Intro post: Cultivating Culture at the UCSD Design Lab

Constantly iterating in design and in how we engage with others

The Design Lab at UC San Diego includes people who advance research about a broad range of social, technical, and design challenges — from developing new ways for communities to take part in problem-solving to inventing novel health and medical technologies. A spirit of “constant iteration” runs throughout our design research as well as in how we engage with each other as members, partners, honored guests, and visitors to the Design Lab.

In the Spring, we formed the Cultivating Culture Working Group (CCWG) to investigate opportunities for the Design Lab community to reflect on and promote a healthy lab culture. The CCWG includes Camille Nebeker, Brian McInnis, Elizabeth Eikey, Steven Rick, Maryam Gholami, and Emily Knapp. We are applying a community-centered design approach where we leverage the skills and perspectives of those within the Design Lab to identify problems and collectively shape solutions. This is the first of a series of posts to publicly share our process of iteratively reflecting on and promoting a healthy lab culture. Watch for updates as we share lessons learned from a series of panel discussions, brainstorming sessions, and prototyping activities throughout this next year.

We are eager to learn from you as well as people beyond this Design Lab. In the spirit of design, we invite your feedback about our approach and hope that these posts help to generate some meaningful discussion about the culture within your own research centers, labs, and teams. To promote online discussion we will be including conversation prompts in each post and encourage you to use the Medium commenting features to respond with your thoughts, experiences, and beliefs. Follow this link for instructions about how to share a comment on Medium.

Summer “Ask Me Anything” panel discussions

In the summer of 2021, the CCWG launched an “Ask Me Anything” style series of panel discussions about Lab Management, Managing External Relationships, and Self-Management. Results from a community “needs assessment” (conducted in the Spring) were used to select these topics.

The needs assessment surveyed Design Lab members’ experiences around learning various research related methods and practices (e.g., research design, identifying and mitigating bias, mentoring trainees, data management, partnering with community members). Our analysis found that many respondents had received formal training in research methods, but had received little to no training on topics related to managing people, working with external partners, as well as self-care and time management. As such, these three topics were the focus of our discussion panels this summer.

Our next step was to identify and recruit panelists for each topic from within the Design Lab community. The CCWG considered diversity of training, culture and experience as we identified potential panelists. In the weeks leading up to each panel, the working group developed discussion questions, which we shared with the panelists ahead of time.

Each panel discussion lasted about an hour and was facilitated by members of the CCWG. The following is a short description of each discussion panel as well as several of the primary discussion questions.

Lab Management: What does it mean to be a manager within an academic + design + community building setting like the UCSD Design Lab? The panel included Mai Thi Nguyen, Professor of Urban Studies and Planning and Director of the Design Lab, Scott Klemmer, Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science and Engineering and Co-founder of the Design Lab, and Michèle Morris, Associate Director of the Design Lab and Community Team Director. Collectively the panelists reflect a diversity of management experience, from working with large and small teams on academic and community initiatives, management styles, as well as different career paths prior to joining the Design Lab.

1. Setting and achieving goals: How do you make sure that the work you do advances the purpose and goals of your lab?
2. Playing various roles: As leaders of your lab groups, you play a lot of different roles, from being educators to project managers and principal investigators for funding agencies. How do you reconcile the tensions among these roles?
3. Planning for student success: How do you know when a mentor-mentee relationship is working? How do you know when one isn’t working?
4. Facilitating difficult discussions: What steps do you take when there is a disagreement within your lab/team? What about when you are directly involved in the disagreement?

Follow this link to read more about Lab Management.

Managing External Relationships: What are some best practices toward forming respectful, mutually beneficial, and potentially long-term relationships with external collaborators? The Design Lab includes a collection of labs and teams that regularly partner with external collaborators, from public officials to community-based organizations and residents throughout the San Diego region and beyond. The panel included Colleen Emmenegger, Head of the Design Lab’s People Centered Automation Lab, Lilly Irani, Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies, Director, Feminist Labor Lab and Co-Director, Transitional Ecologies Studio, and Blanca Melendrez, Executive Director, Center for Community Health at the UC San Diego Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute.

1. Finding partners: How do you identify partners and evaluate fit for potential collaborations?
2. Syncing up: How do you establish and maintain good relationships, set clear expectations, and understand a collaborative organization’s structure and norms?
3. Learning from mistakes: Conflicts and missteps happen. When they do, what steps do you recommend toward repairing relationships with a collaborator? With an organization? With a community?
4. Debriefing: How do we debrief/unpack/evaluate an external collaboration after it has ended or at specific benchmarks in an ongoing relationship, we are working to maintain?

Follow this link to learn more about managing External Collaborations.

Self-Management: Managing people, including students, staff and volunteers, to accomplish these goals is not easy and reflects a set of skills that are not often “taught” in graduate school. In particular, skills about how to balance our own professional drive with our personal needs for self-care, family and friends, and enjoyment in life. Our panel discussion on Self-Management included Lizz Eikey, Assistant Professor in the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science & The Design Lab, Nadir Weibel, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Camille Nebeker, Associate Professor in the Wertheim School of Public Health & The Design Lab as well as co-founder of the ReCODE Health center.

1. Mindset: Acknowledging that academia and beyond is focused on productivity, how do you construct a sustainable mindset that allows you to thrive and not deplete everything in the name of success?
2. Boundaries: Setting expectations of ourselves and one another in terms of responsibilities. Tell us about a time when you said “no” or otherwise stuck to a boundary you set? Tell us about what you do to support your own self-care and enjoyment?
3. Balance: Burnout is real — understanding individual and collective behaviors to create a healthy balance between work, family, and other personal needs. What have you done to promote balance in your work-life and self-care?

Follow this link to read more about Self-Management.

Continuing to iterate

Keep an eye out for posts about each of the “Ask Me Anything” panel discussions this summer. Our next steps at the Design Lab will involve community-centered participatory design work to transform insights from each panel discussion into proposed policy, practices, and activities that nudge people towards a healthier culture. We will be applying a community-driven design approach to involve all members of the Design Lab and beyond as we continue to iterate in the ways that we engage with each other.

What steps will you take to promote a healthier lab culture? We encourage you to pick up some of the topics and questions that we considered for the panel discussions this summer and facilitate a similar conversation within your own lab group (please share what you learn!).

This post was co-authored by all members of the CCWG, which includes Camille Nebeker, Brian McInnis, Elizabeth Eikey, Steven Rick, Maryam Gholami, and Emily Knapp.