The $67 million Design and Innovation Building, or DIB, will make it possible for students to develop everything from watch sensors that measure air quality to apps that screen for signs of Alzheimer's disease to scooters tailored for the elderly.
"We want students to engage and serve the community, to bring people in, rather than having the university be an island unto itself," said Ramesh Rao, director of UC San Diego's Qualcomm Institute, a nearby technology test bed.
The approach reflects the school's need to produce more workers for the region's huge biotech, life science and engineering industries, and its desire to more warmly welcome the public to an institution largely isolated near the bluffs of La Jolla.
This week, the 74,000-square-foot DIB will become the first working piece of the university's emerging "front door," a clearly designated spot where students and the public will find it easier to access the main campus, which is spread over more than 600 acres.
The second piece, a Blue Line trolley station, will begin operating on Sunday. It's located next to the DIB, whose windows are designed to let visitors and commuters peek at the action in the maker studios. A restaurant will be added to encourage people to linger.
An outdoor amphitheater that will seat nearly 3,000 people is being built next to the DIB. And workers are straightening and lengthening Rupertus Lane, which will provide people with the first clear path between the eastern and western edges of a campus that now has nearly 43,000 students.
UC San Diego has long cultivated entrepreneurship and design among its students, notably among a trio of engineering undergraduates who created Hush, a smart earplug company that was bought by Bose in 2016.
But the effort began to take on more focus and depth two years earlier when Chancellor Pradeep Khosla recruited famed design expert Don Norman to found the school's Design Lab and to help conceptualize the DIB.
Norman is an engineer and psychologist who originally joined the school's faculty in 1966. He became founding chair of the Department of Cognitive Science, the first department of its kind in the world.
He left UC San Diego for industry in 1993 and became a research executive at Apple, helping the company to, among other things, improve the Macintosh computer.
Norman later went on to other companies, including Hewlett-Packard, and proselytized his core belief that products should be easy to use and practical.
"Design is not about making something look pretty," Norman told the Union-Tribune shortly after he returned to UC San Diego. "It's about making the world work better.
"I mean everything, from your cellphone to health care to education to our impact on the environment. That's what we're focused on."
That will be one of the guiding principles at the DIB, which is composed of four floors, one which will house The Basement, an incubator space where students will learn how to develop ideas and start a company.
The hope is the site will give birth to companies like Nanome, a San Diego startup founded by UC San Diego graduate Scott McCloskey. Nanome develops virtual reality software that better enables scientists to study molecules, work that is essential in drug development.
DIB also will get students to think about undertakings like the Limber Project, an effort in which students, faculty and philanthropists and entrepreneurs found ways to use 3D printing and novel design to create affordable prosthetics.
Such work will get under way in the coming weeks at the DIB, which sits on a spot of land that was, until recently, a scraggly, little-used area of the campus.
"It's gone from being a backwater to a part of our front door," said Paul Roben, associate vice chancellor for innovation and commercialization. "It's fantastic."
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