Katya, Charlie and Matt wanted to create a functional and cohesive space

Current family room on the first floor of the Library

The Library Services team challenged second-year undergraduate Product Design students in the School of Engineering and Informatics to design a new piece of furniture for their family room. 

Located on the Library's first floor, the family room is a dedicated space where students with childcare responsibilities can study while their children play. The room was set up in 2016 and furnished with study desks for parents, a gated play area, a quiet feeding corner with a privacy screen, bean bags, and, of course, toys and books for a range of ages.

The task was to design a new piece of furniture that would:

• allow parents to work comfortably and see their pre-school children (0-4 years) at all times, 
• be big enough to be used by multiple people simultaneously, 
• and have storage or inbuilt activities for children. 

The students, who took on the challenge as part of their 'Design Techniques in Practice' module, presented the designs last week in front of a mock client panel:

• Fiona Courage, Associate Director of Library Services / Director of the Mass Observation Archive 
• Tom Mountford, Library Support Supervisor 
• Maria Smith, Administration, Finance and Planning Officer (Library Services)
• Grainne MacDermott, Library Building and Frontline Manager (Library Services)

The panel members assessed how well each of the six groups had met the brief based on accessibility, creativity, sustainability, flexibility, durability and safety.

Katya Jeppesen-Frank, Charlie Stanbury and Matthieu Barrois impressed the judges with their research into the users' requirements and how they had embedded pedagogical concepts in a practical design.  

The team enjoyed the experience of redesigning the family room, which has opened their minds to a human-centred approach to design.

Matt commented: “Having the opportunity to work with the end-user and observe their interactions with the room helped me understand the importance of having the users involved in the design process.” 

“I found it insightful learning how to design for a target audience that we don't identify with and the empathic skills I gained from this," added Charlie. 

Katya stressed how this experience had prepared them for real-life work: “identifying team strengths, encouraging a constructive work dynamic and adopting appropriate timescales are all skills that I will take forward in future projects.” 

Their design was inspired by the Dokk1 public library in Aarhus (Denmark), Sir Basil Spence's furniture in Sussex Library, and the Montessori educational approach. 

Fiona Courage, who chaired the panel, said: "We particularly liked the link to Spence’s design concepts and appreciated the adaptation of these into functional products, relevant to how student parents want to use the facility." 

The judges also found the other five designs inspiring, and they are already thinking about how they can incorporate elements from each of them into their plans for the space.