Not just pretty: Building a campus design lab that matters
How it all got started
My team and I started up the Hive seven years ago, with a slew of ideas for how we’d turn a former library and temporary physics building into a design lab that would pull students from across the five Claremont Colleges into a buzzing center of collaborative creativity. As more and more colleges try to figure out how to build human-centered design into their own curricula, I wanted to share what we’ve learned from seeing how those ideas have been banged up, bent, and turned into things even better than we started out imagining.
Over these past seven years, we’ve built the Hive into a place that serves students from across The Claremont Colleges in majors ranging from Engineering to Philosophy; offering design courses for credit, workshops, skill shares, and making spaces, while partnering with professors in the sciences, humanities, and arts. We always knew we wanted the physical space of the Hive to play a key role in these transformations, so I thought I’d take you through the Hive — both the parts you can see from the outside, and the principles of it inside.
From the beginning, we’ve used space as a way to activate our intent. Less of a background against which cool things happen, and more of a stage we were designing to get students collaborating in ways they typically don’t in ordinary classrooms. To get instructors experimenting with different ways of encouraging their classes to unfold. To make room for different kinds of thinking, making, and feeling — a new take on what learning could look like in the liberal arts.
Yes, you can
Often, when a campus space is beautiful, it feels a bit precious.
The materials it’s made of, the kind of furniture that fills it — they send a quiet signal: “Don’t mess this up.”
At the Hive, we took an old building and played off its existing quirks to make it feel like a place you want to be. A place where you feel comfortable and curious of what you might find there — and what you might make. Where you’re invited to try things out, and it’s clear that it’s OK to make mistakes.
We started with furniture designed by the Stanford d.school because we liked how easy it was to move where you needed. Or to stand on. And then we added, restful places to linger.
We wanted to make sure the furniture’s implicit message came across loud and clear: Yes, you totally can.
We knew that inviting people to feel at home is really important. And we found that showing them how to use it — with easy-to-follow instructions — makes that invitation real.
Put your fingerprints on it
When an architect creates a sketch for the building they’re planning, they often add in stock images of people that’ll give you a sense for how the space will feel. For a student center, they might insert a group of students clustered around a guitar player on the stairs. But for us, that student playing the guitar was the whole point. They’re the foreground — the reason the building exists — and the building is what gets put in behind them. It’s there to give them a home.
We want students to feel like they can put their stamp on the space — to have a hand in creating its vibe. Which is one reason we encourage students to put up the work they’re proud of — and also work that isn’t finished yet. We want them to get used to putting up drafts in front of other people while they’re still messy. We want the walls of the Hive to challenge all of us to do more of our thinking in public: To share our ideas while they’re still half-baked, in ways that ask other people to be a part of making them better.
One way or another, we want the Hive to get people making. To develop a bias for action, that fundamentally optimistic mindset that pulls you away from just observing the intractable problems of the world and get you starting (even in a small way) to make it better. Underneath this mindset is a belief that action makes sense. That you will need to fail in order to succeed, to experiment in order to make a dent in the universe.
Change the room — so students know they can change the world
I’ve always been fascinated by how space can shape what happens in it. When I was leading the Innovation group at Fidelity, we remade our workspaces several times, trying to figure out which configurations were best for deep collaborating, or sparking serendipitous conversations, or just getting work done. So when I got to Claremont, it seemed natural to do the same kind of experimenting with the spaces we were creating for learning. Because teachers are different, and even the same teacher, on different days in the same course, is trying to teach different things — why would the classroom stay the same?
I decided to prototype this idea on the students in my Human-Centered Design class, and challenged us to change the classroom with intention each day we met. So, for a class on “synthesis,” we set up the room as a giant 2x2 matrix. And as a warm-up for thinking with this kind of framework, we had the students place themselves inside different quadrants along a variety of axes. “Are you more of a coffee or a tea person? Hot or iced? Are you neat or messy, organized or disorganized?”
In a class focused on ambiguity, we set up the room in a grid that made it harder to know where to sit or who to talk to. And then we discussed how the environment’s cues were pointing us in certain directions over others.
For a class on visual notetaking, we put students in pairs facing each other and their work — where no one was facing a speaker in the middle of the room. Each sat directly across from their partner, and nothing interfered with those direct lines of communication.
After we’d tried out a few of these space experiments, my teaching assistant, Lily, tracked what we were doing. By the end of the semester, she had created a full catalog:
And so we turned Lily’s sticky notes into a card deck that we left in the room to give other teachers some ideas about how they might rearrange the space — to help them imagine how the classroom itself might be one more tool they use to get different kinds of learning to happen.
Along the way, we’ve also discovered that space doesn’t just help teach specific skills. It shapes a more fundamental mindset. When students encounter a different classroom each time they come to class, they start to understand how space can be one of the factors that shapes what they learn and how. That it’s worth paying attention to. They start to recognize that a class — like a party or a conversation or a coffee shop or a democracy — doesn’t have to be the same as the ones you’re used to. Each of these are experiences we have the power to design to better serve their original purposes, or redesign to serve better ones. We get to choose the light and sound and where to put the chairs to make our intent real.
And at the same time, there was a simpler idea happening in our space experiments: That when the classroom changes, there’s more room for the students to change too. We wanted to see what happens when it gets a little harder for a student to slip back into the third seat from the left and six rows back. Because it can be tempting, as a student, to find that comfortable role and track yourself into just one way to be.
We want the Hive to be a little unsettling. A challenge to our students’ assumption that a classroom is a classroom is a classroom. To their understandable urge to think of themselves as only a Math student or an English student or a Design student. We want students to get to know each other, in new ways — and get to know themselves in new ways. We want our classes to open up more room, to give our students a chance to try out really unique ways of talking or acting or thinking in class. To get them closer to believing that not only is the universe hackable, but so are they.
Inspired? Here is a little video made by our students and staff giving you their take on our space:
