Jacobs Hall: New home for design innovation
Starting in fall 2015, future engineers, artists and game-changers from many fields will have an inspiring new environment for advancing visionary ideas into designs to help improve the world.
The 24,000 square feet of the newly constructed Jacobs Hall, at the northeast corner of campus next to Soda Hall, serves as a hub for the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation. Five design studios with access to the latest equipment for rapid prototyping and fabrication provide enough space to let ideas loose.
To learn more about the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation and its new home, see jacobsinstitute.berkeley.edu.
“It’s so cool to make something yourself, to know that it came from your head and that you can make something tangible, like a building, like a device — literally anything you can think of, and that you can change the world with that.”
– Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm executive chairman, at the Jacobs Hall topping-out celebration,
February 2015
Design
At its core, the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation is about education. The primary focus is preparing undergraduate students to combine technical skills with design theory to develop original solutions and technologies, based on human-centered design principles.
Build
Students from a wide variety of academic disciplines with varying levels of technical experience will collaborate to complete project-based assignments using state-of-the-art facilities. Jacobs Hall will offer:
- CAD/CAM lab, electronics lab, A/V equipment and maker space
- Laser cutters, 3-D printers and other rapid prototyping equipment
- CNC router, waterjet cutter, shop and hand tools
Launch
At the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, ideas and prototypes will lead to solutions for all sorts of social problems, and will be an integral part of Berkeley’s expanding innovation ecosystem of technology translators, entrepreneurial ventures and start-up incubators.