Multidisciplinary Design Center
This thesis project represents the culmination of my Master of Fine Arts work. My objective was to design a built environment that encouraged interaction between design scholars from multiple disciplines. The design was based on qualitative user research.
View details, diagrams, and process drawings after the jump.
The Environment
I designed every aspect of this 20,000 square foot space, created working drawings in CAD, and modeled and rendered it in 3-dimensional form. Much of the furniture in the space, such as the studio systems below, I custom designed based on input and feedback of potential users.
More details from the renderings:
Research and Process
In addition to a thorough grounding in environmental and behavioral psychology, the design was based on user-research, mostly accomplished in the form of contextual inquiry. I followed graduate students from different disciplines to their studios, watched them work and interact, and interviewed them about their design processes and knowledge of cross-disciplinary practice. In addition, I took pictures of the various types of workspaces and environments the students had created to support their work.
Based on this data, I created personas and modules that could be used as tools for not only shaping the spatial volume of the design, but also creating affordances for multidisciplinary task activity.
