The initial design brief given by Aalto University Campus & Real Estate (ACRE) was to design mobile outdoor furniture for the campus to address the lack of use of these areas. This inspired our team to look at already present solutions, temporary or permanent. We were inspired by signs of user appropriation of the campus outdoors, such as the Arts Wappu terrace, guild terraces, make-shift sitting areas, and the Aalto skate park. After a tour on campus, more user research activities were necessary to understand the context and to elicit the needs & values behind these appropriation activities. Interviews with three master students gave us a deeper look into the stories of students on the Aalto campus and how this related to their needs; and a participatory feedback board was used to gather broad insights on what people think currently about the campus outdoors, and how that could be used and improved. Based on this inspiratory user data, our team started designing the concept. Key themes for this were modularity of the furniture, how it aesthetically related to the campus, how users can appropriate it and build a community around it, and what ACRE’s role in this would be. Through struggling with the design, we discovered that the main problem we were trying to tackle was not necessarily just how the furniture could foster community and appropriation; rather, it was also related to conflicting execution of values and needs between students & ACRE. This gave rise to the two fundamental dimensions of our concept: the physical modularity, where both stakeholders are able to reconfigure the furniture according to their wishes; and the development service path, which includes an iterative cycle of building, feedback and revision of the furniture through collaboration between ACRE and the students.

Going beyond the A-frame concept, the design process prompted a more thorough reflection on what it means to design for emergent phenomena. A more metacognitive layer was present in this process that forced deeper engagement with what our team was working on, as well as with what we were working on: analysis of the problem space solution space.