The Worst F&#%ing Words Ever

Benjamin Bergen is a member of UC San Diego Design Lab, professor of cognitive science at UCSD, and director of the Language and Cognition Lab, where he studies how our minds compute meaning and how talking interferes with safe driving—among many other things that don’t need to be bleeped. His latest book is What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves. He calls it “a book-length love letter to profanity.” You’ve been warned.

So, what the… heck? Why study profanity?
Language is changing. We’re exposed to a wider and wider swath of language than we might have been twenty years ago. That includes slang, it includes new vocabulary embraced by young people, and it includes profanity. We would be doing ourselves a disservice if we didn’t consider all these different types of language as part of our research purview. What people do with language tells us things about how humans learn language, how their brains process language, how they use language for social purposes.

Your book identifies four broad categories into which profanity seems to fall.
When you look across languages and cultures, the taboo words – the words people decide are inappropriate for formal contexts or inappropriate around kids, or inappropriate in general – tend to be drawn from four categories of human experience: from religious concepts; from sexual activities and sexual relations; from bodily functions and the body parts that perform those functions; and then, finally, from terms for groups of other people. You find in language after language that these tend to be the sources of taboo language. It’s not surprising because these, of course, are domains of human experience that themselves are quite taboo…

Click to read the full article on Triton Magazine.

Building New Bridges: San Diego and Tijuana’s Combined Bid Breaks Down Barriers to Bi-National Cooperation

As dusk hovered over The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park on October 3 at the ‘Welcome Home, Bienvenido a Casa’ event, reflections off the San Diego Bay illuminated an evening of excited anticipation more than five years in the making. Will the San Diego-Tijuana megaregion take home the win in their bid to be the 2024 World Design Capital? Or will it be their competitors, Moscow?

Hosting the event and spearheading the San Diego-Tijuana bid initiative is the interorganizational collaboration of Design Forward Alliance, UC San Diego Design Lab and the Burnham Center for Community Advancement, with the full support of the City of San Diego and City of Tijuana and regional elected officials. This collective was created to amplify San Diego’s capacity as a global leader in human-centered design-driven innovation. The combined communities of art, culture, business, education, civic and design worked together in a multi-year, multi-national collaboration culminating in this night of solidarity for the joint-effort to win the coveted World Design Capital designation—a year-long city promotion program that would begin in 2024 and put the region on the global stage as a world-class innovator of economic, social, cultural and environmental design solutions for a better society.

“It’s not just about gaining the World Design Capital title,” said the Director of The Design Lab, Mai Thi Nguyen. “It’s about how we actually want to contribute and collaborate on multidisciplinary design innovation throughout the region, nationally and globally.”

Announcing the Norman Design Fund!

UC San Diego Design Lab is excited to announce the Norman Design Fund. The Norman Design Fund provides small, rapid allocations of funds to support student activities in human-centered design (HCD). The goal of the fund is to enhance and encourage human-centered design work by UC San Diego students. Applications are open to ALL students at UC San Diego.

UC San Diego Receives Community-Engaged Research Grant

Design Lab Member Lilly Irani has been awarded the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation Community-Engaged Research Grant. This funding will assist the United Taxi Workers San Diego team in their community-engaged research on community-accountable, employee-driven technology entrepreneurship in San Diego.

“We’re excited to support community engagement in the research process through this grant portfolio. These six projects aim to build equitable, collaborative, solution-driven initiatives between communities and researchers with the potential to advance inclusive prosperity through entrepreneurship.” — Chhaya Kolavalli, Senior Program Officer, Knowledge Creation & Research, Entrepreneurship

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is a private, nonpartisan foundation based in Kansas City, Mo., that seeks to build inclusive prosperity through a prepared workforce and entrepreneur-focused economic development. The Foundation uses its $3 billion in assets to change conditions, address root causes, and breakdown systemic barriers so that all people–regardless of race, gender, or geography–have the opportunity to achieve economic stability, mobility, and prosperity. For more information, visitwww.kauffman.org and connect with us at www.twitter.com/kauffmanfdn and www.facebook.com/kauffmanfdn.

In San Diego, ‘Smart’ Streetlights Spark Surveillance Reform

Photo: Google Streetview

Lilly Irani, Design Lab member and UCSD Communications professor, was recently quoted in a Bloomberg City Lab piece on surveillance in San Diego. Read more about the "smart streetlight" program, privacy concerns, and new legislation efforts here.

“With body-worn cameras, and with the streetlights footage, and with drone footage, the people who have the money to maintain those technologies and control the data flow of those technologies get to control who gets access to the footage and who gets to narrate its public meaning,” said Irani.