Starting point
Everyone had a story about space. The numbers didn't exist yet.
At the GSD, a desk is a privatized piece of the public building. For a semester it's yours: where you sit, make things and run into people. Desks were allocated by program and studio, and some students went without. How many, for how long, and to what effect was anecdote. Students and administrators held many views, with no consistent sides.
We set out to map the system of power the space invisibly represented, gather data on how space affects learning, and share that data with the people who allocate space.
What we found
Most desks sat empty most of the time, but having one still mattered.
For seven days, we walked all four floors of Gund every four hours. We logged headcount and activity on a tappable floor plan in an iPad app we built for the week. We also surveyed 162 students across every program and interviewed 6 stakeholders, including one of the lead architects of the current layout.
With AI, a team of three built the app, the analysis and the visualizations, and still had time to interpret the study. There were 625 desks for 994 students, so 369 people, 37% of the school, had no desk.
Empty desks could look like a case for removing some. The survey pointed the other way. Having a desk predicted more hours in the building. Those hours predicted what a design school is for: chance meetings with classmates and professors, focus, community and belonging. Students without desks were missing those hours, not just a table.
Where we went
A shortage allows three responses. We proposed one of each.
When a resource is short, you can add more, reduce how many people need it, or use the scraps better. We proposed a design competition to redesign Gund, run as a live studio brief. We modeled the school's finances and found it could offer free tuition if it reduced enrollment, a surprising result the endowment data supported. And we proposed free process changes to make daily life in Gund a little better right away.
We presented the findings to the Dean and the administration in person, as data visualizations, each recommendation beside its evidence.
What changed
A school with a shared picture of its own problem.
Before this work, talk about space at the GSD ran on anecdotes. After it, the people in the room shared the same numbers. The question moved from whether there was a problem to which response to try. We have heard there is a Fall 2026 architecture studio on redesigning GSD spaces.
We do research so the people inside a situation can see it whole.