From an Idea to an Ongoing Partnership
The Pratt Libraries partnership began with an idea: use design to increase awareness, engagement, and use of the Pratt Manhattan Library.
The initiative was proposed to Pratt Manhattan Library and developed through conversations with Library leadership around its needs, spaces, and opportunities to better connect the Library with students.
Building a Multi-Semester Design Studio
The partnership has grown into a multi-semester project that works more like an ongoing design studio.
Each semester, student teams take on real Library needs and build on the work that came before. Projects have included identity, environmental graphics, wayfinding, signage, digital communication, promotion, and ways to make Library resources easier for students to discover and use.
Students research the problem, develop ideas, present to the client, get feedback, revise the work, and move ideas toward possible implementation.
Design as a Way to Increase Engagement
The starting question remains simple: How can design help more students discover and use the Library?
That means looking at the whole experience—how students find the Library, what they see when they enter, how they discover resources and services, and how the Library communicates with students across the Pratt Manhattan campus.
The work gives the Library new ways to think about visibility and engagement while giving students a chance to solve actual design problems.
Real Client. Real Design Team.
For students in Pratt’s two-year AOS program, the partnership creates professional experience while they are still in school.
They work as a team for a real client, present ideas, respond to feedback, deal with real needs and constraints, and develop work for an actual environment and audience.
The larger idea is the partnership: see an opportunity, bring people together, build the relationship, and turn a real institutional need into something that benefits both the client and the students.
