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The last ACE Mentor Program session was a very interesting one. Group 4 met at an interior design firm on the east side of Portland.

The meeting started off as usual with a tour of the firm’s offices. This is where I started getting interested in their work. I, personally, am very interested in industrial design and wish to pursue this in my future. I did not know much about interior design or even what the firm truly did, but I saw some of its great innovative designs in desks and office furniture. These pieces of work were very different than what people might think of as typical for a workplace. I enjoyed this innovative take on the mainstream concepts. I hope to work on similar work with new and innovative products when I am done with college.

I know that my group had not put an incredible amount of work into planning the inside of any rooms in our design besides the auditorium. So this session changed our minds on what to do with these important rooms. These rooms in particular were the band, choir and drama rooms. These were planned to be some of the most high-traffic areas of the building, yet we still didn’t know what they would look like for the students. We also needed to plan the common room and the visitor lobby.

Two other members of Group 4 and I worked on the lobby. We decided there needed to be ample seating for visitors who had to wait there, along with good lighting and a notice board. One special feature about this space was the large glass wall that curved around one side of the room, allowing for the iconic look from the outside while also allowing people to see the insides of the lobby from the road. This encouraged us to make it a very bright and colorful room.

We also decided that it would be important to have doors separating this space from the hallways. This would allow for a separation to keep the visitors out of the student area and vice versa.

For the seating in the lobby we had two long benches going along the glass wall and a circular seating arrangement in the middle drawing attention toward it. Our original plan was to have ottoman-like seats in the middle. This would be on a circular track so that they could move side to side in the circle but not be removed from this area. We thought it would be different and new, but just too much trouble. We ended up just having them attached to the ground and unable to move in any way.

When we thought our plan for the lobby was done, we talked with the other small teams in our group. The common room focused on sharing the hall space. This area had some couches and benches against a wall, with many wall features to draw it together. The three classrooms were also decorated in their own unique colors.

We decided that next week would be a big session for putting the finishing touches on many parts of our design. It will be the big final step to getting everything to work together once and for all.