FutureLab is a workspace of the Cologne city administration meant to facilitate service design ways of working and collaboration across departments and offices. The original FutureLab was created in collaboration with KISD, however, the time had come to revisit these first ideas and upgrade the existing FutureLab to 2.0.
During the first part of the project, everyone worked together; later, we split into three main groups and developed our ideas further. My group focused on the interior design and the facilitation of work with service design methods. Our work can be summarised in three working questions:
How can we integrate the different methods the City of Cologne is working with into the room design?
How can we facilitate prototyping?
How can we create an inspiring work environment?
How can we facilitate prototyping?
How can we create an inspiring work environment?
We designed three spaces: the first space is made to inspire brainstorming. It has an atypical office atmosphere with tactile carpets, games, and music. The second space houses two large, red, magnetic circles to which transparent service design method templates can be attached. These circle-boards make it possible to work together on the templates, which can be used again and again. The third space is designed for prototyping: it has a flexible and well-organised materials library and trolleys where you can collect your materials and tools onto and easily transport them to your desired workspace.
This KISD project was held in collaboration with the City of Cologne and supervised by Katja Trinkwalder and Anastasia Bondar.
