In 2018, 21 third year Industrial Design, and 8 Graduate Architecture students tackled the second round of Section 001, taught by myself, and Stephen Slaughter, and advised by the DAAP School of Design Director, Dr. Gjoko Muratovski.
The intent of the project for this year was to investigate the use of a specific suite of rooms (6450) used by the Communication Design (CODE) program in the college. The students in the course were tasked with conducting a significant amount of both primary and secondary research, surveying and interviewing the students in the CODE program, timelapse filming the use of the space, etc., while also benchmarking against the latest in workplace design solutions from some of the worlds strongest furniture brands.
From this research, students were to design both furnishings and floorplans to reimagine the 6450 suite, while taking into account the very real parameters that come with a large classroom suite in a public University.
The project was actually broken into two courses, Product Design Studio 1 and Design Thinking Methods each of which were focused on different aspects of the same problem. The semester was broken into 3 major chapters, Research, Design, and Execution, the last of which included everything from prototyping to documentation and articulation.