Scad - Design Management Program
Enabling Collaboration
Our project brief was to discover the requirements for effective collaboration within Design Management at SCAD and to design a space that reflected those insights. Currently, Design Management is housed within SCAD’s Gulfstream Center for Design. This is a shared building among several majors, of both graduate and undergraduate students. Some of the majors in Gulfstream include Industrial Design, Furniture Design, Service Design, and Sustainability Design. Gulfstream provides students with many valuable resources such as: a workshop room, 3D printing lab, photo room, spray booths, printing lab and a designated space for graduate students called Gradspace. However, with the growth of student population at SCAD, Gulfstream has become overcrowded. Furthermore, it is difficult to find space for effective collaboration at Gulfstream. In previous quarters, other groups of students have explored how to improve the current space at Gulfstream. Therefore, our brief was to think outside the box in creating the ideal space for the unique needs of Design Management and similar majors, at a completely new location.
Focus: discovering the requirements for effective collaboration within Design Management at SCAD and designing a space—in a new building—that reflected those insights.
Services: research in collaboration with IBM and Steelcase, user testing, industrial design, interior design, facilitation, interaction design.
How Might We Improve The Collaborative Experience Of The Design Management Educational Environment?
We ensured our team was aligned by creating a research question that clearly articulated our goals and main areas of focus for the project: “How might we improve the collaborative experience of the Design Management educational environment?” Through this exercise we identified collaboration, Design Management, and environment as the three key areas to study. As result of our secondary research, we grouped key findings into three sets that describe an important aspect of collaboration: community, choice, and access.
Our primary research –focused on our key stakeholders, Design Management students, Design Management Faculty and professional collaborators from IBM and Steelcase– compiled observations, cultural probes, self-reporting, observations, interviews and co-creation workshops. We analyzed the collected data through a careful affinitization process and found patterns that led as to design principles to propose a new SCAD Design Management collaborative space.
For ideation, we created personas, identified the spatial needs and the curriculum requirements so we could visualize a user journey to guide our design. We were given an existing SCAD building to model our proposal. The relationships in the space were mapped and distributed per spatial restrictions and nature of use.
