Design at Large: Speaker and Workshop Series
Experience Design, Research Analysis, Event Facilitation
Oct 2025 - April 2026
The Winter 2026 Design@Large series at the UC San Diego Design Lab explored a central question: How is meaningful innovation actually built and sustained in the real world?
Across six public sessions, the series examined how design moves ideas from early momentum to real-world systems and infrastructure. The program brought together researchers, civic leaders, educators, and practitioners to explore how innovation is sparked, expanded, and sustained.
The series was organized around three phases of innovation:
Pave the Path — catalyzing ideas and early momentum
Build Momentum — expanding collaboration and testing with stakeholders
Sustain the Work — embedding successful practices into durable systems
As a Junior Designer, I helped design the underlying systems, facilitation structures, and synthesis processes that enabled the series to function as both a public program and a collaborative research initiative.
My Role
Mason Oelschlager (me) inspiring the participant audience to think outside the box as they dive into a interactive-work-session of ideating and analyzing what the future of a San Diego Art and Design District could be like downtown.
Pre-Series Design & Systems Development
Before the series launched, I focused on designing the operational and participatory structures that would support the six-week experience.
I began by mapping the experience from the perspective of participants and students, identifying moments where interaction, clarity, and learning could be strengthened.
From there, I developed early iterations of core program artifacts, including:
Run-of-Show (RoS) frameworks for each weekly session
Stakeholder maps outlining relationships across speakers, participants, partners, and internal teams
Facilitation templates for workshops and collaborative sessions
Interactive work-session designs to translate panel discussions into participatory exercises
These artifacts served as early-stage design scaffolding that enabled senior leadership at the Design Lab — including Head of Studio James White and Associate Director Michelle Morris — to refine and finalize the program structure.
While working alongside another Junior Designer, many of these early systems and frameworks were primarily developed by me.
Live Event Operations & Facilitation
During the live series, I supported the operational flow and participant experience.
My responsibilities included:
Timekeeping and managing the Run-of-Show during live sessions
Updating program documentation in real time as sessions evolved
Meeting with invited speakers prior to sessions to coordinate logistics
Facilitating interactive workshop segments within the series
These sessions translated high-level conversations about innovation into hands-on collaborative exercises, allowing participants to apply design thinking to real-world challenges.
Post-Series Research & Insight Synthesis
After the series concluded, I worked with another Junior Designer to analyze and synthesize participant data collected from workshops and work sessions.
The research supported early planning efforts by partners working to develop a new Art and Design District in San Diego, led by stakeholders including the Dean of Architecture and civic collaborators.
My contributions included:
Building a structured, coded dataset from workshop responses
Leveraging AI-assisted coding methods to organize qualitative input
Developing a comprehensive analysis spreadsheet for collaborative insight exploration
Programming heatmaps and data visualizations in Python to surface patterns in participant perspectives
These visualizations helped translate large volumes of qualitative feedback into clear, actionable insights.
Our team then presented the findings directly to project stakeholders, helping them validate emerging directions and better understand community perspectives around arts infrastructure and design-led development in San Diego.
Impact
The Design@Large series functioned as both a public learning platform and an applied design research initiative.
My work contributed to:
Structuring the experience architecture of a six-week design series
Designing interactive systems for large-scale participatory workshops
Translating qualitative workshop data into strategic insights for civic partners
The resulting insights are helping inform early planning work around arts and design infrastructure in San Diego, while demonstrating how design methods can bridge public conversation and real-world decision making.
Systems design
Workshop design & facilitation
Stakeholder mapping
Experience architecture
Qualitative research synthesis
Data coding & analysis
Python data visualization
Run-of-show design for live events
Skills & Methods
Systems design
Workshop design & facilitation
Stakeholder mapping
Experience architecture
Qualitative research synthesis
Data coding & analysis
Python data visualization
Run-of-show design for live events
