The four chapters
Each one states its purpose, its essential elements, and the mechanism that makes it work when nobody is guiding the visitor.
0
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the Cover page – Where am I?
MAIN ENTRANCE
The goal is provide a "sneak peak" before the reveal in Ch.1.
The lift lobby and sliding entrance carry a compressed preview of everything the visitor is about to meet: the mark, the red, the batten geometry, and the cluster colours used as floor-level coding. It resolves orientation before the reveal, so the next chapter can be spent on the school rather than on wayfinding.
Key point of design
Proposal vs Image taken during refurbishment
1
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Start of something new
MAIN LOBBY
The reveal. A six-metre projection panel with paired front projectors and a backlit logo box sit at the end of the sightline, and the ceiling battens run as leading lines straight into them.
The whole composition is set out on golden-ratio construction, a device the school teaches, used as the room's own structure rather than as decoration.
Construction geometry, and the room built on it.
Cluster colours double as floor-level coding, so the identity system is also the wayfinding system.
2
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This is SDM
GALLERY
Three clusters, (ie. Creative Media & Technology, Image Making, and Object, Place & Experience Making) each get a bay with its diplomas, their respective faculty colour and its current work.
Light-box panels and mounted displays carry work that dates; laminate pedestals on castors let the school reconfigure for open house, industry showcases and graduate shows without a fit-out budget.
Usage layout and Organisation
Elevation. Each bay is readable at walking pace, at a distance, without stopping.
3
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Trust us
ADMIN OFFICE & ALUMNI WALL
Proof, placed where visitors wait rather than in a trophy cabinet that most visitors do not intentionally travel to. The alumni wall, award record and partner work sit against the admin frontage, and the waiting and discussion area is folded into the same zone.
This way, a parent or client who is waiting for an appointment is sitting inside the evidence of SDM's reputation. The office edge was deliberately kept semi-open: sophistication against rawness, staff visible at work.
Two directors, three assistant directors, fifteen staff, relocated to the perimeter so the centre could become public.
Layout (Image 1) + Mock-up of the proposed Alumni Panel on the CDU (Image 2)
4
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Work hard, play hard
ADMIN OFFICE & ALUMNI WALL
The last chapter was intentionally designed to be the one space that is not meant to be performative as it sits within the same shared space as Chapter 3.
A pantry, long shared tables and a projected wall of student and alumni portraits, positioned so that visitors see the school being used rather than displayed. It is also the honest answer to the welfare question every parent is really asking.
Mock-up of space
Feature wall concept illustration along the Admin office reception area
360º Facilty Walkthrough
Some things that I would specify now and also if I were given a larger scope, would be to have named content owners per zone, ensure that a review cadence tied to the academic calendar, and a fallback state for every screen to create a failsafe/closed feedback loop.
2026 Reflection
Why this project sits in a service design portfolio
It is the first project where I stopped treating brand and space as outputs and started treating them as the delivery mechanism for an organisational change that had already been decided and not yet been felt. The artefacts are a logotype and a floorplate. The work is stakeholder mapping, sequencing, content governance and a fixed set of questions that every design decision had to answer.
This is essentially still the same operating method I now apply to systems with far more moving parts, such as workforce transition programmes, environmental monitoring ecosystems, public-sector service redesign.
Different perspective, different scale, same discipline.