design lab eric hekler public health technology

Eric Hekler Joins Design Lab Team

Eric Hekler Joins Design Lab Team

Eric Hekler Joins Design Lab Team

UC San Diego Design Lab is excited to welcome Eric Hekler, an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Public Health at UC San Diego.  Hekler hails from Arizona State University where he was an Associate Professor in the School of Nutrition and Health Promotion and the director of the Designing Health Lab.  He has recently joined the Design Lab to work at the intersection of his interests in behavioral science, human-centered design, public health, and control systems engineering.  Specifically, he wants to explore how to successfully identify and develop behavior change interventions to address unmet needs in our rapidly changing societal contexts.

Hekler is also the Director of the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems at the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego where he is looking to advance his research through studying the evolving digital technologies that are currently tackling complex health problems spanning individuals, families, communities, social networks, and populations.  

In collaboration with Design Lab faculty and staff, Steven Dow, Eli Aronoff-Spencer, and Michèle Morris, Hekler is focused on securing grants that empower individuals to build scalable solutions that will drive smart and connected communities.  Through leveraging his experience uniting a diversity of voices and perspectives as well as a collaboration with initiatives such as Design for San Diego (D4SD), he is looking forward to creating a sociotechnical platform for individuals to innovate around region-wide challenges such as transportation and housing.  Design for San Diego, led by Steven Dow, Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science, presents advocates and passionate citizens with the unique opportunity to engage in the iterative process of design thinking to create transformative impact.

Additionally, Hekler and Morris are pioneering an effort to design a consulting service for local, national, and international partners who seek to incorporate human-centered design complemented with agile methods into their practices.  The initiative revolves around spearheading workshops, design challenges, and large scale research projects to educate the broader community about human-centered design principles and effective methods of incorporating design thinking to craft meaningful and powerful solutions across a variety of fields and disciplines.

Each of these opportunities provides an avenue for Hekler to directly interface with and support a community of passionate individuals dedicated to achieving real and sustainable behavior change solutions through the integration of human-centered design.  Hekler believes that The Design Lab is an incredible place to contribute to a forward-thinking organization that has a deep understanding of the importance of dynamically adapting solutions to meet the needs of different people and different real-world contexts.

UC San Diego Design Lab is excited to welcome Eric Hekler, an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Public Health at UC San Diego.  Hekler hails from Arizona State University where he was an Associate Professor in the School of Nutrition and Health Promotion and the director of the Designing Health Lab.  He has recently joined the Design Lab to work at the intersection of his interests in behavioral science, human-centered design, public health, and control systems engineering.  Specifically, he wants to explore how to successfully identify and develop behavior change interventions to address unmet needs in our rapidly changing societal contexts.

Hekler is also the Director of the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems at the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego where he is looking to advance his research through studying the evolving digital technologies that are currently tackling complex health problems spanning individuals, families, communities, social networks, and populations.  

In collaboration with Design Lab faculty and staff, Steven Dow, Eli Aronoff-Spencer, and Michèle Morris, Hekler is focused on securing grants that empower individuals to build scalable solutions that will drive smart and connected communities.  Through leveraging his experience uniting a diversity of voices and perspectives as well as a collaboration with initiatives such as Design for San Diego (D4SD), he is looking forward to creating a sociotechnical platform for individuals to innovate around region-wide challenges such as transportation and housing.  Design for San Diego, led by Steven Dow, Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science, presents advocates and passionate citizens with the unique opportunity to engage in the iterative process of design thinking to create transformative impact.

Additionally, Hekler and Morris are pioneering an effort to design a consulting service for local, national, and international partners who seek to incorporate human-centered design complemented with agile methods into their practices.  The initiative revolves around spearheading workshops, design challenges, and large scale research projects to educate the broader community about human-centered design principles and effective methods of incorporating design thinking to craft meaningful and powerful solutions across a variety of fields and disciplines.

Each of these opportunities provides an avenue for Hekler to directly interface with and support a community of passionate individuals dedicated to achieving real and sustainable behavior change solutions through the integration of human-centered design.  Hekler believes that The Design Lab is an incredible place to contribute to a forward-thinking organization that has a deep understanding of the importance of dynamically adapting solutions to meet the needs of different people and different real-world contexts.

UC San Diego Design Lab is excited to welcome Eric Hekler, an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Public Health at UC San Diego.  Hekler hails from Arizona State University where he was an Associate Professor in the School of Nutrition and Health Promotion and the director of the Designing Health Lab.  He has recently joined the Design Lab to work at the intersection of his interests in behavioral science, human-centered design, public health, and control systems engineering.  Specifically, he wants to explore how to successfully identify and develop behavior change interventions to address unmet needs in our rapidly changing societal contexts.

Hekler is also the Director of the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems at the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego where he is looking to advance his research through studying the evolving digital technologies that are currently tackling complex health problems spanning individuals, families, communities, social networks, and populations.  

In collaboration with Design Lab faculty and staff, Steven Dow, Eli Aronoff-Spencer, and Michèle Morris, Hekler is focused on securing grants that empower individuals to build scalable solutions that will drive smart and connected communities.  Through leveraging his experience uniting a diversity of voices and perspectives as well as a collaboration with initiatives such as Design for San Diego (D4SD), he is looking forward to creating a sociotechnical platform for individuals to innovate around region-wide challenges such as transportation and housing.  Design for San Diego, led by Steven Dow, Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science, presents advocates and passionate citizens with the unique opportunity to engage in the iterative process of design thinking to create transformative impact.

Additionally, Hekler and Morris are pioneering an effort to design a consulting service for local, national, and international partners who seek to incorporate human-centered design complemented with agile methods into their practices.  The initiative revolves around spearheading workshops, design challenges, and large scale research projects to educate the broader community about human-centered design principles and effective methods of incorporating design thinking to craft meaningful and powerful solutions across a variety of fields and disciplines.

Each of these opportunities provides an avenue for Hekler to directly interface with and support a community of passionate individuals dedicated to achieving real and sustainable behavior change solutions through the integration of human-centered design.  Hekler believes that The Design Lab is an incredible place to contribute to a forward-thinking organization that has a deep understanding of the importance of dynamically adapting solutions to meet the needs of different people and different real-world contexts.

Read Next

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. 

First-Ever UC San Diego Design Conference sponsored by Design Lab Unites Students with Leading Design and Business Professionals

By Kaila Lee, Design at UCSD In late May, over 150 students and leading industry…

Diabetes Design

Diabetes Design Initiative Presents Community Challenge Designs To Over 50 Stakeholders

Photo Courtesy of Matt Chesin

This Wednesday, September 2nd, the Diabetes Design Initiative presented the culmination of an entire summer of work to over 50 stakeholders in the healthcare industry. The team shared a prototype that will redefine the way how diabetes is explained without numbers and a new design to simplify data sharing.

Led by Eliah Aronoff-Spencer, director of the Center for Health Design, Design Lab fellow Lars Müller, and Ben West, a nightscout developer, DDI is re-thinking how healthcare technology is designed.
Productivity

Bringing Order to Chaos: How to Increase Productivity By Mastering Unstructured Time

Podcast with Design Lab member Amy Fox

In this episode we will talk to UCSD Cognitive Scientist, Amy Fox, about Structured and Unstructured time. Join us as we learn about the difference between the two, and tips and tricks that can help you organize and boost your productivity.

Triton Tools & Tidbits is a podcast that is focused on discussing topics that will engage and enrich student life and education. Brought to you by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs.

Design Lab & UCSD Spaces strive for Educational Equity Through Design

Who better to learn about good design than the people who will most benefit from…

Report: Military Remains Economic Bright Spot In San Diego

Report: Military remains economic bright spot in San Diego

Design Lab member Michael Meyer discusses San Diego's defense economy during Covid with ABC 10 News San Diego.

The coronavirus pandemic appears to have been no match for San Diego's defense economy, which a new report says keeps on growing.

The San Diego Military Advisory Council study says from the fiscal year 2020 to 2021, direct defense spending was $35.3 billion dollars, a 5.3 percent annual gain. Jobs grew 2 percent to nearly 349,112. In all, it made for a $55.2 billion dollar gross regional product.

"That means continued stability and economic prosperity for San Diego, buffered by, or provided by the military economy presence," said Michael Meyer, a professor at UC San Diego's Rady School of Management, which researched the report.

The study points out that military spending impacts more than the people employed by the federal government or serving on base or active duty. Instead, there's a multiplier effect in San Diego, with nearly 190,000 San Diegans employed by private companies contracting with the defense department -- such as in programming or shipbuilding.

"Retraining for electronics, computers, aviation, the engineering fields, the technical financial fields. That's all valuable and an effective way of getting into the military economy," Meyer said.
Back To Top