June 30, 2024
Department of Design, School of Design and Creative Technologies
Designed for wkrm Studio, UT Austin, Spring 2023
See the Final ResultResearch and investigate the Anna Hiss Gymnasium to understand why it's underutilized by the design community.
The research started with a question: what makes a place great? That led to a multitude of answers and responses from the team.
We used this framework developed by the Project for Public Spaces to organize our research and design because it enables us to look across experiences of use to/from and inside/outside AHG. You will learn more about it through an assigned reading.
These factors helped influence our research and honed in our focus towards specific areas of our research, and in turn, helped inform our problem statements of:
These three problem statements led to the creation of specific criteria that helped inform our prototypes and further research and iderations.
Design criteria are derived from research and prototyping. They inform the concepts developed by the Spring 2023 wkrm team and those created by future teams. Every idea doesn’t need to be in service of every design criteria — it just can’t go against any of them. When working with Design Criteria, a good rule of thumb is that every idea must at least “Abide by one, but contradict none.”
Ideation and research spawned over 80 quick concepts–from mild concepts, to wild concepts. All the concepts were then grouped into our four problem areas: Community, Look and Feel of Design, and Attitudes and Attributes of Design. From client input and feedback, we were able to narrow down 9 total quick concepts to prototype and test with end users:
The final prototypes stemmed from multiple iterations based on user testing and client feedback. For example, the environmental wayfinding signage went from directory-based signage, to simplified horizontal stripes to signal key locations (i.e. room numbers).
