Students will launch the calming-space project by touring real campus spaces, noticing user needs, gathering rough measurements, and meeting community partners so they can begin defining a welcoming, functional design challenge grounded in area, volume, safety, and mental health outreach.

Students will gather stakeholder feedback, organize observations into an empathy artifact, and turn real room measurements into first-round layout assumptions for a calming space.

Students will turn stakeholder feedback into a focused design brief, generate several calming-space layout ideas, and build and revise a low-fidelity prototype that tests area, volume, traffic flow, access, and welcoming features.

Students will use feedback from peers and partners to revise their calming-space designs, finalize accurate measured artifacts, and rehearse a concise evidence-based pitch before the public gallery.

Students will present their final calming-space floor plans and models to staff and community partners, explain how area and volume guided their design choices, gather authentic audience feedback, and capture one concise reflection on how partner input changed their thinking.