Futures Lab Redesign

Business Objective: Futures Lab needs to redesign their space to reflect their creativity, innovation, and community culture.

Design Concept: Authentic Exploration

Meow Wolf Visit

We visited Meow Wolf to get inspiration and see how their displays played with sensory. Sensory is an extremely important aspect in designing a space, and while it doesn't make or break it, it heavily contributes to the sense of belonging a space can have.

NR Design Center Visit

My team and I also paid a trip to the Nancy Richardson Design Center on the CSU campus. Here, we saw how CSU created flexible and comfortable spaces for design students to use and reorganize as needed. We also observed how they gave credit to the designers of the space and how the displayed student work.

Empathy & Definition

This project was a lot of back and forth between empathizing with our stakeholders and defining and redefining needs and wants. Many interviews and tests were conducted with students, mainly, and some staff, to gage how they felt in the current space. During this stage, constraints and desires from the main stakeholders (office and administrative staff) were also defined and expanded upon.

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Some ideation and brainstorming also happened during this stage, as the structure for this project's process was less of a traditional waterfall and more of an agile structure. An agile project structure means the process is more cyclical and involves a lot of customer feedback and polishing.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming ideas on approach

Narrowing

Categorizing feedback from student interviews

Constraints

Defining our project constraints

Organizing Notes

Organizing notes into categories

Whiteboard Kanban Board

Organizing tasks to be done

Ideating & Prototyping

Layout sketches to communicate the design ideas for the space

Tests & Presentations

Part of my team's job was also installation, so we were busy moving furniture around and hanging up LED lights, building lamps, etc.

These signs are printed out and are hung on the ceiling like subway signs to signal where classroom areas are. Each pathway chose their own name! EX:

"The Studio" belongs to the Audio Production pathway.

"The Shop" belongs to the Design Build pathway.

Reflection

This project was a great way for me to blend my graphic design skills with my soft skills of communication, project management, and time management. It was overall really good experience and reminded me about my love for interior design.

The goal was to transform the space to better reflect the needs and wants of the people living in it– not literally every day and night– but the people existing in the space. The students and staff who passed through it and stayed to work, to talk, and to relax.

The main challenge for me was the duration of the project. Unlike the 4-week schedules I'm used to, this one went on for 11 weeks total. There was just so much to do, but that also means I got a lot out of it. I got experience with actually rearranging furniture, preparing/building furniture. and adding decorations to the space on top of making the visual layouts for the area.

My favorite aspect of this project was just getting to use so many skills and do so many different tasks. Throughout this project, we got to use a Gantt Chart as well. Gantt charts are new to me, but this project helped me exercise that hard skill of knowing how to use one effectively for a project.

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