Design at UCSD: Winter Quarterly Report
Since Design at UCSD had first started, it’s made its way to build a community for students to feel comfortable sharing their passion for design.
We wanted to ground design culture on campus by bringing students across all majors together, easing students into design, and providing guidance on interviews and developing portfolios.
Below is a highlight of a few of the workshops and events we’ve held this past quarter.
Resume Workshop
The main goal of this workshop was to help students prepare for the upcoming job fair in the Winter Quarter. We brought in Alyssa O’Neill, an Interaction Designer at HP, and Kaitlin Garriott, a UX Research at Viasat to guide our students in building a strong UX-focused resume. Alyssa and Kaitlin gave helpful tips as well as provided examples of what good and poor resumes looked liked. Afterwards, students had the opportunity to have their resumes critiqued by fellow board members and our guest speakers.
Sketch Workshop
With Sketch becoming a principal tool among designers in companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google, we wanted to help students learn these tools that would later help them ease into industry. In our introductory Sketch workshop, we had board members teach the fundamentals of vector-based design to attendees as they were guided through a Sketch file to follow along, and had the opportunity to create their own mock up of an app.
Designing for Accessibility Talk
“…things are designed to be used by people, and without a deep understanding of people, the designs are apt to be faulty, difficult to use and difficult to understand.”
- Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
The importance of designing for accessibility is to design solutions for those with disabilities so it can improve the user experience for all types of users. Andrew Bergeron, a UX Designer from Everybody Counts came in to teach students about how to design for accessibility. During his talk, he shared some of his insights, lessons learned, and experiences with user testing voters both with and without disabilities. Afterwards, he opened up the floor for questions and students were able to talk to him about more opportunities in designing for accessibility.
Design Research Workshop
Our org collaborated with Round Feather to host an interactive workshop to help students learn more about best practices for UX research and design. Round Feather is a consultancy that helps companies develop products and services that bring happiness to people through emotion-driven design. Emilia Pucci, an Interaction Designer and Researcher at Round Feather, came in to share advice and tips for engaging users and creating immerse experiences. At the end of the workshop, students were able to conduct their own user research activities and present their findings to the group.
Alumni Meet-Up
Design at UCSD members had the opportunity to meet up with past alumni up in San Francisco and find out what they’ve been up to as well as share what the org has been doing in the past months. Attendees were able to connect and mingle, and alumni shared their stories about working in industry. Following up with this event is our ongoing campaign called Alumni Spotlight, where alumni share how they got into design and share tips and and advice they have for new designers.
And that wraps up our winter quarterly report! While we didn’t include all of the events and workshops we’ve hosted, we hope this gives you a glimpse of the opportunities Design at UCSD tries to provide for students interested in getting into design. Looking ahead to Spring Quarter, we’re excited to continue servicing the org’s members with future events and workshops.
