Course Reflection 2

The past two week seem to have passed more quickly than the first two. The two lecture classes about Accessibility and Environmental Design were very informative. I often think about OSU’s approach to accessibility on campus and find it very strange that they manage to make it so complicated for the user. Most of the old buildings you find on campus have a side or back door that has had a very “out of place” ramp added to it for accessibility and code agreement purposes. Also, the seating patterns and doors in the classrooms are often not compliant with code. It seems that designing for accessibility in a new building is much easier than trying to integrate it into an existing structure and I think as designers we should be thinking of solutions that provide answers to problems like this.

I have to say that much of what we heard in the second lecture for Environmental Design involves topics that are controversial in nature and very popular these days. I found the videos to be the most interesting and my personal favorite was the one on bio-mimicry. It is fascinating to see that nature (with all its complexities in design) has so many small and simple lessons to teach and how these simple lessons can make dramatic differences in the way we design and use the world around us.

The video on IDEO’s work environment and design practices was very interesting. I think that these days most design firms have adopted a similar format of work environment for their offices. The ability to work and share ideas freely has become a standard for design teams and I think this is most apparent in industrial design firms where the designers are open to any idea and test most of them to come up with a finalized design that integrates the best of these ideas. One of the reasons I chose to study design is because I’m not very fond of traditional offices and work environments and look forward to graduating and working in a design firm that may be similar to IDEO in some ways.

The scavenger hunt for buildings and designs around campus was fun. It helped us to get to know our group members a little better and involved us with the OSU campus. I hope we’ll have more assignments similar to this one in the future.