Introduction
Design Co is a pre-professional organization aims to create a community for students interested in human-centered design (HCD). Throughout the school year, we organized numerous skill-based workshops, speaker panels, socials, and large-scale events to provide our members with adequate knowledge and confidence to pursue a career in technology and design.
A Year in Review
This past school year marked another jam-packed year for us as we continued to inspire and encourage students toward a life in design. We wanted to focus on creating experiences where students can use their classroom knowledge. To do so, we continued last year’s successful Design Frontiers, a day-long design sprint, included more interactive activities in General Body Meetings (GBMs), and organized UC San Diego’s first-ever design-centric career fair.
Skill-based workshops
Throughout the year, we organized a series of workshops on a variety of subjects to help students sharpen their skill set. This ranged from different prototyping softwares to basics of visual design, to user research methods, and more!
Visual Design Workshops
Good user experience involves good use of visual design, which exceeds more than just the aesthetic. Visual design in HCD is a combination of creativity with relevant imagery elements that convey certain emotions. Many of our members have a strong background in design thinking, but since HCD is also about the clever use of visual elements, we held a range of visual design workshops to help students have keener eyes when designing.
We led many theory-based and interactive workshops on visual design. We organized a workshop on design composition and colors in the Fall, and one on the use of typography in the Winter. In Spring, we showed students a more creative use of visual design through motion design with our Adobe After Effects workshop.
Understanding Users
Designers must first understand their users in order to create a good product. To better implement user research methods taught in class, we invited Sony representatives to demonstrate their experience with storyboarding. This active workshop allowed students to create their own storyboard based on Sony products. From this workshop, students understood the importance of understanding the users before heading into a design.
Front-End Development Workshop
Since some of our students end up doing front end development, we felt it was fit to offer workshops on different popular tools within the industry. We introduced Figma in the Fall as an introductory design tool. In Winter, we had a workshop on Bootstrap and on creating a responsive portfolio. We also showed students InVision, Framer, and Axure, three useful software for prototyping and wireframing so students are exposed to more options to decide the right tool for them.
Professional Development
In addition to having the necessary skills, we wanted our members to be familiar with the design industry. Throughout the year, we held panels featuring UCSD alumni, working interns, and people from industry to share their experiences with students.
Interview Preparation
An interview for a design position can be difficult, especially when students are not familiar with the process and design challenges. Around peak recruiting season, we helped students revamp their resumes and build their portfolios so that they could be competitive for these companies. The following week, we held a workshop on how to complete a whiteboard challenge so students know what to expect when stepping into an interview.
Intern Panel
What can be more inspiring than hearing from our own UCSD community? To help students start searching for an internship, we asked students at UC San Diego to share their past experience as interns in design. Our speakers happily talked about the process of landing the internship and their takeaways to perform better in the future. Our panel aimed to be as interactive as possible through an ongoing Q&A session so students opened up more to the speakers and struck up conversations.
Industry Talks
There is no way better to know the industry than to hear from the people in it. We were honored to have had many companies come in and describe their different work cultures to students. Last Spring, Workday generously invited us to take a field trip to their office over Spring Break. There, we were shown how product designers interacted with other departments such as engineering and product management to create an effective flow. Workday also participated in an interactive design jam the following week to give students a networking opportunity.
Another prominent tech company who worked with us last year was Intuit. Their designers held a talk on their role in developing products and building design systems, followed by a hands-on workshop on how to build design system components.
Before students jumped into their summer internship, we had HP’s designers come to talk about the different paths they took to become a designer. The panel included designers starting from a Physics or Psychology major, which was extremely inspiring to those students who were starting late in design.
Large Scale Events
Continuing the success of last year’s Design Frontiers, our quarterly full-day design sprint, we teamed up with Intuit and Sony this past year to bring a design sprint on financial software and consumer electronics. In addition, there was a lack of design-related career opportunities in career fairs at UC San Diego, so we organized our first design-centric career fair, Stride.
Design Frontiers: Intuit
During Design Frontiers, we allowed students to apply all their knowledge into a real design process to create a product. For Winter, we collaborated with Intuit to tackle problems facing the financial software space. Similar to the past Design Frontiers, students got to hear the designers from Intuit share their experiences in the industry. They also had some helpful tips and tricks to give before everyone headed to the sprint. After 5 hours, the venue was covered with sticky notes, prototypes made from carbon pizza boxes, and just amazing ideas.
Stride: Design-Centric Career Fair
Stride is a career fair aiming to provide opportunities in the fields of human factors, user research, user experience, interaction design, UI design, visual design, content strategy, product management, product development, brand design, product design, UX engineering, web development, and much more. Over the years, there has been a lack of HCD job opportunities in UC San Diego’s quarterly career fairs. We wanted to give design enthusiasts a chance to turn their knowledge into a career, so we created our first design-centric career fair.
The companies were extremely excited to network with and recruit our talented students. Some of the names included Sony, Visa, Nanome, Learning Equality, and more. To better accommodate students and recruiters, we stretched Stride into a 2-day event, with pre-Stride info sessions from ServiceNow and Intuit to help students better prepare themselves.
Design Frontiers: Sony
Near the end of Spring Quarter, we organized another Design Frontiers to help students wrap up their knowledge of the past year. Sony agreed to participate in the sprint to help students think about designing for consumer electronics, specifically on TVs and displays. We heard Sony designers talk about the history of Sony, which started from producing rice cookers to becoming one of the world’s leading technology firms.
The 5-hour long design process seemed to be tiring, yet we were presented with many creative ideas, despite the time constraint. Sony gladly agreed to hold a networking session afterward for students to explore more about a career path in design.
Rebrand
During the summer, we decided to launch a full rebrand for our organization. There were many reasons for why we had to do this. But, the TLDR is that Design at UCSD changed to Design Co. We changed our name, brand, and visual identity, and we updated our mission statement and values. You can read more about the rebrand here!
Conclusion
The current success of Design Co would not be possible without the support of our incredible members and corporate affiliates. As we continue into this new school year, we hope to strengthen and expand our community to create a safe space for all aspiring designers at UCSD. We look forward to seeing you at our events this Fall!
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