September has been a busy month at Designlab! Here are some of the new updates our team has recently shipped.
Events Calendar
We've created an in-platform events calendar which will help surface relevant information, depending on if you're a mentor or a student.
This new event calendar includes things like:
- Holidays
- Important course dates
- UX Academy application deadlines
- Scheduled webinars
- External design related events
- Group crit sessions
- Skill labs (beta)
- and more!
Group Crit Scheduling
We've been working diligently to ensure that we're able to support our capacity needs for group crit sessions for all UX Academy students.
We adapted the previous booking flow so that there is a stronger integration with our group crit tracking database. The goals were to:
- Reduce the number of no-shows and thereby increased available capacity
- Streamline manual processes around duplicate and erroneous entries
- Surface session attendance and cancellations within a single system
- Circumvent the Calendly limitation which prevents more than one session to be booked during the same time
The process was moved into Airtable and implemented through an interim release. In response to feedback, we've updated the process to support the following:
- Timezone support
- Confirmation emails
- Google calendar integration
Diversify Design Scholarship
We publicly launched our scholarship program this month!
The Designlab Diversify Design scholarship program has run since March 2020 with the intention of building equity across diverse and inclusive representation in the design industry. We aim to do so by providing design education and professional support to aspiring designers from groups underrepresented in the design industry; this includes BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color), women, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, and members of other historically disadvantaged groups.
We started Designlab in part to build, from the ground-up, an institution that would address some of the structural inequalities that exist in the world around access to education — and we committed to doing this with core values centered around empowerment, accessibility, and empathy.
Building empathy and enriching design requires a wide range of perspectives, which is why we actively seek diversity in our community; we intentionally do this through our hiring for both internal team members and mentors, as well as through this scholarship.
We believe that diversity of background and opinion strengthens us and allows us to consider different ideas and approaches and the people we design for.
More information on our application timeline and process is available here.
.jpg)
