The new Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation at Berkeley Engineering gives you the tools, teams and hands-on learning to turn your creative ideas into solutions that help people and communities. Learn more about the Jacobs Institute, or check out the fact sheet.

You can also check out Berkeley’s vibrant student network of designers, makers and builders:

Student organizations

• 3-D Modeling Club: Interested in 3-D printing? Take a workshop, join a team project, enter a competition.
• berkeleyByte: Join Berkeley’s leading design, innovation, culture and technology blog.
• Berkeley Engineers and Mentors: Create hands-on lesson plans and teach them at local K-12 schools.
• Berkeley Innovation: Get hands-on experience with the design process, from conducting user research to building and marketing prototypes.
• Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology Student Association: Find tools and networks to start your own company. We’ve actually started businesses.
• Code the Change: Use your computer science skills for social good through nonprofit projects.
• DeCal: Learn graphic design, web design and just about anything else in a student-led class.
• Design Engineering Collaborative: A student hub for hands-on engineering design. Interdisciplinary projects launch here, every day.
• Design for America: Use human-centered design and creative problem solving to tackle big community problems.
• Engineers Without Borders: We design and implement sustainable engineering solutions in communities that lack access to basic needs.
• Hackers@Berkeley: Build it, break it, and build it again in workshops on web development, product design and other topics.
• Innovative Design: Need a website, video, photo shoot or flyer? Teams of awesome Cal student designers can create it for you.
• Pioneers in Engineering: Every spring, Bay Area high school teams face off in a robotics competition that we craft. We build our own robotics kit for each team, we mentor the teams, we design and build the competition field.

Competition teams

• Cal Concrete Canoe: We design, build and race canoes made of concrete. We’ve won the national title a record five times.
• Cal Construction: We tackle a project management challenge in a two-day national competition.
• Cal Seismic Design: We design, analyze and fabricate models to withstand simulated earthquake ground motions.
• CalSMV – Super Mileage Vehicle: Think you can get to 1,200 miles per gallon? We design and build hyper-efficient vehicles.
• CalSol – UC Berkeley solar vehicle: We design, build and test fully solar powered vehicles and compete in races worldwide.
• UC Berkeley Formula SAE Team: We design and fabricate small formula-style racecars and compete against other colleges from around the world.
• UC Berkeley Human Powered Vehicle: We build aerodynamic recumbent bicycles as an engineering project for the ASME Human Powered Vehicle Competition.
• UC Berkeley iGEM Team: In this international synthetic biology competition, we build a genetically engineered machine.
• UC Berkeley Steel Bridge Competition Team: We’ve won three national trophies, so far, in this contest to design and fabricate the most structurally efficient and cost-effective steel bridge.

The design ecosystem at Berkeley is a dynamic one, and new projects and teams get launched daily. If you have anything to add to this list, let us know at bears@berkeley.edu.

Labs and studios

• Biomolecular Nanotechnology Center, Stanley Hall
• Cal Design Lab, Wurster Hall
• CITRIS Invention Lab, Sutardja Dai Hall
• Civil & Environmental Engineering Lab, Davis Hall
• iLab, Memorial Stadium
• Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory, Sutardja Dai Hall
• Materials Lab, Hearst Memorial Mining Building
• Mechanical Engineering Student Machine Shop, Etcheverry Hall
• Rapid Prototyping Lab, Hesse Hall
• Supernode EECS student makerspace, Cory Hall
• Swarm Lab, Cory Hall
• TI Electronics Design Lab, Cory Hall