In May, many UC San Diego Design Lab members and students swarmed the largest human-computer interaction conference in the world, ACM CHI 2017. Affiliated with ACM SIGCHI, the premier international society for professionals, academics and students who are interested in human-technology and human-computer interaction (HCI), the conference brings together people from multiple disciplines and cultures to explore new ways to practice, develop and improve methods and systems in HCI.

“I love the mix of people at CHI—chatting with people making new sensor technologies, new theoretical approaches, new architectural construction techniques -- it has incredible diversity but is still brought together with a common set of ideas and expectations,” said former Design Lab Fellow Derek Lomas, who presented at the conference.

This year, the mega-HCI conference, which was sponsored by tech-industry giants such as Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo! was held in Denver near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Organizers selected the site, which is full of scenic trees, mountains and valleys to serve as a motivation for the theme of “Motivate, Innovate, Inspire.”

While Seda Evis participates as a Designer-in-Residence at UC San Diego with The Design Lab, and is VP of Strategy & Growth at FreshForm Interactive—an experience design and innovation consultancy—she also claims to have what she refers to as a superpower: her hybrid mind, which she describes as the combination of two worlds: the business side and the design side.

As a Designer-in-Residence at The Design Lab,  Evis enjoys working in an interdisciplinary setting, which she says enhances her existing skillset. “Academia tends to be quite separate from how the practice is done,” she explains. “I find ways of doing interdisciplinary work, as well as cross industry work, very important for innovation because that’s how you actually get seeds from different places.” As of now, most of Evis’s work at The Design Lab has been working with the Community Team on the now winning bid for the World Design Capital 2024 (WDC) designation. Her work dovetails with her role on the Board of  Directors for the Design Forward Alliance–a non-profit organization started by the Lab in partnership with the regional design community and one of the partners co-leading the HOME 2024 WDC efforts alongside the Design Lab, Burnham Center for Community Advancement, the City of San Diego and the City of Tijuana.   The designation puts the San Diego-Tijuana region in a prestigious international cohort recognized for the “effective use of design to drive economic, social, cultural and environmental development.”  Even the proposal theme is significant, Evis says. “Home” not only refers to the immense and diverse communities of San Diego and Tijuana that form one, but also serves as an acronym for Human-centered, Open, Multi-disciplinary/Multi-cultural, and Experimental. For Evis, participating in HOME2024 signifies her career “coming full circle.”