team member Katelyn Greene. “We learned about being open-minded, seeing what already exists elsewhere.” Ultimately, ideas adapted from these products found their way into the team’s final design, a stability handle that can be easily transported and connected to parts of a car when needed.

Underlying these wide-ranging explorations was a focus on the connections between biological systems and the physical and social environments in which people experience health issues. By interviewing and observing target users and experts over the course of the semester, the student teams were able to link research findings with contextual insights. The team working on vital signs monitoring, for example, spoke with experts throughout the semester, following this up with a January trip to several hospitals in Uganda. There, they met with staff and got a fuller sense of the hospital’s layout, day-to-day workflows, and details like power and wifi reliability. Now back in Berkeley, they’re working to incorporate this research and feedback on their device into their next iterations, refining design features and project plans.

Another team — focused on tremor monitoring for Parkinson’s patients to help gauge the effects of individualized treatment plans, which can involve difficult adjustment periods — quickly got a sense of the complex systems surrounding health issues. As they met with patients, caretakers, families, doctors, and physical therapists, they realized that the core needs for a symptom monitoring system included flexibility and convenience. For patients already facing challenges in daily life, a discreet device that could be easily worn in multiple settings and required only passive inputting on their part (unlike systems that required patients to manually log their hours) could make a big difference.

With this in mind, they prototyped an approach that would use an emerging technology — wearable circuits, in the form of thin-film metal temporary tattoos that can collect and share sensor data — to make symptom monitoring less intrusive. This elegant solution was the product of a highly iterative, often cyclical design process. “One of the big things that this class has given me is an appreciation for how much thought goes into everything. Going through the real design process to develop this one small device makes you realize that,” says Katherine Spack, a student who worked on the project. She adds, “It was good to have the chance to apply theory myself and to see, ‘oh, this is how these pieces really go together.’”

Bringing concepts together is a familiar practice at Jacobs Hall. From Bioinspired Design, a lower-division integrative biology class that draws from nature to inform product design, to upper-level courses like Bringing Biomedical Devices to Market, the building houses diverse explorations around biology, health, and design. Outside of courses, many students are seeking out — and creating—opportunities to learn about design, seeing it as a powerful complement to expertise in a field like bioengineering. The Berkeley Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), for example, has a growing committee focused on design. While this committee has generally focused on graphic design projects related to the club’s programs, it’s increasingly interested in areas like hardware innovation and how students can gain hands-on skills to enhance what they learn in class. “I never thought an engineering club would focus on design processes, creative processes,” says Tiffany Ma, who helps lead design efforts for BMES. “It’s really rewarding to have this opportunity to learn.”

Other projects underway at Jacobs Hall provide new opportunities to work across disciplines in tackling health challenges. Computer science students have prototyped health-focused smartwatch apps in User Interface Design, while budding social entrepreneurs have worked on public health initiatives for both local and global settings. Some of these efforts have extended beyond the campus, such as Navigating the Human Path, a spring 2016 course in which undergraduates and elders from the local community collaborated to design for healthy, affordable aging. This month, student group EnableTech, in partnership with Tikkun Olam Makers, will host a makeathon at Jacobs Hall, connecting need-knowers (community members with disabilities or needs for assistive devices) with student makers to create open-source assistive technologies.

In a time when myriad developments—from the rise of big data to advances in biomaterials—are reshaping approaches to health, design offers modes of connecting emerging technology with real human needs. Learning from each other as they apply design tools to pressing health challenges, Berkeley students are preparing to help lead the way in this ever-evolving field. With skills honed at Berkeley, says student Giang Ha, “We’re able to go into the real world, find a problem, and bring something to life.”

By Laura Mitchell

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Designing healthy futures 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 March 17, nearly 100 innovators gathered at the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation to kick off a weekend makeathon focused on developing custom solutions for everyday challenges encountered by people with disabilities. The event, called TOM: Berkeley, was presented by UC Berkeley student group EnableTech as part of the global Tikkun Olam Makers community, with support from the Jim Joseph Foundation. Using space and equipment in Jacobs Hall and the CITRIS Invention Lab, 11 teams worked with need-knowers to create prototypes over 48 hours. Here’s a look at the innovations they brought to life.

Speech Translator

Malia is 11 years old and has severe cerebral palsy, which often makes it difficult for people to understand her when she speaks. To help Malia communicate more accurately and fully, the speech translator team — made up of a combination of Berkeley students and Googlers — developed an algorithm to learn from and adapt to her voice, understand what she is saying, and translate it to others around her.

Auto Shift

Alvaro, an MBA student at the Haas School of Business, is quadriplegic with limited motion in his shoulders. He enjoys hand cycling, but current gear shifting mechanisms rely heavily on wrist and grip strength. For Alvaro, this means that going for a ride requires a second cyclist to ride alongside him, shifting his bike’s gears for him as needed. The auto shift team developed a gear shift mechanism that allows him to use his elbows, and they hope to work on developing a voice-activated solution as a next step.

Grocery Helper

Bliss, a mom to three kids and a full-time doctor who lives in San Francisco, is hemipalegic. When Bliss takes her children grocery shopping, she finds it difficult to manage both her kids and the groceries while navigating city streets in her wheelchair. She had seen bulky devices that might help, but hoped to find a solution that would allow for flexibility. The grocery helper team — all brothers of the professional engineering fraternity Theta Tau — developed a solution with only one permanent component: a small metal plate mounted to the back of Bliss’ chair, to which a swinging basket can be easily added and removed.

Autism Letterboard

To communicate at school, many children with autism rely on a physical letterboard: a laminated sheet of paper on which students can point out letters, which are then relayed by an aide. To help facilitate more autonomy in the classroom, the autism letterboard team developed a digitized touchscreen letterboard powered by a Raspberry Pi. Rather than pointing out a letter to an aide, the digital letterboard allows students to touch letters that are then recorded instantly by the computer, both speeding up the process of communication and reducing reliance on aides.

Makeup Applicator

Since sustaining an injury eight years ago, Ligia has been unable to apply makeup by herself. Until this weekend, she would apply her makeup by asking a caretaker or one of her sons to hold and position her brushes, pencils, and lipsticks while she would move her face and apply her own makeup. While she had become very skilled at using this system, it would slow down her morning routine, and she was looking for a way to put on makeup more independently. The Makeup Applicator team created a solution that holds her applicators, allowing her to apply makeup with autonomy.

HouseAUTO

Owen, a Berkeley-based filmmaker and self-taught engineer, can only interface with technology when in his wheelchair, using a customized joystick controlled by his chin. Because Owen spends a lot of time at home outside of his wheelchair, this quickly becomes limiting. But as an engineer, Owen doesn’t like to think small — in addition to a non-wheelchair-exclusive technology interface, he also wants to automate devices around his house through an app. To tackle Owen’s multi-faceted challenge, the HouseAUTO team worked on projects like developing a mechanical arm to attach to Owen’s wheelchair, connecting his joystick to a tablet interface, and setting up a server to control peripheral devices.

Gripper

Longtime Berkeley resident Bonnie loves to spend time outside, enjoying local trails and working with the Bay Area Outreach and Recreation Program. Currently, she relies on a grabber arm to pick up things from her wheelchair. Most of these grabbers rely heavily on wrist and grip strength, making them impossible for Bonnie to operate with one hand. Current devices also have difficulty picking up objects heavier than one pound, forcing Bonnie to rely on maneuvering a converted dustbin to lift heavy objects. Take a look at Bonnie’s experience at the makeathon here.

Leg Bag Emptier

Rafe, who sustained a spinal cord injury ten years ago, uses a leg bag connected to a catheter. If the mechanism breaks, Rafe must send in the device to be repaired, leaving him without an autonomous solution for a week or longer. Some current devices are also unreliable in determining whether or not the leg bag is full — and if the detector mechanism fails, urine can become backed up in the user’s bladder, potentially leading to serious health complications. The Leg Bag Emptier team aimed to develop an easy-to-use and reliable solution for this challenge. They created a system in which sensors on the bag (controlled by an Arduino) connect to Rafe’s iPhone, where he can use an app to monitor the time elapsed since the bag was last emptied and its current fullness level.

Tendon Glove

As a result of a spinal cord injury, Marcos, a Berkeley architecture student, has no function in his hands and relies on exoskeleton-type devices (which can be bulky or unstable) to grab objects. The tendon glove team developed a rigid glove, which provides Marcos with increased grip strength between his thumb and index finger. Unlike existing devices, the team’s solution forms to the shape of Marcos’ hand for easier usability and more flexibility.

JARL

For people with limited to no arm and leg function, a robotic arm attached to a wheelchair can serve as a backup working limb. However, solutions currently on the market can cost upwards of $50,000, making them inaccessible for many people, and cheaper desktop arms don’t provide the same strength and range of motion. Need-Knower Jade, who had created an early prototype of a solution with Owen (the Need-Knower for HouseAUTO) before the makeathon, took the idea further with the JARL team over the weekend. They created a model equipped with two degrees of freedom and a laser pointer, to make operation easier and more accurate. The team’s minimum viable product is a robotic limb that can press elevator buttons.

Travel Commode

When Jill’s parents travel, taking their toilet and shower chair with them is difficult — most models aren’t made for portability and can be heavy and cumbersome. To facilitate easier, hassle-free travel, the travel commode team developed an inexpensive and lightweight commode that can be easily broken down into parts that fit into a standard backpack or carry-on bag. Once Jill’s parents have arrived at their destination, the device is easy to reassemble without needing a screwdriver or any tools besides a small hex wrench. The team’s device is also much less expensive than similar products on the market.

Instructions for building these custom, affordable solutions will be made freely available online, with the aim of helping other people with disabilities around the world. For the students and community members who participated, the makeathon provided a valuable chance to apply their knowledge to real challenges. “The Jacobs Institute was made for a makeathon like this,” said George Anwar, a lecturer at UC Berkeley, adding, “This event is so much greater than a grade, and it teaches our students to put the person in need first.”

Learn more about the makeathon at berkeley.tomglobal.org. TOM:Berkeley is a local community for student makers, designers, developers, and engineers working together with people with disabilities to develop technological solutions for everyday challenges. This event was co-organized by the student group EnableTech at UC Berkeley, who will also be providing support for projects to continue after the event. By mobilizing TOM Communities worldwide, TOM:Tikkun Olam Makers seeks to address neglected challenges and develop millions of affordable technological solutions for people with disabilities around the globe. Established in 2014, TOM is a strategic initiative of the Reut Group.

Content for this recap came from Tikkun Olam Makers and from Jacobs Institute student storytellers Dapree Doyle and Nicole Kim.

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48 Hours, 11 Innovations at TOM:Berkeley 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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James Pierce approaches design from multiple angles. With an academic background in human-computer interaction (he holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in this field), he is a designer and researcher who explores speculative design, design theory, and everyday social practices. At the Jacobs Institute, he teaches two courses that reach students at different points in their undergraduate pathways: Discovering Design offers an entry point to the field of design for lower-division students from across campus, while User Experience Design is an upper-level course that equips students with skills for designing information systems and other interactive experiences. Linking these courses — and all of James’ work —is a focus on thoughtful, creative inquiry. We asked James a few questions.

You both design and study interactive technology, and your work spans many activities, including making, researching, writing, and teaching. How does this hybrid perspective on design inform your work?

Often in my research I use making things as a mode of studying things — so the process of designing and making artifacts is a tool or technique for understanding, exploring, and critiquing. This way of doing research is sometimes referred to as research through design, critical making, or design inquiry. One consequence of this extremely hybrid way of working is that no two projects ever really feel the same, as each often requires its own unique synthesis of methods, techniques, perspectives, and intellectual frameworks. When it comes to teaching, I draw on this full range of perspectives. Oftentimes in a single class we will move from researching users, to conceptual explorations, to physical prototypes, to critiquing projects.

Some of your work has included thinking about how designers might creatively grapple with the implications of new technologies. Here at the Jacobs Institute, one of the things we often talk about is finding balance between what can be and what should be. Could you share some thoughts on that balance, and designers’ role with regards to it?

No matter what area of design you work in, it is always necessary to frame and reframe the problem or issue at hand, particularly at the early stages of design. And this is no less true when a client comes to you with a very clearly defined problem! Often they don’t know what they want or need until they see some different options or possible final solutions. One of the challenges I face in teaching, particularly students who come from an engineering background, is that students often want to jump straight to a solution. My job is to help them learn to slow down and really grapple with the problems and constraints — and consider different possible outcomes and effects, or a particular line of inquiry or outcome, before they start building circuits or deciding which buttons go where.

Given UC Berkeley’s rich history with social activism and ethical issues, my classes also encourage students to think about the broader implications of their work. Students are taught to consider not only expected users, but also the many other stakeholders or constituents that may be directly or indirectly affected.

You teach classes with an interdisciplinary perspective, including Discovering Design, which is open to students across campus and serves as an entry point to the broad world of design. Can you tell us a bit more about that class? Do any “discoveries” stand out to you from this experience?

Discovering Design is an extremely enjoyable class to teach because it introduces so many facets of design — graphic design, interaction design, product design, speculative design, design methods, architecture, art, and more. Each area is introduced with hands-on activities, ranging from short design projects, to form studies, to observation activities. What stands out for me is seeing students discover which aspects of design they are most drawn to. Some students realize they are most interested in interaction design and use their course projects to develop their interaction design portfolios and apply for jobs in the field. Others find they are more interested in user research and design methods, and pursue graduate programs in these areas. It’s exciting to see students continue to take Jacobs coursework after getting their hands dirty playing around in the different areas of design that this course introduces them to.

What are you working on, or thinking about, right now? Any projects you’re particularly excited about?

At the moment I’m working on a project exploring the Internet of Things (IoT). But instead of starting with all of the hopeful aspects of IoT, we start with various points of anxiety: overstimulation, distrust, creepiness, and so on. From there I’ve been designing a wide range of artifacts designed to engage outside participants in discussing network anxieties. These early stages of a project are always quite exciting — as well as anxious — because it is unclear where exactly where the work will end up.

UC Berkeley provides a unique context for design. Does this context play a role in your work? What insights or advice would you give to someone interested in exploring Berkeley’s design ecosystem?

In Discovering Design we devote an entire week to discussing and analyzing the politics and ethics of design, from everyday things like high heels and toothpicks to more specialized and sometime hidden things like 3D printable guns and redlining practices. I find Berkeley students to be particularly adept at engaging design and innovation from a political and ethical perspective, perhaps because of the university’s emphases on both societal impact and innovation. My own work almost always explicitly engages these political and ethical dimensions of design. But every designer must consider these aspects to some extent.

My recommendation to undergraduate students who are interested in continuing to explore design opportunities at Berkeley is that they start with the obvious and consider all of the different courses offered at Jacobs. But after that, I always advise my students to forge connections between other class and disciplines on campus. For example, taking an anthropology class is useful for design anthropology and user research. Cognitive science classes can make you a better usability expert.

I also stress that the design skills and mindsets learned at Jacobs are applicable to virtually any area in which they end up working and practicing, because design can also be understood as a fundamental sort of human activity. So I encourage students to also be on the lookout for ways to apply design thinking and techniques to other areas, including their major area of study and other interests they have — whether that’s social activism, a startup idea, or how they organize their desk and closet.

Learn more about James’ work here.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

By Laura Mitchell

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Research through design: Five questions with James Pierce 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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The Bay Area is a global center of design activity, from Silicon Valley innovations to the urban manufacturing projects that marry craft and technology in San Francisco and Oakland. For Berkeley students, opportunities to explore this rich local ecosystem can powerfully complement their coursework, offering close-up looks at design concepts in practice. This spring, a pair of program series at the Jacobs Institute — Design Field Notes, a talk series that invites practitioners to share their work in a Jacobs Hall studio, and Design Field Trips, which allow students to visit professional design spaces — aimed to expand these opportunities, linking the institute’s student community with the Bay Area’s constant flow of new ideas.

The Design Field Notes series, which first launched in fall 2016, comprised nine talks over the course of the spring semester. Reflecting the series’ goal of offering insights into practices across a broad design landscape, speakers shared work in architecture, product design, design research, and a range of other fields. In an informal studio setting, their audiences, which included students from diverse departments, got an inside look at these speakers’ recent projects, often adding their own questions or ideas to the conversation.

While the speakers’ backgrounds spanned a wide range of fields, common themes appeared across the talks. Many speakers touched on the role of cultural contexts in design, from 99% Invisible producer Avery Trufelman, who explored the concept of “drift” as she traced how objects had taken on different meanings throughout their lifetimes, to Montaag principal Per Selvaag, who prompted audience members to think through their own cultural positioning and its effects on the designs they produced.

A number of talks also explored the hybrid processes that shape 21st-century practice, offering insights into areas like smart product design. Matter Global’s Justin Porcano, for example, walked the audience through the design processes behind two recent projects that linked industrial and interface design (a showerhead that tracks water usage and a wearable for Carnival cruise passengers), while Pearl Automation’s Jorge Fino and Tyler Mincey outlined how the tools they build for cars reflect a set of core design values that guide both software and hardware decisions. Beyond the realm of smart consumer products, this emphasis on linking physical and digital design emerged in a variety of talks, with practitioners offering their takes on navigating an increasingly hybrid design landscape.

For students hoping to get an on-the-ground view of this landscape, the launch of the Design Field Trips series offered a unique opportunity. While Design Field Notes talks bring discussions of real-world processes into a Jacobs Hall studio, the Design Field Trips series serves as the flip side of that equation, offering students a chance to see the sites in which these processes play out. “If you can actually go and see a design process, it’s a lot easier to grasp and be inspired by it,” says Amy Dinh, the Jacobs Institute’s student services advisor and the coordinator of the Design Field Trips series.

Over the spring semester, students headed to three unique sites of design activity: the San Jose Museum of Art, to see the exhibition Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial; the new offices of design firm Cooper; and Autodesk’s Pier 9 facility. The three trips offered opportunities to explore both products and processes of interdisciplinary design innovation — and to contextualize these experiences in relation to their work at Berkeley. At the San Jose Museum of Art, for example, students saw works from wide-ranging design fields, from architecture to textiles, as a docent discussed the techniques and technologies involved in creating them. Particularly for students interested in novel intersections of design and cutting-edge technology, the inclusion of projects like 3D-printed glass vessels provided inspiring reference points.

Other reference points came in moments of interaction with practitioners themselves. At Cooper, students took part in a workshop, getting a feel for how design firm employees might approach a client project, before talking to Cooper team members — including a Berkeley alumna—about career paths within the field. “Going to a design firm, seeing people who are doing this professionally, was really good for students to see,” says Dinh. “They talked about the design process, the pathways to become a designer—all these things that students have a lot of questions about.”

For many students, the tangibility of these experiences added to their impact. At Pier 9, students made connections between the tools they use at Jacobs Hall and Autodesk’s more advanced machines, passing around project samples as they discussed different fabrication processes. For Emily Hill, a first-year student in cognitive science, these examples offered a look at how she might connect different interests. “Our guide showed us a model drone made with Project Dreamcatcher, a smart CAD system developed under Autodesk. Dreamcatcher solves design problems by optimizing design solutions based on given goals and constraints,” she explains. “I am passionate about both design and machine learning, and have always been looking for joint applications between these two areas. And Eureka! This is it!”

As both the Design Field Trips and Design Field Notes series continue to grow, facilitating these “Eureka!” moments will remain central to the programs’ goals. Both students and practitioners who have participated in the two series speak to the value of venturing beyond their everyday settings and exchanging ideas. For Olivia Ting, an MFA student in art practice, participating in field trips this spring fostered newfound “access and awareness of these places in the Bay Area design scene.” She notes that these experiences have had continuing influence as she develops her practice on campus: “[The events] that I attended,” she says, “offered me much inspiration for future projects.”

Work in design in the Bay Area? Interested in hosting a Design Field Trip or giving a Design Field Notes talk? Let us know — we’d love to connect!

By Laura Mitchell

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Getting into the field 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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Adam Hutz is a doctoral candidate in rhetoric, whose research focuses on the ways in which we map virtual spaces. When he’s not working on that research, he can often be found at Jacobs Hall or the CITRIS Invention Lab: he’s woven hands-on making into his graduate experience, participating in Jacobs Institute Chief Learning Officer Eric Paulos’ Critical Making course (first as a student, and more recently as a graduate student instructor) and taking on projects like developing assistive technologies. We talked to Adam about how rhetoric and design relate, and what he’s learned from bringing them together.

You work across a wide range of practices and disciplines, from critical theory to hands-on making. Does your work in your home department — rhetoric — inform your work in design and fabrication? On the flip side, do design and fabrication practices inform your work in rhetoric?

I think, in an abstract sort of way, that “design” and “rhetoric” have a lot in common from the very beginning, and so I see them as being in constant dialogue with each other. Both disciplines concern themselves with “appearances” — how things come across to particular readers in particular contexts — and this is true whether you’re looking at a monument, a painting, a poem, or a political speech. Stepping back a bit, it’s easy to see how the disciplines of “rhetoric” and “design” actually study the same basic building blocks of expression: artisans combine signs to explore ideas of greater and greater complexity. And this works across the board, whether you’re thinking about the specific tessellations in the marble blocks that make up the Taj Mahal; or how particular rhythms invoked in a Fleetwood Mac outro unsettle the rest of the song; or even how a smartphone’s beveled screen makes an argument for or in contrast with the phone’s prior generations.

And the similarities between design and rhetoric don’t end at the level of semiology, either: both disciplines are difficult to define (and explain!), and both seem to at least attempt to describe nearly everything that there is in the world. If design is the study of “all things human-produced,” then rhetoric must be the study of “all things human-expressed” — which may, now that I think about it, actually comfortably include the former.

When I first took Eric Paulos’ course Critical Making in spring 2015, every new skill registered as a new kind of language to me: you would learn the “discourse” of the laser cutter, and then the discourse of the 3D printer, and so on until you knew all of the languages of making. This is, for me, one important way that rhetoric informs making — the fact that I will think of each new kind of “making” in the language of language itself. Making informs rhetoric, on the other hand, by reminding me that the physical world is ultimately responsible for nearly all of the lines of inquiry I produce. That is to say, in the ivory tower it’s easy forget that only through the specific material actions of the body do thoughts become manifest in the world, and only through an understanding of the physical processes behind reading, writing, speaking, and thinking can one fully engage with philosophy.

Your research has looked at virtual spaces and the ways that we map these spaces. In the design field, technologies from augmented/virtual reality to novel conversational interfaces are currently raising interesting conversations around notions of space and how spaces are designed and experienced. Could you talk a bit about your interests in virtual spaces, and how this might relate to work in design and technology?

One of my favorite “authors of the virtual” is a scholar named Jonathan Crary, and one of the reasons I like him so much is that he somehow manages to write compellingly about our current epoch while almost never mentioning any technology built after the mid-1800s. But in a rare move in an introductory chapter of probably his most well-known book, Techniques of the Observer, he breaks away from his historian’s oculus and asks a few dense questions about what it means to “observe” in the 21st century:

“The most urgent questions, though, are larger ones. How is the body, including the observing body, becoming a component of new machines, economies, apparatuses, whether social, libidinal, or technological? In what ways is subjectivity becoming a precarious condition of interface between rationalized systems of exchange and networks of information?”

These (admittedly tough to parse) lines betray Crary’s feeling that the “human” can be easily washed away by the tumult of the 21st century. He argues in his book that, where once the eye could be taken as the dominant and undisputed arbiter of reality, where seeing was believing and believing seeing, today we have become adrift in incomprehensible streams of data, built environments, white noise, alienating social networks, labor divorced from the physical, and an unyielding array of interpellations by distant and often synthetic beings. What even are humans anymore among all of this new chatter? And, moreover, where are they?

I’m interested in how we map virtual spaces because “mapping” seems to me to be what people do in order to understand where they are in the world, and it also seems to be a subject profoundly complicated by the introduction of virtual space into the human experience. Where are we when the land fades away to reveal the limitless Cartesian grid of the holodeck? Do we continue to “map” the virtual until the very process of mapping breaks down? And what then? These are all questions I obsess over — questions of “place” — in my own writing and research.

This past spring, you were the GSI (graduate student instructor) for Critical Making, a course taught by the Jacobs Institute’s chief learning officer, Eric Paulos. Can you tell us a bit more about that class, and your experience helping facilitate it?

For me, Critical Making was the beginning of a kind of awakening towards the material I underwent about halfway through my doctoral career at Berkeley — and also incidentally the first course I took in any building north of Moffitt. The class had been in development for only a few semesters, and was at that point still taught in the Invention Lab. We didn’t yet have access to the massive reservoir of tools and resources provided by the Jacobs Institute. For 3D printers, we had three Afinia H-Series models to choose among. Still, they were enough to communicate what I feel is the most powerful idea behind 3D printing: that, with a little training, the right software, and a few hours of access, any person with a creative spirit can draw objects directly out of the ether of their imagination and into the world of things.

This past semester I had the unique pleasure of watching 37 students make all of the discoveries I made, plus many, many more, empowered as they were by the full might of the Jacobs Institute’s brilliant staff and trove of cutting-edge tools. Following Dr. Paulos’ guidance, our students were invited to push the envelope of what was possible (and sometimes also what was advisable) to discover and develop new ways of challenging the status quo in all areas of society. One group created “growable clothing” to undermine and critique fast fashion; one group created a haunting monument of a hand that, when touched, would vocalize the desensitized emails students get disclosing where assaults had taken place on campus; one group made a fully-functional rickshaw and accompanying app, called “Uberik,” to call attention to the labor practices of an unnamed company in Silicon Valley; one group created “identity armor,” which, at the push of a button, would raise dark shades and a voice modulator in front of the user’s face to protect them against iris scans and voice capture — insinuating the possibility of a dystopian future (and present) where such protections are essential; and dozens more provocative, thoughtful, and technically demanding projects too numerous to name here.

Critical Making strives to push against the presumption students sometimes have going into prototyping courses that design has to be assistive, or at least “pleasing,” by alternatively asking: “What if a design was willfully difficult? Inconvenient? Needlessly complex? Or called attention to an absurdity that’s often overlooked?” The results, I can safely say, have been illuminating.

What are you working on right now? Any pet projects?

Always! This weekend, incidentally, I was working on an assistive walker for my dog, Irma (yes, a “pet project”… please forgive me). I used Fusion to model the device, Illustrator to finish the cut files, and a Jacobs-provided laser cutter to punch out the pieces from plywood. I then tested the mockup for fit, and plan to use Jacobs’ OMAX waterjet cutter (on which I was just recently trained!) to cut the final design out of aluminum when I’m certain the files are ready.

Another piece of enabling technology I’m working on right now is a personal elevator to be used for helping individuals with limited leg strength ascend from the floor after falls. I’m developing this machine in league with Berkeley’s EnableTech, a club that meets in Jacobs during the spring and fall semesters, and we’re excited to report we just ran our first few successful test-lifts with our need-knower at the end of last semester. Our next goal is to make the lift more portable by replacing the heavy frame with aluminum (as opposed to water-jet steel), and power it using pneumatics.

Finally, I’ve been assisting with a project called “Helping Hands: Playground Edition” to help build a modular prosthetic device for kids that, in contrast to most prosthetic hands available today, can be used in playground settings for hanging, swinging, throwing, and catching.

What’s your favorite thing that you’ve made while at Berkeley?

For my team’s final Critical Making project in 2015, I did the mechanical development for Hugwear, a “wearable pet” designed to help calm down kids with difficulty managing their emotions. It’s a simple device: it curls up and makes sad noises when it detects its user is upset, and uncurls and makes happy noises when pet. But it was my first introduction to the world of animatronics, and I had a lot of fun showing off the creature to dozens of kids at two different Maker Faires — one in San Mateo, and one in Washington, D.C. — and it is still one of my favorite ideas to date.

Learn more about Adam’s work here.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

By Laura Mitchell

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The languages of making: Five questions with Adam Hutz 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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“Starting in fall 2015,” read a spring 2015 Berkeley Engineer magazine feature on Jacobs Hall, the then-future home of the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, “future engineers, artists and game-changers from many fields will have an inspiring new environment for advancing visionary ideas into designs to help improve the world….Studios with access to the latest equipment for rapid prototyping and fabrication provide enough space to let ideas loose.”

Today, roughly 20 academic courses take place in these studios each semester. Reflecting the Jacobs Institute’s aim of infusing design innovation into the undergraduate experience, these offerings range from introductory seminars to capstone courses in a diverse mix of fields. New courses in Design Innovation (DES INV), developed directly by the institute, provide opportunities for students from all majors to gain hands-on design skills. At the same time, Jacobs Hall hosts and supports design-focused curriculum offered through a variety of departments, bringing courses from computer science’s User Interface Design to integrative biology’s Bioinspired Design under one roof.

With the two-year anniversary of Jacobs Hall’s opening approaching, we sat down with some of the faculty members who teach these wide-ranging courses. They offered a look at how they’re bringing design innovation into the classroom, fostering creativity and collaboration within Jacobs Hall’s studios.

“We want to get students in the makerspace in their first and second years…so they have these tools at their fingertips from there.” — Hayden Taylor

Hayden Taylor, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, teaches two courses in Jacobs Hall: Introduction to Manufacturing and Tolerancing, an entry-level course geared toward freshmen and sophomores, and Processing of Materials in Manufacturing, an upper-division offering.

The syllabus for Introduction to Manufacturing and Tolerancing, Taylor explains, was largely designed around the possibilities that Jacobs Hall would open for building hands-on skills early on in students’ undergraduate experiences. “We want to get students in the makerspace in their first and second years…so they have these tools at their fingertips from there,” he says. With the opening of Jacobs Hall, he continues, it’s become much easier for students to gain familiarity with tools like 3D printers as part of a course — enabling them to try out ideas and fabricate their own designs as they explore core engineering concepts.

In teaching two courses at Jacobs Hall, Taylor has gained insights into structuring these kinds of hands-on experiences, from effectively facilitating teamwork to creating meaningful assignments. “The more open-ended we make a project, the more students have enjoyed it,” he notes. Partially in response to student feedback, he’s worked to integrate Jacobs Hall’s diverse equipment capabilities into course assignments. In Processing of Materials in Manufacturing, for example, students use tools like the Type A 3D printers, ShopBot CNC router, and Othermill CNC milling machine, ultimately bringing skills together to create original projects in which they prototype a product and scope out how it might be manufactured at scale. Going forward, Taylor hopes to continue to build on this work, and to collaborate with staff and other faculty at Jacobs Hall to share ideas and resources for hands-on learning.

“This is a complete eye-opener for many students.” — Jeff Bokor

Jeff Bokor, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, has long taught Gadgets Electrical Engineers Make, a seminar that invites students to look inside everyday gadgets like projectors and flat screens. The opening of Jacobs Hall, however, allowed him to boost the course’s scale — increasing the class size and expanding the seminar from freshmen-only to an offering for both freshmen and sophomores.

His goal, he explains, is to get lower-division students excited about hardware. He points to a slogan he’s used for the course: “Take this class to find out how much fun you can have working with your hands — other than typing with a keyboard.” Each class session centers on a particular type of gadget; a small group of students researches the week’s gadget and opens the class with presentations on its function, features, and history. From there, students get to break open sample gadgets, with Bokor walking around to provide additional context as they take a close-up look at the engineering behind an everyday object.

Jacobs Hall’s studios, equipped with movable tables, hanging outlets, and other flexible features, facilitate this format. “It’s a good space for this class,” Bokor says of the studio that houses his course, noting that he typically arranges the tables to form large surfaces on which teams can easily work together to study their gadgets. For many students, the course is their first hands-on engagement with hardware, and Bokor hopes it will prompt them to continue tinkering and experimenting, commenting, “This is a complete eye-opener for many students.”

“There’s an openness.…It’s nice to have the kind of space where students can really move around and put it to use.” — Sara Beckman

Sara Beckman, senior lecturer at the Haas School of Business and teaching professor in mechanical engineering, has been leading courses in design methodology and innovation for years. In the past two years, some of her work has taken place in a new setting: Jacobs Hall’s third-floor studio, the building’s largest space. In this space, Beckman has served on the teaching teams of three distinct courses — Design Methodology, an introductory course; Reimagining Slums, an advanced project-based class (both Design Innovation courses offered with the Department of Mechanical Engineering); and Collaborative Innovation, a course that was launched in 2016 and is offered jointly by the Haas School of Business, Department of Art Practice, and Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies.

The concept for Collaborative Innovation stemmed from faculty members in these departments being struck by unexpected connections between their fields — then wondering how they might prompt students to mine these connections in formulating creative interventions or solutions. “What we’re trying to do is to get the students to look across the areas — to think about what’s the same, what’s different — and appreciate the opportunity to use tools from other disciplines,” explains Beckman, “then apply the tools to attacking wicked problems, such as mental health awareness on the Berkeley campus.”

In its current iteration, the course involves a two-week module from each of the three disciplines, followed by team-based work on projects that draw from the approaches students have learned in the first part of the semester. The Jacobs Hall studio, Beckman says, makes it easy to quickly toggle between various formats, a crucial ability given the multi-disciplinary nature of the course. The studio may be set up with theater-style seating while students put on performances, for example, before furniture is rearranged to allow for group work and whiteboard brainstorming sessions. “There’s an openness….It’s nice to have the kind of space where students can really move around and put it to use,” notes Beckman, adding, “My colleague from Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, Lisa Wymore, starts our classes with body movement exercises that emulate the design work we will do in class that day and that use all of the space in the room.”

While the course doesn’t require use of Jacobs Hall’s equipment labs, Beckman says that she has seen some examples of the makerspace’s culture and capabilities infusing course processes. This past spring, for example, students were assigned to brainstorm ideas for selling drones as part of the business module in the course. During the class session, one student ran down to the makerspace and laser-cut a lo-fi prototype of a drone with solar panels, integrating this into his group’s presentation. Beckman is interested to see how connections like this may grow as students become more familiar with Jacobs Hall. Looking around at the third-floor studio’s glass walls, whiteboards, and post-it-covered surfaces, she also wonders how users might continue to bring the space to life, from exploring new tools for co-creating visually to providing space for students to leave ideas up for others to stumble upon. With this kind of open space, she says, “we have an opportunity to push things even further.”

“You get to create a project that you self-define — that’s a big deal.” — Scott Moura

Scott Moura, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, teaches an undergraduate capstone course, Design of Cyber Physical Systems, in Jacobs Hall. He smiles when he remembers the first day his students walked into the then-brand-new building for class, back in fall 2015: “I’ll never forget the looks on their faces,” he says.

Moura says that Jacobs Hall’s studios provide a physical environment that is designed for collaboration, from seating that allows students to face each other to integration with equipment labs. He also highlights the role of the building’s community in shaping student learning experiences, even beyond the classroom. Particularly as fields like civil engineering move into emerging areas like smart infrastructure, he notes, students can benefit from immersing themselves in design mindsets and methods. Moura points to a 2016 talk at Jacobs Hall, in which Tesla co-founder Marc Tarpenning highlighted the potential impact of infrastructure innovations, as an example of how participating in the institute’s interdisciplinary ecosystem can help his students place their specific interests within a broader design context.

He also sees the freedom to be creative as key to learning processes at Jacobs Hall. In Design of Cyber Physical Systems, students work in teams to create prototypes that range from smart gardening solutions to systems for optimizing home energy use, learning how to use tools like Arduinos and sensors along the way. “You get to create a project that you self-define — that’s a big deal,” says Moura. Reflecting on the most recent offering of the course, Moura describes the projects that have come out of this kind of open-ended, creative environment. “As the students were giving their presentations,” he recounts, “I was struck just by how awesome they were — and how much personality and creativity they showed.”

As the Jacobs Institute enters its third year, Moura is interested in how these kinds of advanced project-based courses can continue to scale up, expanding opportunities for students to dive into emerging concepts and take part in creative prototyping processes. “I’m excited to see the future,” he says.

“It’s really the heart of our course: enabling students to keep innovating.” — Albohassan Astaneh-Asl

Albohassan Astaneh-Asl, professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Gary Black, associate professor of architecture, teamed up to create a new course, Innovative Sustainable Residential Design, when Jacobs Hall opened. “This is exactly what we were wishing for for years,” says Astaneh-Asl of the opportunity to develop a course that would be held in the new building.

Innovative Sustainable Residential Design, first offered in spring 2016, is open to students in both civil engineering and architecture, with the goal of connecting students from these two disciplines at the start of a design process. “We felt that putting architects and engineers in the same room, where the architect and the engineer can realize that there’s something to contribute from both teams early on in the process…that would actually make a better building,” explains Black. Prior to the course, many of the students from the two departments had never even met, but Astaneh-Asl and Black set out to help them collaborate as part of a fully integrated design team.

Astaneh-Asl and Black see Jacobs Hall as an ideal space for this kind of creative collaboration, mentioning the studios’ natural light, work tables, and easy makerspace access as key features. They also highlight the building’s positive culture and sense of community — a spirit they try to cultivate in the classroom as well. From the physical layout to team workflows, “we try to make the classroom feel like a design office,” says Astaneh-Asl.

A central element of the initial offering of Innovative Sustainable Residential Design was the final project, for which students broke into teams to develop concepts for a sustainable residential project at a site in Berkeley. This team-based approach led to a number of insights — not just for the students, but for the instructors as well. Realizing the role of intentionally structuring effective teamwork (particularly when working across disciplines), for example, the instructors drew from resources on team formation and evaluation developed by fellow Jacobs Hall instructor Sara Beckman and her collaborator Barbara Waugh. “There are so many resources on this here — I learned a lot,” says Astaneh-Asl.

Beyond these teaming tools, the instructors also hope to be able to continue to integrate more technology tools, such as rendering software, into future class sessions. They see the combination of flexible space and real-time access to technical tools as essential to the iterative, “just try it” approach they aim to foster in the classroom. Ultimately, they say, their role as instructors — particularly in a space like Jacobs Hall — is not just to impart information, but to help their students develop a design mindset that they can take with them once the course is over. Reflecting a common view at Jacobs Hall, Astaneh-Asl remarks, “It’s really the heart of our course: enabling students to keep innovating.”

Learn more about courses and curricular pathways at Jacobs Hall here. Want to see what students have created in courses like these? Explore sample projects.

By Laura Mitchell

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Inside the studio: Teaching design innovation 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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