When the Experimental Lab is Itself the Experiment: Making Someone Else’s Design Work

Abstract

The redesign of learning spaces has been a growing trend in education, especially higher education. The redesign of such spaces takes time and involves a variety of stakeholders, sometimes resulting in ill-defined designs. This can be exacerbated when individuals leading such efforts depart and there is not a consensus on the design, sometimes leading to vendors having a disproportionate say in final implementations. Understanding these differences and finding a way forward can fall on new stakeholders who are tasked with supporting such spaces after most of the foundational decisions have been made and/or carried out. This case explores one faculty member and designer’s experiences with helping to both design for and define such an ill-defined space. Included in this case are the story of the design of the space pieced together from before the author started his employment and the story since he became a stakeholder, stumbling blocks encountered after the space was built, strategies employed in the interim, discussing a path forward, and finally sharing realizations made during the process which will help his future efforts with designing such multi-stakeholder spaces in the future.