Third Spaces

The concept of a third space has become a recently trending topic again, especially after society spent a year in confinement after the COVID19 pandemic. Third spaces are a sociocultural theory relating to identity, and generally refers to a place or environment that is not home (the first space), work or school (the second space). Third spaces are needed to foster community, social interaction, and a sense of belonging in society.

The problem that my group and I identified was that many students, especially in NYC, are lacking third spaces. There aren’t many places to go that don’t require money spending, something many students simply cannot afford.

We began brainstorming the concept of a new space for this demographic- using many personal anecdotes, we came up with the problem statements. NYC lacks free, affordable, and safe third spaces for young students to hang out and relax in. We wanted to create a space that could offer all of these and more.

First, we began researching existing places. The library, for example, was something we took lots of inspiration from. NYC libraries, in particular, have lots and lots of resources and are great alternative third spaces. However, library activities are usually limited to just studying and reading, and people must stay relatively quiet to not disturb those around them.

We brainstormed the idea of offering classes of some sort to encourage more learning and productivity- Photoshop 101 classes, sewing class, and more.

As my group and I continued to brainstorm what we wanted the space to offer, we began doing user interviews to gather more information from high schoolers and ask what they wanted. Personally, when I was in high school, I just wanted quiet spaces to hangout and do homework on- like the library but less crowded and no noise limits. However, it turns out that most of the students we interviewed were interested in some space that offered creativity and activities. They wanted some common ground hobbies to bond over and they wanted the space to really feel like their own. Some mentioned privacy as a factor as well.

My team began to think a bit differently. Instead of being like a library, maybe more like a weworks or office coworking space. No one on the team has ever worked in a weworks except for me at the time, so I walked them through the entire experience with photos for them to understand the feeling of working in a weworks.

This encouraged us to look more at offices as inspiration, and we really liked the idea of having individual meeting rooms for privacy, as well as a common room for networking and socializing. This is where Chloe came up with the idea of having pods- similar to the ones they have in corporate tech offices for private, individual meetings.

With this new revelation, we began to imagine the space differently, and ultimately decided on our final prototype. I suggested the idea of us creating the prototype on either the Sims, Minecraft, or Roblox, since it would’ve been really fun for students to actually visit and experience it and experiment with it, but we decided against it and to just 3D model it instead. Some challenges my group and I faced were really pinpointing down on what we wanted to focus on- fun, productivity or creativity? We decided to let students make the decision themselves, by having the opportunity to reserve rooms and select what amenities and items they wanted with it.

Some lessons I learned from this project was- sometimes, if you can’t choose on what to focus on for a user, let them make the choice themselves. After we showed everyone our final prototype, the feedback was really supportive. My high school brother and his friends both agreed that they would love to use the space for different things, from studying and reading alone to gaming with friends. Also, something we should’ve implemented was, if we were going to stick by a route to take with our service, we had to make a full dedication to the decision we decided to make. For example, if it was a space meant purely for creativity, we would go all out with the furniture selection, location, amenities, and more, and it would look very different than if it was a space meant for productivity. Lastly, working with my group was extremely fun, but one thing we definitely needed to work on was figuring out our differences in a calm, respectful manner. We became so emotionally invested in our project that some things began to turn personal when there were disagreements- but we ultimately ended up being very supportive and great company with each other for our final presentation, which I am very proud of.