Innovation Tank
Designing a New Spatial Identity for the THI Center of Entrepreneurship
This project focused on redesigning the new space for THI’s Center of Entrepreneurship after the team was forced to leave their previous, much larger location and move into a smaller but more central space next to the university’s Aula. The challenge was not simply to fit the same functions into fewer square meters, but to rethink the entire spatial concept: combining office work, private coaching, workshops, student interaction, and brand identity in one flexible and welcoming environment.
The CoE described itself as a fast, dynamic “speedboat” within the much larger and slower structure of the university. At the same time, it wanted to become more visible, more approachable, and more clearly identifiable to students. A key metaphor from the kick-off was the wish to become an “aquarium”: a place that people look into, become curious about, and want to enter. This made it clear from the beginning that the project was not only about rooms and furniture. It was about spatial branding, atmosphere, and creating a better point of contact between the CoE and its audience.
In this project, I again took on the role of team leader. I was also mainly responsible for research and user experience methods, helping ground the concept strategically before the team moved into sketching, interior design, and 3D modelling.
I really enjoyed this constellation because it matched the way I like to work best: I set the direction, structure, and conceptual foundation, while the team translated that into spatial form. My contribution lay especially in shaping the research process, defining the experience perspective, and later developing the interactive exterior concept that used the location itself as a communication opportunity.
These early UX methods helped us organise the complexity of the brief and identify what the project was really about.
The CoE needed a space that could support very different activities, from focused work and confidential coaching sessions to creative workshops and public visibility. At the same time, the new location offered a strategic advantage through its position next to the Aula. For me, this phase was essential because it created a common foundation for the project and translated the client’s wishes into a clearer design challenge.
Since the words of the core team alone were not enough to fully understand the context, I expanded the research through interviews with both CoE employees and former clients. The questionnaire focused on four major areas: understanding the CoE and its role more precisely, clarifying practical room requirements, mapping the customer journey of startup founders, and exploring marketing and visibility. This broader research perspective was important because the new space was not only meant to function internally, but also to support how students discover, perceive, and engage with the CoE.
Based on these insights, I created customer journeys for both CoE employees and startup founders. This helped make the experience dimension of the project more visible and connected the spatial concept to actual use over time.
We interviewed five CoE workers and two startup founders.
To synthesise the material, I used affinity diagramming to cluster observations, identify patterns, and generate insights that could guide the concept. Affinity diagramming played a central role in translating the interviews into actionable insights. It allowed me to structure very different perspectives into thematic clusters and reveal what really mattered across the data. Through this process, the project moved from anecdotal input to a more grounded understanding of needs, barriers, and opportunities. This is representative of how I approach research: not as a checklist activity, but as a way to build a solid strategic basis for design decisions.
The insights made several things clear. The CoE already offers valuable support in coaching, consulting, events, funding, and entrepreneurship education, but visibility and accessibility remain challenges. The team wanted the new space to feel creative, personal, open, and dynamic, while also supporting privacy where needed. The existing glass facade was both a problem and an opportunity: it created privacy concerns for coaching sessions, but also offered a highly visible interface to the Aula. The research also showed that spontaneous student visits were still relatively rare, and that the new location could play an important role in making the CoE more approachable and better known.
Based on these insights, I created customer journeys for both CoE employees and startup founders. This helped make the experience dimension of the project more visible and connected the spatial concept to actual use over time.
The customer journeys were important because they shifted the project from “room design” toward experience design.
They made visible how people move through the CoE’s services, where barriers occur, and where the space itself could support discovery, interaction, and trust. This step reflects a core part of my contribution to the project: using UX methods to connect spatial decisions with meaningful user experiences rather than treating the environment as a purely aesthetic problem.
The next step was to map the insights toward possible solution spaces and use them as a basis for brainstorming. This allowed the team to move from understanding the problem toward identifying where the strongest concept opportunities lay.
This stage made the transition from research to concept development visible. Instead of jumping directly into ideas, I worked to ensure that ideation remained anchored in real user needs and strategic opportunities. The mapping helped define what kinds of solutions would be meaningful and which design directions had the strongest potential to address both the CoE’s internal requirements and its public presence. For me, this is where conceptual design becomes especially valuable: creating a clear bridge between research and idea generation.
Brainstorming, Sketching and Prototyping
Innovation Tank
From there, the team moved into broader sketching, brainstorming, and research on furniture, lighting, and other environmental solutions. Since the new space had no daylight and strong artificial lighting had already been experienced negatively in the old location, the atmosphere and light concept also became an important part of the discussion.
This phase shows the project becoming more tangible. Once the strategic direction was in place, the team was able to explore different ways of translating it into spatial arrangements, material choices, and interaction opportunities. While my teammates focused more strongly on the interior form and 3D development, I remained especially focused on how the concept would feel, how people would move through it, and how the location could actively support engagement with the CoE.
The final concept took the “aquarium” metaphor seriously and transformed it into the central idea of the project: the Innovation Tank. This concept framed the CoE as a dynamic ecosystem, a place where different ideas, people, and businesses coexist, connect, and grow. It drew on the image of a fish tank not in a decorative sense, but as a metaphor for visibility, transparency, diversity, and interaction.
The Innovation Tank was designed as a nurturing and interconnected environment: one that supports collaboration, offers resources and mentorship, and allows others to look in and become curious. In contrast to many other groups that proposed highly ambitious new furniture systems, I made the team decision to keep the concept strongly goal-oriented and realistic. We intentionally relied mostly on existing furniture from the former space to make the move easier, faster, and more budget-friendly. This pragmatic decision was very well received by the client and reflects an aspect of my leadership style that is important to me: keeping concepts grounded in what is actually useful, feasible, and valuable.
The renderings show how the Innovation Tank concept was translated into spatial form. The design combines openness, flexibility, and identity in a way that reflects the CoE’s vision of itself as dynamic, interdisciplinary, and welcoming. For the project as a whole, these images are important because they visualise how the conceptual metaphor shaped not only the atmosphere of the interior, but also the overall coherence of the space.
While the interior concept was developed collaboratively, the area I was most invested in was the exterior and its potential as a public-facing interface. For me, the biggest opportunity in the location change was not the smaller room itself, but the large glass facade facing the Aula. Rather than seeing it only as an architectural limitation, I wanted to turn it into an active point of contact between the CoE and passing students. My goal was to use the facade to create visibility, curiosity, and playful engagement.
I defined three main principles for this exterior interaction layer: participation, information, and gamification. Together, they were meant to make the space more inviting, more understandable, and more memorable for people passing by.
Participation
The first idea focused on participation. I developed a voting interaction on the glass facade that would allow students to respond to changing questions using small reusable suction cups. This concept was intended to create a low-threshold and slightly unusual point of interaction: something haptic, playful, and easy to engage with while also giving the CoE a way to learn a little more about students and invite them into dialogue. I was interested here not only in communication, but in making the CoE feel more alive and approachable through direct participation.
Information
The second layer was a more direct information interface. The facade could be used to communicate upcoming events, draw attention to the CoE’s website, and showcase successful startups through a visible “wall of fame.” This part of the concept addressed a very practical issue from the research: many students simply did not know enough about the CoE, despite its marketing efforts. By treating the facade as a strategic communication surface, I wanted to make the location itself support awareness and outreach.
Gamification
The third and most experimental idea was gamification. I wanted to create a playful interactive installation that would encourage people to stop, observe, and engage with the facade in a way that felt entertaining rather than purely informational. Inspired by the fish tank metaphor, this concept eventually evolved into a system of moving magnets shaped like rockets and planes. The idea was that hidden mechanical gears behind the glass would drive the movement, while magnets on the outside could be watched, moved, and even taken home. This turned the facade into something interactive and curious, while also subtly referring to startups, engineering, and THI’s technical identity.
The close-ups show the detail of this gamified interaction and make visible the material and mechanical logic behind it. For me, this concept was an especially strong example of how interaction design can extend beyond screens and into space. It combined play, branding, merchandising, and public engagement in one gesture and turned a transparent boundary into something active and inviting.
Based on this exterior concept, I reworked the initial customer journey of a student interested in founding a startup. This allowed me to show more clearly how the redesigned space and facade would not only look different, but actually change the experience of discovering and approaching the CoE.
The new customer journey illustrates how spatial design and interaction can shape awareness, approachability, and engagement over time.
It shows that the project was not just about fitting functions into a room, but about improving the relationship between the CoE and its audience. For me, this image is especially important because it ties the whole case back to user experience: the final concept is not only a design solution for the client, but a more inviting and motivating experience for the students the CoE wants to reach.
What makes this project especially representative of my work is the way it combines leadership, research, conceptual design, and interaction thinking within a spatial context. I led the process, built the research foundation, structured the user journeys, and shaped the strategic concept behind the facade as a public interface. At the same time, I worked in a team where responsibilities were clearly shared, which allowed me to focus on the areas where I could contribute most strongly while trusting others to develop the spatial and visual details further.