Working in 5D.

Photo by Filip Kominik on Unsplash

The design journey can be messy. No, it is messy and often frustrating. When I’m working on my own, I’ll go through cycles of feeling brilliance and defeat, excitement and doubt, with a healthy dose of negative self-talk. For whatever reason, these voices seem to quiet when I work in a group. Bouncing ideas off group mates could be part of the reason, but there’s something that happens in conversation. There is this shared excitement that motivates and inspires. Armed with glee, our group tasked ourselves to design a space that would support learning for post-secondary graduate students—an interest we all shared.

Without knowing it, we stepped into the first phase of the 5D design process—discovery. On the advice of one of my group mates, who drew from her experience as a health researcher, we began our brainstorming on a mural board, jotting down questions as to why we felt our current spaces were limiting. We grouped our questions and discovered three themes to investigate: What have we lost in learning that benefited us as children? How does sensory input support our education and functioning? How do we decolonize learning spaces? With these questions, we broke off to do a literature review. We created a literature review google doc where we shared the relevant links to the papers and quotes, then regrouped to brief one another on the findings. It turned out to be a fun meeting. Sharing results that refuted our initial assumptions was eye-opening. From there, we narrowed our scope to a singular research question: can the exploration of a multi-sensory campus space engage a child-like curiosity amongst post-secondary graduate students to support learning and mental health?

We’re now working on our project statement surrounding this question, which will phase us into the next part of our design journey—define.

Following the define phase is design, develop, then deliver. Our design path will be a non-linear journey- scrambled and messy! By the next post, I hope we’ll figure out how to keep track of it all so that we can keep our approach open-ended to grow, evolve and adapt to the wants of our co-designers.