Design Exhibition Workshop: Designing Everyday Health and Wellbeing in San Diego
Design Exhibition Workshop: Designing Everyday Health and Wellbeing in San Diego
San Diego is home to a growing health-tech community, but many of the conditions that shape health and wellbeing happen far beyond clinics, devices, and apps. Work schedules, housing, air quality, caregiving, stress, access to care, and neighborhood environments all influence how people sleep, breathe, recover, and function in daily life.
This community-centered initiative explores the health and wellness challenges San Diegans experience in their everyday lives—and how local designers, health-tech companies, community organizations, and residents might work together to address them.
The project begins during San Diego Design Week with an interactive public experience that shares local stories, surfaces overlooked challenges, and invites residents to identify where design and health-tech expertise could make the greatest difference. Community input directly influences a longer-term, community-led pilot focused on one priority area, such as breathing and air quality, rest and recovery, health for night-shift workers, caregiving, or access to support outside traditional healthcare settings.
The selected challenge moves into a collaborative research and co-design phase, resulting in practical interventions, service concepts, or prototypes developed and tested with local partners. The ultimate goal is to demonstrate how San Diego’s design and health-tech communities can collaboratively contribute meaningful, tangible value to the people who live here.
About the Host
Alexandra Sieben
Alexandra (“Allie”) Sieben is a Senior UX/UI Designer at Resmed with 10+ years of experience designing across healthcare and consumer technology. She specializes in bringing clarity to complex systems and creating thoughtful, human-centered experiences where trust, accessibility, and usability are critical. Beyond product design, Allie is passionate about shaping more inclusive futures for technology through design education, mentorship, and community leadership. She develops programming around AI, accessibility, and healthcare technology, mentors emerging designers through complex problem spaces, and serves as an Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF) Local Leader supporting San Diego’s design community. Her work explores how speculative design and futures thinking can empower designers to move beyond fear-based narratives and take a more active role in shaping ethical, human-centered AI experiences.
