Earlier in the term, I did sketchbook work where I utilized Norman Design Principles to analyze things I interacted with daily in order to foster critical design thinking skills.
Our sketchbook work had trained me to slow down and look more carefully at what was in front of me rather than moving past first impressions. The regular observation exercises, particularly those focused on Norman Principles and placemaking, had reinforced that meaning often lives in details you initially overlook. I drew on that habit when our group sat down to ideate on the Village 1 redesign. Rather than jumping straight into a single agreed-upon layout, I suggested we each take ten minutes to brainstorm individually first, mirroring the structured brainstorming process we had practiced earlier in the term during the PSA project. After everyone presented their ideas, the group went quiet, so I took the initiative to transfer all of our designs onto a chalkboard so we could more easily collaborate, compare, and build on each other's work. From there I ran a short exercise where I encouraged the group to identify the features we liked most across all the sketches and layer them onto a single evolving design which was a process that reflected the critique and iteration techniques we had been taught in class.
It was during this exercise that someone offhandedly noted the aerial layout looked like a turtle. Rather than letting that comment pass, I paused to ask whether it was actually significant. I connected it to the Indigenous creation story of the Earth resting on a turtle's back, a narrative centred on belonging and home, and argued to the group that this resonance was substantively meaningful for a first-year residence, not merely aesthetic. This required me to reflect on an assumption our group had been implicitly operating under: that functional layout decisions and conceptual identity were separate concerns. Questioning that assumption, consistent with the WatCV behaviour of "reflecting on the justifications of your own assumptions", opened up a different approach entirely. I then applied the connection systematically across decisions we had already made. The rectangular entrance became a trapezoid to suggest the turtle's head, the gym and cafeteria were relocated to the sides to read as arms, and I proposed incorporating Indigenous medicine plants into the greenhouse to ground the concept in something purposeful rather than decorative. This also reflected what our group had learned from prior art observations: that successful environments like St. Jerome's University derived their sense of community from coherent, connected design rather than a collection of unrelated functional choices.