Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft, co-directors of the Environment Collaborative at the d.school who design the school’s physical spaces, shared lessons learned taking the d.school from a 1,000-square-foot temporary trailer to its current location in a 10,000-square-foot former fluids research lab, during NYU-Poly’s inaugural Transformative Speaker lecture on February 4. The Transformative Speaker Series is a companion piece to the Town Halls and workshops that will encourage faculty, students, and staff involvement in i²e Campus Transformation, NYU-Poly’s plan to rebuild and renovate areas of its Brooklyn campus.

Fittingly, Doorley and Witthoft’s lecture, “Space as a Teacher, Space as a Tool,” took place in the future home of NYU-Poly’s Game Innovation Lab, a multi-functional space for researching games as innovation challenges, conducting lab-style classes, and seminars. Katherine Isbister, the lab’s director who holds joint appointments in the Humanities and Social Sciences and Computer Science and Engineering Departments and is herself a Stanford alumna, explained it as a place “to foster conversation and interdisciplinary creativity.”