Cornell Students Design with Clubs in Mind   By Susan S. Lang   Design students in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University didn't just research and write about the activity modules they designed for Boys & Girls Clubs of America. They also sawed, drilled, sanded and constructed four, full-scale models of a games corner, a technology and homework room, an art station, and a young women's nook, all to be donated and used at Boys & Girls Club locations. The games space, for example, consists of three rolling and stackable cabinets and two sturdy benches that youngsters can stand on to play board games with taller youth or push together to form a table. Each cabinet includes drawers, bins and shelves for storage. The young women's nook is a curved cubby decked out in bright orange, pink and lime green cushions to form an intimate, inviting "room within a room" where girls can discuss private issues, personalize the space with photos and artwork, and reconfigure to fit up to four or five individuals. The modules were designed and built by two collaborating classes in Cornell's Department of Design and Environmental Analysis (DEA) whose goal was to create interiors that would help promote youth development and empower at-risk youth. "We assign this type of project each year to give our students a realistic experience of a professional interior designer," says Paul Eshelman, associate professor of DEA at Cornell. To develop the activity modules, students in professor Gary Evans' Environmental and Social Behavior class served as behavioral science consultants on the needs of at-risk children, ages 8 to 15. They researched and provided information on developmental needs and important individual differences (e.g., gender, ethnicity) of the client population. With such information in hand, students in Eshelman's intermediate interior design class proposed designs. Then the student social-science consultants offered feedback by annotating the design guidelines in terms of behavior, and the designers revised their plans. This feedback loop continued until solutions were agreed upon and interiors were built. Throughout the process, the students also consulted with architects from the facilities division of BGCA, and representatives and children from the Boys & Girls Club of Syracuse, N.Y., and the Greater Ithaca Activities Center (GIAC), an after-school program with a philosophy similar to BGCA. "The student designs were very innovative, practical and applicable to any of our Clubhouses," says Les Nichols, BGCA's vice president of architecture and risk management. "We plan to observe how these modules are used in our Syracuse Club and then we hope to replicate them for other Clubs." The Cornell students not only had to consider issues such as color, surface, storage, safety, acoustics, lighting, attractiveness, usefulness and versatility, but also the behavioral and development needs of the children and the needs of staff, especially visual access into each space. "They also had to consider the different kinds of facilities that BGCA uses," Eshelman says. "Some use schools, for example, and so the projects also had to be portable and easily stored." The project involved four phases: pre-design, in which the interior design students learned about building materials, hardware, tool use and how to achieve structural integrity; design, based on guidelines developed by human factors/facilities planning and management students working closely with Eshelman's design students; model construction, which included ordering materials, planning tasks that involved students from both classes and building in the woodshop; and presentation. In the final phase of the project, the students observed how youth from the Syracuse Club and GIAC actually used their modules, both appropriately and inappropriately, and interviewed the children about their reactions to the interiors. "When the students realize that they're helping real people with real problems and that the BGCA designers flew in from Atlanta several times to consult with them, they have a meaningful reason to learn and become much more motivated. Their work is no longer an exercise but a project with very eager consumers," Evans explains. "What excited me about this experience was the opportunity to practically apply what I learned in other classes," says Nicole Simon, a human development senior at Cornell. She helped write design guidelines for the young women's module on topics such privacy, territoriality (personalization), flexibility and aesthetics for the designers in Eshelman's class. "I liked working with BGCA because I felt like I was actually involved in something real-life." Cornell junior Etan Rand, who worked as a behavioral consultant for the design team creating the technology and homework station, says: "Designing a single space for multiple user groups with very disparate ages and needs was definitely the most challenging task we faced. In the end, though, it really taught me the value of universal design." In previous years, the interior design class workshops have developed indoor mini-playgrounds for child care programs housed in senior citizen centers, residential spaces for people with Alzheimer's disease, shared-use spaces for people with dementia residing in assisted-living facilities, and a residence hall suite for students with sensory and motor disabilities. Susan S. Lang is a senior science writer for Cornell News Service.