An overview of my time as a Branded Environments co-op at Perkins&Will.
WHAT I DID
Perkins&Will is a global design practice in the architecture industry focusing 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 Summer 2024 co-op at Perkins&Will, 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.
Additionally, I spent a few hours a week partaking in the summer intern program, in which we were tasked to each explore a research topic of choice.
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.
SKILLS
Research
Concepting
Branding
Wayfinding & Signage
Full-scale graphics
Multi-tasking
CAD Tools
Illustrator, Photoshop, & InDesign
How can Biophilic Design Impact Neurodiverse Individuals in a Learning Environment?
FOR MY INTERN PROJECT, I WANTED TO KNOW…
CASE STUDIES
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.
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.
RESEARCH REPORT
Given time restraints, I was not able to complete the final part of my project to the extent of my standards, as I became more and more engrossed in research. The final part I hope to develop more thoughtfully is to visually show how teachers and staff could implement these considerations in their learning environments by redesigning an ineffective learning environment.