Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation

10/30/2026

This Tuesday, Design Field Notes welcomes Dr. Stefanie Hutka for a lecture celebrating the launch of her new book, What Your Machines Should Do: The Science and Strategy of Human-Centered Automation.

Stefanie is a design research leader and founder of Sendfull who has led research for emerging products at Adobe and Meta. She teaches UX design and AI at the UC Berkeley School of Information and holds a PhD in psychology focused on cognitive neuroscience.

Her talk and her new book examines the Automation Strategy Gap—the distance between an organization’s AI ambitions and its readiness to create something useful. Her central provocation: automation accelerates the system you already have. Before deciding what machines should do, we must understand the beliefs, incentives, and processes they will amplify.

AI can make a system faster. It cannot decide whether that system is worth accelerating.
This event is free and open to the public.

This Tuesday, November 3rd, 5:30 pm at Jacobs Hall on the north side of campus. RSVP and more info:
https://luma.com/k0amr17h 

10/29/2026

10/22/2026

This Tuesday, October 27, DesignFieldNotes welcomes Dr. Catie Cuan, an engineer, artist and pioneer of choreorobotics, the practice of using choreography to design how intelligent machines move. As Founder and CEO of ART Lab (AI Robot Technology), Catie blends robotics research with dance to create robots that move with expression and social awareness, and her award-winning robot choreography has reached audiences as far as the TED2024 mainstage. She holds an MS and PhD in robotics and AI from Stanford, where she now lectures, and led a multi-robot machine-learning project at Everyday Robots and Robotics at Google. 

In her talk, Physical AI: Giving AI a Robot Body, she’ll explore what changes when AI leaves the screen and takes physical form, and how choreography can help us build machines that take part in human life more intuitively and meaningfully.

This event is free and open to the public.
Tuesday 10/20, 5:30 pm at Jacobs Hall on the north side of campus. RSVP and more info:
https://luma.com/hsmpoyxa 

10/16/2026

Matthew Carlson is one of the most engaging presenters we’ve hosted at Jacobs Hall. So we are really looking forward to this new talk, “Future Farming: Designing Startups in a Big Company” — this Tuesday, 10/20 at 5:30 PM — as part of DesignFieldNotes at our Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation at UC Berkeley.

Matthew is Director of Product Design for Aqua at Adobe, an internal start-up developing creativity tools for kids. Matthew has built a career across Adobe, Twitter, and Meta, where he has focused on creating and scaling new products within large organizations. His practice combines design, creative technology, and strategic thinking to uncover new opportunities and build tools that empower the next generation of creators.

In his talk, Matthew will examine how innovation takes root inside large organizations, where ideas grow toward opportunity much like plants toward sunlight. Drawing on real-world examples, he will discuss how designers can act as “gardeners”: identifying potential, nurturing collaboration, and protecting new ideas long enough for them to take hold and thrive.

This event is free and open to the public. Please join us! Find the link to RSVP and get a calendar event in the first comment.

10/08/2026

Our next speaker at is Shoshana Berger, writer, strategist, and cofounder of the Aged Intelligence Society, whose work explores how design and storytelling shape the way we understand the world and our place in it.

Shoshana spent a decade at IDEO leading global marketing and serving as editor-in-chief, before guiding content and communications at Notion. Her practice brings together a storyteller’s curiosity and a designer’s attention to how people navigate complex systems and everyday life. She evokes creativity through the overlaps of journalism, design, and communications with contributions to The New York Times,TIME and many other print publications.

Shoshana cofounded ReadyMade, the DIY design magazine that became a National Magazine Award finalist in both 2005 and 2006, and later helped launch WIRED Design. She is also the coauthor, with physician BJ Miller, of A Beginner’s Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death, extending her storytelling with a designer’s curiosity who asks big questions about life while reminding us we don’t have to figure it all out.
In her talk, Good Life Design is as Little Life Design as Possible, she will challenge the pressure to optimize every aspect of our lives, exploring what it means to make space for creativity, uncertainty, and experiences that unfold on their own terms.
This event is free and open to the public.

Tuesday 10/13, 5:30 pm at Jacobs Hall on the north side of campus. RSVP and more info:
https://luma.com/8k55glb9

09/21/2026

Our next speaker at is Kelsey Brennan, Head of Product Design and User Research at ThredUp, where she leads the teams shaping how people buy and sell secondhand in one of the world’s largest online resale platforms.

With a background spanning design, research, architecture, and new media, Kelsey brings a systems-minded approach to product design, pairing creative rigor with a deep understanding of how people interact with complex digital experiences.

Kelsey has built her practice across a range of ambitious product environments, from scaling design at Planet, where she developed novel patterns for machine learning, satellite, and geospatial data, to launching products at Carbon Five that many people know and love. Her interdisciplinary path, grounded in a Master of Architecture from and a BA from Reed College, reflects a career shaped by both conceptual thinking and practical ex*****on.

In this talk, she will explore the tensions between found problems and made problems, and what comes first when designing products, teams, and systems that need to work in the real world.

Tues 9/22 5:30 PM. This event is free and open to the public. RSVP via link in bio or via https://luma.com/DesignFieldNotes

09/16/2026

Part of the benefit of having a Makerpass is access to a range of skill building workshops taught by Jacobs’ Design Specialists. Swipe through to check out the array of great classes coming up:

9/17: Intro to Rhino / Unlock the potential of 3D modeling with Cody Glen
9/23: Jewel of my (Laser) Eye / hands-on intro to laser cutting with Chris Myers
9/24: Intro to Grasshopper / Understand the fundamentals of parametric design with Cody Glen
10/1: RoboDraw / Turn your sketch into robot art with Cody Glen
10/15: Advanced RoboDraw / Go deeper with multiaxis robotics with Cody Glen

Note two are OPEN TO ALL, and do not require a Makerpass:

* 9/18: Privacy Not Included / Take back control of your data with Chris Parsell
* 9/29: AI Ethics for STEM / Navigating AI, thoughtfully and critically with Nicole Panditi

Find out more at https://jacobsinstitute.berkeley.edu/workshops



 


09/14/2026

This Tuesday, 5:30 PM Hall: Josette Melchor is a founder and cultural strategist working across art, technology, cities, and responsible AI.

As the founder of Gray Area and now Newtemporary  — as well as Google’s global lead on “placemaking” and a board member of the Burning Man Project — Josette has spent her career shaping experiences that connect emerging technologies with civic life, cultural infrastructure, and public imagination.

In this talk, Josette will reflect on how design can respond to impermanence, support community meaning-making, and help shape the cultural infrastructure of the future.

Free and open to the public!
RSVP and see the whole lineup: https://luma.com/DesignFieldNotes



 


09/10/2026

This Tuesday come explore UC Berkeley’s 8,000 sq. ft. design & prototyping hub, meet the community, and watch the tools in action. We’re also celebrating the newly dedicated Yee Commons at noon — remarks, ribbon cutting & lunch!

📍 12:00 — Yee Commons Grand Opening & lunch
🔧 12:30 / 1:30 / 2:30 — Guided tours
🎨 Hands-on demos + Cal club showcases
🎱 Makerspace Bingo — win a FREE Maker Pass (3 winners!)

Free & open to ALL Cal students, staff, and faculty 💡

Please RSVP via link in bio!




09/04/2026

Swipe through this season’s deep Design Field Notes lineup.
9 talks, 11 speakers… one very full semester of ideas.🧠

First up: Tania Ketenjian & Philip Wood, this Tuesday 9/8 at 5:30 PM.

Free & open to the public. Tuesdays at 5:30 pm, Jacobs Hall, 3rd floor.

See 🔗 in bio and follow 
https://luma.com/DesignFieldNotes