Cool Class Room Layouts

A series of interesting class room designs

some cool layouts I found using green houses.

FreshWise Farms

Today we took a visit down to our client Freshwise Farms. The farm is striving to create a educational space or class room to teach the people about the process local farmers use when they grow there food, how its processed, and how its sold to the local community. The overall goal is to educate visitors on the importance of supporting local organize produce, which supports the local economy as well as provides a more healthy organic product to consumers.

We arrived at Freshwise to meet with Derek our contact at the farm and the educational coordinator that we will be working with throughout the design thinking process. Derek took us through the entire farm and taught us about how Freshwise grows there lettuce plants and herbs via hydroponics and soil beds. Being a greenhouse operation, hydroponics is just one of the ways Freshwise grows there produce. In many cases FreshWise grows many of it plants in hydroponic nurseries and once they are of a certain size they are transplanted into soil in the main greenhouse.

Fresh Wise is completely sustainable. The farm really strives on creating zero waste and it is something that they would like to incorporate in there educational presentation to visitors. But lets start talking about the main reason we are here. Fresh Wise came to our class asking us to create a class room space that could be used to teach visitors about NY state agriculture. What we have to work with is a 25'x60' space in the main green house. The physical attributes for the class room that Derek wanted us to implement included a non-sterile feel, like a typical classroom, and they want it to be interactive and filled with on hand activities catered to show visitors just what goes into the farming process.

After seeing how Freshwise operates and what they were looking at as far of design attributes and functionality we returned to the innovation center and started to brainstorm ideas on how to design a space.We placed all of our notes on a board and grouped them into different categories including, the overall design layout,floor design, walls design, roof design, as well as things that we wanted to see in the room based on the type of activities we thought might be fun to have ( farming and planting activities). As we started our design the group consulted with our professor and came up with the idea of actually designing the space not necessarily over physical attributes we received from Freshwise but around those activities Derek and Freshwise would do with the people who come visit the farm. Our next goal is get in contact with Derek and review the curriculum they plan on teaching which should allow us to design a space that is effective. We plan on also sharing some our the ideas that we came up with during our meeting on Tuesday.

Meeting Potential Clients

Last class we meet with four different potential clients. Small world bakery a bakery that is dedicated to showing the link between local food production involving wheat, honey, and milk,creating products from local farmers and providing the process to make bread and granola which they sell to markets.

Fresh Water farms that talked to us about there ambitions of educating people mainly children to farming.Fresh Water Farms operates from a greenhouse; growing various green vegetation and has plans of building an educational experience catering to schools to teach about agriculture. They came to us to see our opinion of the matter and how they may integrate a class room like set up to there greenhouse.

Mud Creek Farm talked to use about community supported agriculture (CSA) and how they conducted business. Basically they would sell shares of crop to customers prior to there seasons. This was a pretty awesome business model because they basically received payment for all the crops they grow and don't have to worry about finding buyers for crops before they go bad.

The last organization that came to speak was the Good Food Collective who talked to us about how there business is trying to help small farmers connect with the Rochester community. The good food collective worked in a pretty unique way. The company was a CSA like multiform CSA the company worked with 8-10 with local farmers, the farmers create a share of food that is split within the community. This company is really striving to have Rochester consumers of fruits and vegetables to buy from Rochester farmers. Placing money back into the local economy.

All of the presenters were striving to obtain the same goal. To increase the consumptions of local produce. One note that I found interesting from the day were the opinions these companies had about farmers markets. When asked about farmers markets each company stated that they were were not good places to generate revenue.

RIT FARMERS MARKET

This week for our second class we were given the opportunity to jump right into actual fieldwork to practice empathy in regards to design thinking. Our assignment was to attend the RIT farmers market and observe the market sellers, customers, and overall environment that made up the farmers market that day. We where asked to take down observations of the environment, ask sellers questions and ask potential customers why they had come to the market and what sparked there interest for attending the market.

When we got there an observation I made immediately was the fact that there seemed to be a lack of advertisements that actually told people there was a market happening. Location is very important for this market because it really doesn't get much advertising from RIT other than an email. The location that the market was held at this week was right behind the Gordon Field House.

As you can see the location of the market was directly to the side of the quarter mile, just as you walk into dorm side of the RIT campus. The location was directly down a hill and off to the side of the quarter mile almost hidden by trees as you walked along the path. Although this spot was preferred by the marketers because of its closer location to campus, its poor visibility and lack of advertisement might cause people to walk right past it without even knowing what was going on. One person I ask said that the only reason she came down to the market was because she saw all the tents and was curious.

Another observation that we noticed was the various different layouts that each vendor had. Many of the vendors for the most part displayed there items in a typical display layout where the vendor is on one side and the customer is on the other separated by there table that held product. We did notice that one vendor implored a different layout that seemed to be more effective in customer engagement.

Below is the layout that we believed to be a much more effective layout. This layout enticed customers to come into a store like environment where they were surrounded by merchandise. This layout also allowed the vendor to provide customers with a more personal experience. Creating greater customer engagement.

During our 30-minute observation we were able to ask various people that were attending the market various questions. Many of the customers where RIT students or faculty but there were also peopling who where not associated with the school. Many of the people attending the market were returning customers there were a few first time customers but almost everyone had heard about the RIT market in some manner.

The Last major observation that we notice was that there were people at the market other than food vendors. One of these vendors seemed to be some sort of student organization raffling off prizes and the other was Brick City Catering. Brick City Catering also had a tent and provided visitors with food samples. The cool thing we found out from RIT catering was that the recipes they were cooking and giving free samples out where made from materials that could be bought at the market that day.

After our observation the class headed back to the conference room and split up into teams and created posted notes of things we observed in related with design thinking. After brainstorming a bit our team grouped these various ideas into clusters of observations.

Observation Grouping:

Restrictions: Perishable Items, Utilities, Inventory, Non Perishable items, time of year.

Products: Ready to eat, product availability, fresh foods, farms from Bloomfield, Baked Goods, Product selection

Location: Weather, Tent Layout, Environment Location, And Poor Visibility

Accessibility: Customer accessibility, Prices, Time, Cash Market, Vendor accessibility

Campus Involvement: RIT dinning, Raffle?

Marketing: Better advertising, free samples, Self-promotions, Presentation, Product layout, Uniqueness to campus, Customer engagement.

My First Encounter with Design Thinking.

After our first session of class and after reading the information for the d.school text about Emphathy, design, ideate, prototype, and test I feel that many of the steps show in design thinking closley resemble the way we have been told to think here in many of my classes. There are however a few differences that I found interesting that really interest me. The whole Idea of focusing on Empathizing was interesting, putting yourself in the shoes of the customer or industry that you are designing a solution to would open such a better understanding of there needs and goals. Placing yourself in the shoes of someone that directly has to deal with the problem allows you to see first hand where the problem originates form and even allows you to start idaeting with your team towards solutions.

Another thing that I found interesting when reading into the 5 steps a little more was the whole idea of ideate. Which was basically the idea of creating ideas that were unique and not the typical solution to the problem. Ideate was interesting to me because in many cases constraints often limit the level of creativity to some limit but it may also force your team to look for solutions to the problem that fit within those constraints in the end creating an even more unique solution than you though was possible.

Im pretty excited to attend the farmers market tomorrow where we will practice empathy at the farmers market.