Brainstorming
Spring is a great season to start anything. This spring, 24 students from
UC San Diego started a new challenge with the cognitive science
department. That challenge is to redesign UCSD. Our team consists of four
students from a range of backgrounds: Crystal Yan (mechanical
engineering), Jamie Yein Chung (visual arts), Josef Goodyear (cognitive
science) and Kavitha Arumugam (structural engineering). As one of the
bigger campuses in the UC system, UCSD has a lot to play with for
designers. During our first session last week, we went through a
brainstorming session to pinpoint an area of focus. We were overwhelmed by the wide array of design flaws on our campus. Some problems were obvious to anyone who attends UCSD, such as unsuitable and crowded parking facilities. Others were so ubiquitous that they were hard to see; as
current UCSD students, we had to look between the lines to see these
“invisible” problems. Our team ran through packets of post-it notes as we
brainstormed topics from transportation to food. As a team we sorted
through our brainstorming session and picked 13 problems, which we then
narrowed down further to two. At the end of our session we ended, assured
that we would focus either on technical difficulties in lectures or the
inefficient school shuttle system.
Those plans changed. Josef works for the school newspaper, the UCSD
Guardian, delivering papers twice a week. The next morning, when he was
out on his route, he was confronted by a student. The student was upset
about the amount of waste that the newspaper produced. Josef brought the
issue to the rest of the group, who immediately contributed ideas for
potential redesign opportunities. Could the newspapers be placed in better
locations to increase readership and reduce waste? Could newspaper stands
be modified to encourage more students to read papers? Could we use the
unread newspapers in new ways, instead of just dumping them in the
recycling bin? We don’t have the answers yet, but we recognize that this
is an issue that affects UCSD. As a team we will be looking at potential
solutions to this problem. Stay tuned as we begin tackling this issue in
the upcoming weeks!
