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.

A new Minor in Design Innovation is in the works, open to all undergraduates at UC Berkeley. The College of Engineering has approved the proposal, developed by a multidisciplinary team of faculty, and the campus approval process is now underway.

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

• Airport Design Studio, McLaughlin Hall
• 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
• SanDisk Computing Laboratory, Cory Hall
• Supernode EECS student makerspace, Cory Hall
• Swarm Lab, Cory Hall
• TI Electronics Design Lab, Cory Hall