While I was Director of Innovation & Strategy for Goochland County Public Schools, I oversaw a re-make of the high school’s media center. The school had been built in 2001 and that year I taught two of my advanced classes while transitioning to a role to focus on teacher professional development. In 2019, the division had received a donation and I was tapped to reconsider the library space.
I worked with the school’s original architectural firm to re-design the space with student input. The changes involved the purchase of new furniture, the removal of a computer lab area, movement of current shelving products, and installation of TV monitors so that students could “beam” or “cast” to them to aid in collaborative work from the laptops. The re-design also brought in some architectural furniture, flexible seating and tables, a new 3D printer, a laser cutter, and finally, fresh paint!
The purple, red, blue, and green colors seen in the poster designs was meant to riff off of the newly painted walls. We also installed a new vinyl flooring product after removing the then stained original carpet. The first poster was installed outside the center in the hallway, and included matching sticker decals applied to the glass windows of the doors.
Finally, another poster for the space can be viewed here in PDF.
I saw a recent post from the school division about their new teachers, photographed in this space, and they are still enjoying this environment, with the same furniture and wall signage for the newly refreshed ‘Learning Commons,’ a name we chose to move away from thinking of the space as a library.
My favorite detail, which I didn’t capture in personal photos, was a set of floor decals that were affixed to reinforce the space’s branding; a few are visible in the photo above. Each was color matched to the signs and paint.
The “starburst” pattern wasn’t entirely original; I created it to mimic the design of a decorative rug we’d purchased to grace the entrance of the space.