UC Irvine’s club for UX/UI and graphic design Design at UCI (DAUCI) hosted its website design competition Design Jam for UCI and UC Riverside students on Feb. 21. Participants sat hunched over desks in clusters of four or five, furiously typing on their laptops and completely wired into the task at hand. The room’s back counter was lined with rows of stacked cases of Red Bull and bags of chips.
User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design prioritizes users and their experiences on online platforms. Designers are typically interested in the entire process of web building, including branding, style, useability and marketing.
According to fourth-year informatics student Elise Alinsug, the current co-president of DAUCI, before DAUCI there was no inclusive space for web and graphic designers on campus.
“In the tech space, there is a lot of space dedicated to coders, different types of software engineers, but there wasn’t really a space for UI/UX designers or graphic designers,” Alinsug told New University. “So I believe our founders were inspired by that niche and wanted to create a safe space for designers.”
Since 2017, club events and competitions have worked to bring the founders’ vision back to life, according to Alinsug.
Competitors in Design Jam used the web designing platform Figma to adjust the composition of specific websites created to help those affected by the wildfires in Los Angeles. The goal was to make them more accessible and user-friendly.
“UX design is all about emphasizing the user and advocating for accessibility,” Alinsug said. “So, we were looking at a couple of different resource websites meant to help victims of natural disasters, and a lot of them are very difficult to navigate, and of course when you’re in that sort of very high-stress situation you want to get your information right away. We are having members redesign different websites to make them more accessible.”
The Design Jam competition is a scaled-down version of Design-a-thon, DAUCI’s largest event of the year. During Design-a-thon, teams have three days to produce a prototype from a prompt. The 2024 prompt, True to You, challenged participants to create their own product that “fosters the cultivation of creative expression in order to create a more inclusive and equitable society.”
The eagerly anticipated 2025 Design-a-thon prompt and date is soon to be announced, according to Alinsug.
“The [2025] date is going to be released very, very soon. [I’m] really excited to see all the graphics, it’s a really cool theme this year. I don’t want to leak anything quite yet,” Alinsug said.
DAUCI is not exclusively for art or computer science majors, DAUCI Co-President Janie Seong said.
“Design is applicable to anyone and everyone, no matter your background or interest. It is just such a unique situation and community where people from all different backgrounds can come for the passion of design,” Seong told New University. “If you have that want to create for others and have that empathy, then you can be a designer. Anyone can be a designer, especially in our club we are very beginner-friendly.”
Seong graduated in fall 2024 but decided to continue working with the club to encourage alumni to stay connected with club events and members.
“The club has been running for so long and there’s really a whole branch of alumni that we can reach out to and we want to pursue that more,” Alinsug said.
According to Seong, passing knowledge to future generations of the club is integral to its success, and is the reason that many alumni stick around.
“I found Design [at UCI] and was able to grow within there, and then I was able to lead them,” Seong said. “I think that’s the whole thing really about this club, a lot of us kind of grew up in this club or worked our way into positions and stuck around to grow together, which I really value. A lot of us on this board stuck around for each other’s design journey.”
Anteaters can learn more about Design at UCI on their Instagram and see upcoming events on their Campus Groups page.
Annia Pallares zur Nieden is a Features Intern for the winter 2025 quarter. She can be reached at anniap@uci.edu.
Edited by Alyssa Villagonzalo