Welcome to my first Action Project of Junior year! I hope everyone had a good summer! This AP is for my STEAM class Design and Engineering, where we are going to be designing and engineering our way through the world's problems. We have been talking about classrooms and other student spaces, and on Wednesday we went to the Harold Washington Library Center to take a look at the Youmedia lounge. This is Action Project 0, so it is more of a refresher as to what we do here at GCE Lab School. For this AP, we have been tasked with creating a student lounge that fulfills the SDG 4.a guidelines. We also had to choose an actual room inside our school that would theoretically become this lounge. I chose the E-Lab, which is our science lab, so I decided to make my student lounge into a science lounge! As you'll soon see, there are animals, lab tables, and stuff to allow you to do science experiments in comfort!
Science Lounge, LAH, 2022
This is my redesign for the E-Lab. As you can see, there are sections to the room. The top left corner is dedicated to storage for all of the things that a science lab/lounge might need. The top right is a normal science table that can be easily cleaned and used for experiments and assignments. The left and right are animal tanks with some sample animals I think would be in a science lounge. The bottom section is dedicated to experiments that might need a sink to be contained. The middle has a fish tank flush with the ground and a couch surrounding it, kind of like a community circle. Ideally, this space follows target 4.a by being accessible to those with disabilities and by being a welcoming space to all who want to use it. I believe this accomplishes the task of being a comfortable space as well as being a space where people can learn and pursue the far reaches of science in.
I took heavy inspiration from the Youmedia lounge in the format and organization of the room. The Youmedia lounge is broken into different sections for different interests and my room is broken into different sections as I explained earlier. I mulled over how I wanted this room to be for a long time, figuring out how to merge a typical science lab and a student lounge, as you'd think they wouldn't mesh well. I wanted to keep the vibe of a science room with animals and tech while also being able to just relax there too. We learned about the design process to help create the project. My biggest issue with the current E-Lab was that it felt very unwelcoming and uncomfortable. Upon looking at the structure of the room, I defined a few issues that the room had, the biggest being that it felt cluttered and messy as well as not user-friendly. I brainstormed some ideas to solve these issues and I eventually decided to have a couch in the middle that is somewhat surrounded by animals hopefully to help you relax, as well as a wide open area on either side to help with the clutter. That is where I've arrived now and I think the improvements I've made are good ones!
This was a very interesting Action Project to begin the year with. We were required to look at our surroundings and think about how we could make them better. I think I took on an additional challenge by taking perhaps the least comfortable room in the school and attempting to not only create a lounge but integrate the original idea of the room into it. If I were to do this project again, I might try and create purely a student lounge as that would be more straightforward, but overall I think this was a great project! There are many more projects to come in this new school year, so stay tuned!
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