Perkins&Will is a global design practice in the architecture industry.
They focus on many sectors such as corporate, education, health, sports, and more. They are a leader in sustainable design and are a research-based firm.
During my time as a Branded Environments co-op, I spent a few hours a week working on a personal research project in which I studied the impacts of biophilia on neurodiverse individuals in a learning environment. Additionally, I was part of the Branded Environments team where I spent my time working alongside other architects, interior designers, and graphic designers brainstorming and researching, pulling precedent images, iterating on conceptual, developmental, and schematic levels, and setting up and working with production files to scale with CAD tools, to design full-scale graphics, branding, and wayfinding and signage for some of PW's largest clients.
While much of my work is confidential at this time, I would be happy to personally share more about my education and design process upon request.
Visual Research and Understanding
To start, I wanted to understand how Biophilic design and neurodiverse-inclusive design individually impact the users of a space. To do this, I conducted a few case studies on a variety of well-designed Perkins&Will buildings ranging in the use case, building sector, and functioning.
These case studies were conducted solely to gain a better understanding of my research topic and mainly focus on those points. They were not conducted to be comprehensive or critical.
Compiling Findings
Then, I spent the majority of my time on this project researching biophilic design, neurodiverse people and environments, school design and types of learners, as well as the impacts the environment has on children.
My report focuses mostly on K-12 education and ages in a school setting. Further research could be done on higher education demographics and in different learning environments such as libraries or museums.
My report is organized by explaining both Neurodiversity and Biophilia separately and then identifying the main overlapping design considerations between the two. The report ends with some suggestions on how to implement these design choices.
