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Benjamin Bergen

Design Lab member Benjamin Bergen featured as an expert in “History of Swear Words”

Design Lab member Benjamin Bergen featured as an expert in “History of Swear Words”

Design Lab member Benjamin Bergen featured as an expert in “History of Swear Words”

Design Lab member and UC San Diego Cognitive Science professor Benjamin Bergen was featured as an expert in “History of Swear Words,” a new Netflix comedy series exploring the usage of and science behind cursing. Bergen is the author of “What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves” and “Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning“.

Watch the full series now on Netflix!

Benjamin Bergen / Picture Credit: Netflix

Check out the trailer here:

Design Lab member and UC San Diego Cognitive Science professor Benjamin Bergen was featured as an expert in “History of Swear Words,” a new Netflix comedy series exploring the usage of and science behind cursing. Bergen is the author of “What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves” and “Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning“.

Watch the full series now on Netflix!

Benjamin Bergen / Picture Credit: Netflix

Check out the trailer here:

Design Lab member and UC San Diego Cognitive Science professor Benjamin Bergen was featured as an expert in “History of Swear Words,” a new Netflix comedy series exploring the usage of and science behind cursing. Bergen is the author of “What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves” and “Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning“.

Watch the full series now on Netflix!

Benjamin Bergen / Picture Credit: Netflix

Check out the trailer here:

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Don Norman On User-friendly Design

I wrote the book on user-friendly design. What I see today horrifies me

The world is designed against the elderly, writes Don Norman, 83-year-old author of the industry bible Design of Everyday Things and a former Apple VP.

More people than ever are living long, healthy lives. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the average life expectancy is 78.6 years for men and 81.1 for women. More relevant, however, is that as people grow older, their total life expectancy increases. So for those who are now 65, the average life expectancy is 83 for men and over 85 for women. And because I’m 83, I’m expected to live past 90 (but I’m aiming a lot higher than that). And these are averages, which means that perhaps half of us will live even longer.
Eating Disorders

Health Tracking Apps Provide a Worrying Pipeline to Eating Disorders. Better Tech Design Can Fix That.

Image Credit: Getty

In an email to The Swaddle, Design Lab member Elizabeth Eikey discuss her research into the behaviors of women with eating disorders who also used weight loss apps.

“Users go through stages of use and report both positive and negative effects of the app at these various stages,” Eikey writes. “As users reflect back on their journey, they talk a great deal about the negative effects of the app during the early stages of use. However, when they first began using the app, they often did not realize their behaviors were indicative of an eating disorder and even found the app helpful.”

Even though Eikey’s research states that some users could self-motivate themselves to recover with the help of the app, the fact that the app pushed them towards or exacerbated an eating disorder is damning enough.

Eikey explains that disordered eating and unhealthy weight loss practices are common, and therefore cannot be ignored as a fringe problem that doesn’t affect the majority of an app’s user base. “Even if a person doesn’t meet the ‘threshold’ for a clinical eating disorder, that doesn’t mean that they never experience negative emotions related to their body and food. Everyone has mental health, and it fluctuates,” she says.
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UK Markey Center and UCSD Seek to Improve Cancer Care with LAUNCH

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Americans living in rural areas are more likely to die of cancer than their counterparts in urban settings, which sets them apart from the many communities nationwide that have experienced a 20 percent decrease in cancer mortality over the past two decades. In Appalachia, the cancer picture is bleaker than in other rural parts of the country. Between 1969 and 2011, cancer incidence declined in every region of the country except rural Appalachia, and mortality rates soared.

This week (Monday, June 17th, 2019) an Innovation Studio workshop was held at the PRTC center announcing a program called LAUNCH.

San Diego Regional EDC teams up with Design Lab on Link2 Project

Kate Gallagher with the San Diego Economic Development Corporation (EDC) needed a website redesign for…

Lily Irani

Lilly Irani: Seeking to the Community Behind the Wheel in Tech

Lilly Irani is currently an associate professor in the Communication department and an affiliate faculty member at The UCSD Design Lab. She’s the winner of the 2020 International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award and the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize for her book Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India. Inspired by the work of Lucy Suchman, Lilly’s research in the field of design extends beyond simply “asking what’s right and wrong and for whom,” but encompasses giving workers and communities “an actual voice in shaping the technology” and getting “political agency over the technologies that we use,” as she put it. 

Her involvement with the community is nothing short of impressive. For ten years, Lilly co-designed and maintained a website for online gig workers on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform to let workers share reviews of employers and jobs to take or avoid. Over the last two years, she has grown the software platform into a worker advocacy organization run by Mechanical Turk workers themselves, so they can also organize to improve their work conditions in ways that matter to them. 

More recently, she has worked with the United Taxi Workers San Diego to champion a program to digitize access to taxis for first and last mile transportation in San Diego. This project works towards maintaining good wages and rights for essential transport workers while working towards climate justice by using taxis to make public transit more useful to San Diegans. Design Lab members Udayan Tandon, Vera Khovanskaya, Enrique Arcilla, and Sam Muñoz work on this project. 
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Message from Don Norman on Power and Prejudice

A message from Don Norman, Director of the Design Lab, regarding the protests, violence following George Floyd’s death
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