With the start of the 2016-2017 school year, the Jacobs Institute welcomes three design fellows to its community. This inaugural cohort of fellows will spend dedicated time in Jacobs Hall over the course of the year, participating in design activities and playing active roles in the Jacobs Hall community. They will also bring diverse areas of expertise to the Jacobs Institute, exchanging ideas with students and other community members in formats ranging from open office hours to talks and workshops. Meet the fellows.
Euiyoung Kim researches areas that involve design roadmapping, human-centric research, and multidisciplinary studies across fields like product management, design, and engineering. He received a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley (he also currently serves as a postdoctoral scholar in disruptive design in that department) and holds an M.S. from the Engineering Design Innovation program at Northwestern University. Prior to moving to the United States, he worked as a product planning manager at Samsung Electronics. Kim will be speaking on “Design Roadmapping: Integrating Design Research into Strategic Planning for New Product Development” at Jacobs Hall on September 2: learn more here.
David Mellis is one of the creators of Arduino and received a PhD from the MIT Media Lab. Prior to the Media Lab, Mellis taught at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design in Denmark, and he holds a master’s degree in interaction design from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy. At the Jacobs Institute, he says, “I’m looking forward to working with people who are making cool stuff — both helping out where I can but also getting ideas and inspirations for new projects.” Current projects he’s involved with, both at Berkeley (where he is also a postdoctoral scholar in the electrical engineering and computer sciences department) and beyond, range from “building software to help makers use machine learning for analyzing real-time sensor data” to helping with an online platform for custom-woven textiles.
Paula Te, currently an interaction design researcher at HARC, studied interaction design at the Copenhagen Institute of Design and mechanical engineering at MIT. At HARC, her current research projects focus on “tangible interfaces and tools for creativity and learning,” and she’s previously worked in areas that range from UX design at a branding agency to interaction design at Xerox PARC. She says, “One of my deep interests is learning and education; I worked at MIT and at a makerspace in Nepal as a design educator, teaching different aspects of the design process to engineers. This is one of the reasons why I’m excited to be a design fellow — I would like to get involved in mentoring and teaching students again!”
At the Jacobs Institute, diverse community members open new conversations and build on ideas together, enlivening Jacobs Hall and Berkeley’s broader design ecosystem. As a new school year begins, the institute is thrilled to invite these three new fellows to add their voices to this community.