skip to Main Content

Design-A-Thon: Mindshifts on Megafires

Design-A-Thon: Mindshifts on Megafires

Design-A-Thon: Mindshifts on Megafires

Living in California, one quickly becomes familiar with the images of roaring walls of fire that seem to overtake the news cycle every summer. The dangers of such events are obvious and have come to seem inevitable. But what if there were other ways of taking care of both the environment and our communities? What if there were ways to prevent the disaster, rather than react to it? This Spring, The Design Lab is partnering with The San Diego Supercomputer Center and WIFIRE Lab to help transition our approach to wildfires from reaction to prevention.

The collaboration, a pitch-style challenge titled “Design-A-Thon: Mindshifts on Megafires,” will be spearheaded by Chief Data Science Officer of The Supercomputer Center and WIFIRE founder Ilkay Altintas and Design Lab Program Designer Kevin Popovic. Working together, both institutions have produced an interactive and engaging program that will help members of the general public understand the benefits and safety that come with prescribed burns, as well as the dangers of wildfire suppression and its creation of wildfire deficits. 

The “Mindshifts on Megafires” calls upon teams of innovative UCSD students eager to engage with real-world problems and solutions to come together and construct a convincing pitch, the best of which will be rewarded with a summer internship at The San Diego Supercomputer Center and the opportunity to bring their ideas to life. Students looking to participate can either sign up as a team or individually, those who register as individuals will subsequently be matched with a team. All teams will have access to subject matter experts and materials to aid them as they build their pitches. No prior experience is required, and students of all disciplines and majors are welcome to participate.

The official Design Challenge kickoff will take place this Thursday, April 7th, at 4:00 P.M in room 202 of the newly built Design and Innovation Building. To receive kickoff information, as well as specific details about the challenge, prospective participants are encouraged to register at the event page: https://designlab.ucsd.edu/designathon-mindshifts-on-megafires/

For a full list of Design-A-Thon related dates and events, see below.

Key Mindshift on Megafires dates and events:

  • April 7 @ 4 PM – Design Challenge unveiled at kickoff 
  • April 15 – Registration & design-thinking workshop, lightning talks, and mentor sessions 
  • April 16 @ 11:59 PM – Submissions due
  • April 20 @ 5 PM – Project showcase at Design@Large

Living in California, one quickly becomes familiar with the images of roaring walls of fire that seem to overtake the news cycle every summer. The dangers of such events are obvious and have come to seem inevitable. But what if there were other ways of taking care of both the environment and our communities? What if there were ways to prevent the disaster, rather than react to it? This Spring, The Design Lab is partnering with The San Diego Supercomputer Center and WIFIRE Lab to help transition our approach to wildfires from reaction to prevention.

The collaboration, a pitch-style challenge titled “Design-A-Thon: Mindshifts on Megafires,” will be spearheaded by Chief Data Science Officer of The Supercomputer Center and WIFIRE founder Ilkay Altintas and Design Lab Program Designer Kevin Popovic. Working together, both institutions have produced an interactive and engaging program that will help members of the general public understand the benefits and safety that come with prescribed burns, as well as the dangers of wildfire suppression and its creation of wildfire deficits. 

The “Mindshifts on Megafires” calls upon teams of innovative UCSD students eager to engage with real-world problems and solutions to come together and construct a convincing pitch, the best of which will be rewarded with a summer internship at The San Diego Supercomputer Center and the opportunity to bring their ideas to life. Students looking to participate can either sign up as a team or individually, those who register as individuals will subsequently be matched with a team. All teams will have access to subject matter experts and materials to aid them as they build their pitches. No prior experience is required, and students of all disciplines and majors are welcome to participate.

The official Design Challenge kickoff will take place this Thursday, April 7th, at 4:00 P.M in room 202 of the newly built Design and Innovation Building. To receive kickoff information, as well as specific details about the challenge, prospective participants are encouraged to register at the event page: https://designlab.ucsd.edu/designathon-mindshifts-on-megafires/

For a full list of Design-A-Thon related dates and events, see below.

Key Mindshift on Megafires dates and events:

  • April 7 @ 4 PM – Design Challenge unveiled at kickoff 
  • April 15 – Registration & design-thinking workshop, lightning talks, and mentor sessions 
  • April 16 @ 11:59 PM – Submissions due
  • April 20 @ 5 PM – Project showcase at Design@Large

Living in California, one quickly becomes familiar with the images of roaring walls of fire that seem to overtake the news cycle every summer. The dangers of such events are obvious and have come to seem inevitable. But what if there were other ways of taking care of both the environment and our communities? What if there were ways to prevent the disaster, rather than react to it? This Spring, The Design Lab is partnering with The San Diego Supercomputer Center and WIFIRE Lab to help transition our approach to wildfires from reaction to prevention.

The collaboration, a pitch-style challenge titled “Design-A-Thon: Mindshifts on Megafires,” will be spearheaded by Chief Data Science Officer of The Supercomputer Center and WIFIRE founder Ilkay Altintas and Design Lab Program Designer Kevin Popovic. Working together, both institutions have produced an interactive and engaging program that will help members of the general public understand the benefits and safety that come with prescribed burns, as well as the dangers of wildfire suppression and its creation of wildfire deficits. 

The “Mindshifts on Megafires” calls upon teams of innovative UCSD students eager to engage with real-world problems and solutions to come together and construct a convincing pitch, the best of which will be rewarded with a summer internship at The San Diego Supercomputer Center and the opportunity to bring their ideas to life. Students looking to participate can either sign up as a team or individually, those who register as individuals will subsequently be matched with a team. All teams will have access to subject matter experts and materials to aid them as they build their pitches. No prior experience is required, and students of all disciplines and majors are welcome to participate.

The official Design Challenge kickoff will take place this Thursday, April 7th, at 4:00 P.M in room 202 of the newly built Design and Innovation Building. To receive kickoff information, as well as specific details about the challenge, prospective participants are encouraged to register at the event page: https://designlab.ucsd.edu/designathon-mindshifts-on-megafires/

For a full list of Design-A-Thon related dates and events, see below.

Key Mindshift on Megafires dates and events:

  • April 7 @ 4 PM – Design Challenge unveiled at kickoff 
  • April 15 – Registration & design-thinking workshop, lightning talks, and mentor sessions 
  • April 16 @ 11:59 PM – Submissions due
  • April 20 @ 5 PM – Project showcase at Design@Large

Read Next

World Design Capital San Diego Tijuana Campus Convening on Dec 9th

It is with great pleasure that we invite you to submit your project and join our first World Design Capital San Diego Tijuana 2024 Campus Convening on December 9, 2022, held at the UCSD Design Lab in the Design and Innovation building between 2.00-5.00pm...
Don Norman On User-friendly Design

I wrote the book on user-friendly design. What I see today horrifies me

The world is designed against the elderly, writes Don Norman, 83-year-old author of the industry bible Design of Everyday Things and a former Apple VP.

More people than ever are living long, healthy lives. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the average life expectancy is 78.6 years for men and 81.1 for women. More relevant, however, is that as people grow older, their total life expectancy increases. So for those who are now 65, the average life expectancy is 83 for men and over 85 for women. And because I’m 83, I’m expected to live past 90 (but I’m aiming a lot higher than that). And these are averages, which means that perhaps half of us will live even longer.
Lily Irani

Lilly Irani: Seeking to the Community Behind the Wheel in Tech

Lilly Irani is currently an associate professor in the Communication department and an affiliate faculty member at The UCSD Design Lab. She’s the winner of the 2020 International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award and the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize for her book Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India. Inspired by the work of Lucy Suchman, Lilly’s research in the field of design extends beyond simply “asking what’s right and wrong and for whom,” but encompasses giving workers and communities “an actual voice in shaping the technology” and getting “political agency over the technologies that we use,” as she put it. 

Her involvement with the community is nothing short of impressive. For ten years, Lilly co-designed and maintained a website for online gig workers on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform to let workers share reviews of employers and jobs to take or avoid. Over the last two years, she has grown the software platform into a worker advocacy organization run by Mechanical Turk workers themselves, so they can also organize to improve their work conditions in ways that matter to them. 

More recently, she has worked with the United Taxi Workers San Diego to champion a program to digitize access to taxis for first and last mile transportation in San Diego. This project works towards maintaining good wages and rights for essential transport workers while working towards climate justice by using taxis to make public transit more useful to San Diegans. Design Lab members Udayan Tandon, Vera Khovanskaya, Enrique Arcilla, and Sam Muñoz work on this project. 
Don Norman

Design a Better World, with Don Norman

UX Cake kicks the season off with a fascinating conversation about changing the world with design, with Don Norman.

"There are really creative people in all these communities. And there aren’t enough experts to go around anyway. What we want to do is go around the world and find these people and facilitate, help them, empower them, give them expert knowledge and allow them to decide how to apply that to their problems." - Don Norman
Design Lab’s Edward Wang Wins NIH R21 For Work On Smartphone-based Alzheimer’s Screening

Design Lab’s Edward Wang wins NIH R21 for work on Smartphone-based Alzheimer’s Screening

Design Lab’s Edward Wang, who is a jointly appointed professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering in Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego, wins a National Institutes of Health (NIH) R21 through the National Institute of Aging (NIA) for his work around transforming smartphones into pocket-sized personal health monitors. 

The NIA has selected Design Lab’s Edward Wang, who directs the Digital Health Lab, to receive NIH R21 funding for his work with Co-investigator Eric Granholm, Director of UCSD’s Center for Mental Health Technology (MHTech), to develop a smartphone app that can screen for early signs of cognitive decline indicative of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). An NIH R21, also known as the Exploratory/Development Grant, provides support in the early and conceptual stages of a project’s development. As part of a national push towards combating the debilitating effects of AD, the National Institute of Aging looked towards funding novel ways to screen for AD through the use of digital technologies. 
Design Lab Michael Meyer Ignite Business

Michael Meyer Highlights Design-Driven Innovation in Business

Read the article below Michael Meyer's presentation below or skip ahead to the bottom for audio…

Back To Top