Hannah Sellers
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I met Hannah Sellers through the head of the architectural science depart- ment in the School of Architecture and Manufacturing Science at Western Ken- tucky University. My blog is about the interconnections in the elds of design, specically user-centered design and the creative processes designers undertake in their elds. For this blog series, entitled “Designers in Process,” I introduce the reader to someone who is studying in a eld of design or technology and try to showcase the detailed thinking involved in the creative process. Ms. Sellers is a student majoring in Architecture and also getting a minor in interior design, and she is someone like me, who places value on the design process from a user-centered approach. But what you will notice if you meet her, is that she is someone who despite her incredible workload, puts you at ease; and this trait could also be said to be true throughout her philosophy of design. Novel Approaches: A great example of the creative process she might undertake is represented by when she was asked to design a hypothetical solution to a new building for the school of Architecture (when she was in Studio II). Since, for her, the design process needs to begin with an inspiration, and she couldn’t nd any similar types of schools, she chose a novel approach and started folding paper: I took a piece of paper and I didn’t wrip it but I cut it then I started folding things and what I came up with, that gave me the whole idea of the project and where I wanted to go with it. This perhaps origami inspired approach is just one of many ways Ms. Sellers has gone about design- ing things. Another way is by incorporating many design concepts into her model, such as mixing dierent themes even from dierent centuries. In this way, she overcomes design problems by doing something dier - ent each time, perhaps something that has not been done before: I like to mix traditional with eclectic, I like to mix modern with colonial – you know I don’t like just one particular style, and my process involves more than one style typically. And when I look for inspi- rations I don’t technically go for buildings or architecture . . . I’ll look at storefronts of clothing compa nies, and the displays that clothing companies come up with can also lead to an inspiration for a design that I’ll do for a project. Inspirations: The storefronts idea was particularly interesting for me, as I wondered how a store-front could inspire an architectural design. But as she explained, it isn’t the store-front per se, but the inspiration. One inspirational store that inspired her and informed her work in a current project for Interior Design was the store Anthropologie, done by EOA architects out of New York. As she explained, it’s the ability of the store to fashion object metaphors out of random odds and ends that gives her a sense of how they create: “Putting the ease in place” by Will Kotheimer
Transcript of Hannah Sellers
8/8/2019 Hannah Sellers
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8/8/2019 Hannah Sellers
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“Like, I saw this one display where they took cotton balls and made this huge cloud, then they had these blueforks dropping down from it as the rain. So when I looked at their store front I saw all these dierent aspectsand how they took one thing and make it something else. So I don’t necessarily use what they have used, but I take a material and turn it into something else like they have. . .” she said.
The look and feel of Anthropologie gave Hannah a sense of creating something for her interior designproject that could inspire people. As she explains here, in this case it was toward the “industrial” :
For this project, we were to come up with a word, a word that would describe our design, and mine was “industrial,” because I love all the raw bare materials of a building. I like exposed framing,exposed steel. And what I used, this plays in part with Anthropologie the displays and stu, I took a laboratory sink, a laboratory faucet, stu that scientists would use and put it in this house, because itsstill a raw material its industrial, its still dierent, and its something that you would never ever think of using. So that’s an example of how I would put what Anthropologie did into my own design.
Besides drawings, her sketchbook is littered with cutouts of dancers, thoughts on inspirations, and other artifacts of a creative mind. So it seems that it’s not on the architecture itself she always focuses but its aect
on the user, and that which inspires her to break out of the fold of other architects and nd other inspira -tions for her designs: “I typically don’t look to people for inspiration, I typically look for items and things, andlike I said, store displays, for inspiration.”
Creativity within Limits: Though there is much room for creativity, as she explains, designers almost always work within limits; sometimes that limit is strictly nancial, but more than likely it also concernscodes and guidelines which engineers have decided people should follow. Some are also corporate guide-lines, things such as “green design,” i.e. making a building have a manageable heat and air bill, and other factors will come into play as well, such as what the building will be used for, mercantile, oce, or residen-tial. Those realities “ll the box” -- as she put it. But there was also room for play, to work with what goes onoutside it.
Hannah’s investment with design exists within this “play arena,” for while adhering to the building codes andcolor palettes that are standard for everyone in her eld, she delves deeper, into the realm of psychology of buildings, how buildings make you feel inside of them.
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Empathy in Design: To round out her toolkit of design inspirations, Ms. Sellers looks to many elds,such as fashion, store-front design, interior design, art, as well as psychology and ethnographic research:
I took an anthropology class and that has been a big inuence on me as a person in how I design,because there was this term we used – ethnographic research, and it meant living with the people likethe people, for a certain amount of time. So I just fell in love with that idea, so when I design some
thing that people have to live with for a long time, I put myself into the worker’s or the person’s shoes who will have to live in it, and I try to see what they would want to see in the building.
As I asked question after question, it seemed she was very excited to talk about her design process, but shealso always came back to the people who would inhabit the buildings. She seemed to care about the people.
Which is refreshing, since you would think by looking at many buildings around campus (and in general), that the architects didn’t think much about what the people might feel in them. “A lot of people don’t like work and I would want to design the building so they feel comfortable in their working environment,” she said.
Final Thoughts: As stated previously, her inspiration comes from others who have made it a point to con -form the building to the people’s needs, and she credits designers such as EOA architects for this:
[T]hey design, with the people, like the people, so if they have a design in Arizona, it’s going to bedesigned like the surroundings of that city, and what that city encompasses and what those people arelike. So you wouldn’t take a building in Arizona and place it in Kentucky.”
Though Ms. Sellers denitely has interest in studying architecture and interior design, its neat to nd that she sees that the beauty of architecture can often be linked to the feel and atmosphere of the locale and theeect it has on the inhabitants of the building, whether they work there, or will just be stopping in. It’s alsorefreshing to nd someone who cares more about making people comfortable in their spaces. Ms. Sellers hasthe foundations for a great future in front of her, and desires to inspire others through her work.
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