When you’re looking for design inspiration, the best place to start is often the end-user. Fleetwood Furniture has discovered there can be a great benefit for both sides when students are brought into the process of designing classroom furniture.
Forest Hills Northern High School, just outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, launched its Project Next in 2018. It’s a multi-disciplinary, experience-based program designed to provide additional context to classroom learning. The lead teachers jumped at the chance to collaborate with professional furniture designers.
“We teach across disciplines and we’re always looking for real-world connections,” says teacher Eric Baird. “Fleetwood agreed to work with us when a lot of other companies were pulling back because of the pandemic. They showed us a standard storage cabinet and invited students to rethink its function and design with particular users in mind.”
Students broke into small teams and tackled the project from several angles, including a makerspace and an art teacher’s classroom. They did research, brainstormed, built mockups, and presented their final concepts to Fleetwood executives over the course of a semester.
“At first glance, it’s a standard cabinet and what can you really do to add a wow factor?” says Baird. “But when you apply design thinking and understand the needs of the user, the ideas come fast.”
For example:
Different ways to balance security and visibility. Could battery-powered LEDs provide lighting to highlight what’s stored deep on a shelf? Could doors be made from high-impact, opaque polycarbonate to make it easier to see what’s inside?
Varied usage: How can an art teacher use a cabinet for painting supplies this month and pottery supplies next month? Could there be different shelving modules that fit inside the cabinet frame? Could a Siri-like smart speaker help track items borrowed from the cart and not returned?
Through the process, Baird says, students learned a range of 21st-century skills including how to identify and draw out each other’s unique talents. “They realized quickly that someone who was great at CAD drawings might not be the best person to build the prototype. They learned to work as a team, and they came to understand the need for reliable documentation in case a team member was sidelined by contact tracing when a key deliverable was due.”
Terry Sullivan, Vice President of Sales at Fleetwood, says he was impressed with the students’ thinking. “They didn’t just come back with wild ideas. They understood the feasibility and the economics and thought through environmental impact, aesthetics, and functionality. From the day we introduced the project to the final presentations, there was a tremendous amount of growth.”
The Forest Hills collaboration was not the first time Fleetwood partnered with students on a design project. The previous year, at the innovative Design39Campus in San Diego, Fleetwood and its dealer, Culver-Newlin, brought students and teachers into an intensive two-day design charette.
“We said to the students, let’s do the research and actually redesign the teacher presentation cart,” says Design39 principal Joe Erpelding. “The hope was to create an experience for the students that support their passion for design, but also to create a product that would make an impact.”
In this case, Fleetwood engineers built a prototype based on student input. You can see more about the project and the reaction to the big reveal in this video.
“Collaborations like these inspire our designers, and inspire the next generation of designers as well,” says Sally Swift, Marketing Vice President at Fleetwood. “We haven’t brought these concepts to market – at least, not yet – but it’s such a wonderful opportunity to better understand how our products are being used.”