Ben Gilbert_Blog #4


Through the semester and the development of the project I had learned a lot about how to observe and identify a problem. Understanding how to observe people in an ethical way is a skill that this project helped me work on and want to work on more. Doing a project based on observation as well as an understanding of how an average day works is challenging and teaming up with three others, led to many different takes and ideas. Each idea had their own pros and cons about how and why it would be the right decision to help solve the housing court issues that we had observed.

The members of the team all had ideas and offered many different ways to help each other out. We all helped work contributively together on what the design should work towards, how it should look, and what the criteria of the design should be. During the initial design decisions everyone had ideas that we all worked through, while consistently asking what is the purpose of the intervention? This question kept many of the group members in tune with the goal that we had set for ourselves. That goal would be to create a space for the lawyer for a day station and the client that talks to them, using a modular screen wall that is mobile and very dynamic. That dynamic partition wall that the team designed and built offered the lawyers and the clients a space for privacy when talking, a space separated from the busy hallway.

After observing, building, and observing again what our intervention did for the users and the space, it left a lasting impression on me. It was an immediate response to a design that we came up with through the semester. We were able to witness the intervention we design, be used and get feedback upon it. To see it be used and how it wasn’t used, it makes you as the designer think about a lot more variables that weren’t being thought of when the design was initially being designed. Studying and observing is something that can help the designer learn about what it is they’re designing for. To learn more about the issue and what it is that is being designed, needs to have who’s using the design as a large factor of the finished project.