The Hugging Desk
An emotional & universal design project for student confidence in inclusive classrooms
Context
Course project
Industry
Education
Timeline
Sep. - Dec. 2024
My role
Product Designer
overview
Problem Space
Collaboration is the dominant culture in many classrooms today. However, learning is a complex terrain that is sometimes best traveled alone – personal space should be as much of a priority for building class experiences as teamwork.
Solution
A classroom desk that embraces students and empower them with peace & ownership in large classes.
define
User research
We started out with a desire to understand the general challenges of learning in large classes for undergraduate & graduate students.
Research Breakdown
29
Survey responses
4
Undergrad interviews
1
Recent grad interview
1
professor interview
Major Pain Points
Students:
Suffer from low self-esteem & confidence in larger classes
“I don’t ask questions in class because I don’t feel my questions are worthy of the time and money of my instructor and classmates.”
Feel pressured to conform to perceived social norms during group discussions
“I don’t wanna appear very enthusiastic only to find out that nobody in my group cares.”
Value both collaborative and personal spaces
“Privacy in class is great; but I also don’t wanna be isolated from my classmates.”
ideate
How might we create a confidence-conducive learning environment for college students in mid-to-large classes?
Sky is the limit
Our group conducted a timed sketch session to brain storm solutions.
For the sketches in which we saw the potential for further exploration, we created a few storyboards:
Our sketches mostly fell under 3 categories:
Anonymous communication: building workflows for asking & answering questions anonymously
Learning design: redesigning questions to be more conducive to participation
Spatial design: reimagining classrooms to help students feel more comfortable while learning
Final pick: spatial design
Anonymous communication → already delivered by many existing learning tools.
Learning design → better executed by learning science experts
Spatial design → immediately affects student experiences, and classrooms have a lot of potential to become more human-centered.
Design Goals
Upon narrowing down our problem space, we defined 2 design goals:
Give students more personal space in class to help them feel less self-aware and more confident.
Meanwhile, maintain a classroom environment that’s conducive to collaboration.
First Look
More brainstorming around our design goals brought us the idea of the hugging desk:
A collaboration-friendly office cubicle reimagined for classrooms.
Key Features
Desk Wings
With its two “wings,” the hugging desk embraces students, allows them to claim more personal space in the classroom, and therefore empowers students feel stronger and more confident in class.
Slanted Outer Edges
The hugging desk’s slanted outer edges further protect students’ personal boundaries in classes by avoiding fully connecting desk surfaces and dissolving the sense of private space ownership when multiple hugging desks congregate form groups.
Trapezoidal Surface
The surface of the hugging desk adopts a trapezoidal shape to enable flexible collaboration setups.
prototype
Start Small, Go Big
We concept-tested a miniature paper prototype with 4 users and then tested a life-size, low-fidelity cardboard prototype with 2 additional users.
User Feedback
Desk surface shape: triangle vs. trapezoid
Participant 1: the trapezoidal shape would create a "dead space" in a group alignment, which could cause a sense of isolation.
Participant 2: the triangular shape is unnecessary because rarely would anyone make use of its top corner.
Desk wings as functional spaces
Some participants thought of the desk wings as there to not only protect personal boundaries but also add functional desk areas.
Collaboration still matters
An user expressed concerns for over-compensating for the currently limited personal space in the classroom and creating isolation.
iterate
The devil is in the details
What’s trapezoidal stays trapezoidal
We kept the trapezoidal shape of the desk despite receiving one negative feedback against it, because:
The pushback against the trapezoidal shape was not echoed by any other participant.
There are more advantages than disadvantages of having a trapezoidal shape
Advantages
Trapezoidal desks cost less space in the classroom
Trapezoidal surfaces, thought objectively smaller than triangular ones, creates an illusion of being more spacious as it guides the user’s vision to diverge and therefore expand instead of converge.
Accessories
We added a water bottle holder to the left wing of the desk.
While we couldn’t make the wings wide enough to hold a lot of items due to 3 constraints
Desks must be adaptable to standard classroom dimensions → can’t expand width outward by much
Desks must be accessible to bigger individuals → can’t expand width inward by much
We can’t make the user experience too isolating → can’t widen wings by much in general
That doesn’t mean we couldn’t make some use of the inevitably small space on the wings, hence us deciding to add a water bottle holder to the left wing.
Collaboration still matters
An user expressed concerns for over-compensating for the currently limited personal space in the classroom and creating isolation.
Personal space without isolation
Iteration 1: we removed the slant on the desk’s outer edges that was originally designed to enhance personal boundaries. We did so in response to some participants expressing concerns over becoming too isolated.
Iteration 2: we gave a slanted cut to the inner corners of the wings to make students feel less confined.
Comfortable posture
We added a slant to the desk’s inner edge to create a wrist rest for users who prefer to write or type with their elbows off the desk.
Rounded-corner groups for friendliness
We gave a slanted cut to the desk wings to create less sharp corners for group arrangements.
final product
Show Time
Just like our prototype, our final product is has 2 parts:
Two life-size cardboard desks built to allow spectators to feel the physical interactions that the hugging desk affords.
A 3D model to showcase the desk’s finer details.
We decided on the desk’s key measurements in adherence to the Human Factors Engineering best practice of designing for the 95th percentile male as well as the 5th percentile female. We referred to this table for the specific anthropometrics data of the top and bottom 5th percentile American adults:
Engineering Details
reflection
Learnings
Think outside of Figma
Wandering beyond the digital realm to bring the hugging desk to life physically has been an enlightening experience for me. Each medium and domain has its unique powers and limitations. Therefore, it is important that designers brainstorm outside the dimensions of digital interaction design when needed.
Emotion-centered design
I call many of my past design projects “knowledge-centered,” because they are designed for effectively delivering necessary, task-related information; in other words, most UX flows help users know what to do. The hugging desk, on the other hand, guides the user towards how to feel. The desk design is first emotional before functional. Approaching design through this different paradigm of emotional design has been eye-opening.
Universal design
A friend joked about my groupmate and me designing an “anti-social social desk for introverts.” While the hugging desk speaks to introverts’ needs, it is designed to benefit everyone by introducing personal space protection that is neither intrusive nor excluding while supporting group collaboration. It was a very fulfilling experience to go from reading about universal design in books to implementing it in real life.
There’s design, and then there’s engineering:
The most challenging part of this project was building out the desks. My teammate and I conducted hours of human factors and ergonomics research to define our desk’s measurements with anthropometric constraints. Although as designers, we are no engineering experts, we should actively learn about engineering needs and reflect them in our work.
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