A school where every
surface teaches.
innovation Dash™ · experience design
The Brief
GIIS was opening a new flagship campus in Singapore. The school called it a ‘School of the Future’, and it had the infrastructure to justify the name: state-of-the-art facilities, advanced technology integration, and the ambition to become a model for what education could look like at its best.
The brief to chlorophyll was precise. The school had its facilities. What it did not have was a way to make its intangible values visible. Its belief that the most important learning happens at the intersection of subjects, not within any one of them, was not legible in the space. Students moved through corridors that could have belonged to any well-resourced school. The building was not doing educational work.
The explicit constraint: no plastering walls with institutional branding. The school did not want logo applications and mission statements. It wanted a space that made ideas visible, that gave students and parents something to think about before they reached a classroom.
The Idea
“The most important learning happens not within a subject, but at the intersections between subjects.”
chlorophyll’s research into the school’s educational philosophy produced a single, organising thought: connecting the dots. Not as a tagline, but a design brief.
Every floor, every corridor, every installation would be built around a specific intersection of two disciplines. A student walking from one class to another would encounter art meeting engineering, biology meeting mathematics, history meeting music. The building would not describe education – it would embody it.
The Process
Innovation Dash™: nine steps from research to execution
chlorophyll applied its Innovation Dash™ methodology, a nine-step innovation-led design process developed for exactly this kind of brief: where the output is not a visual identity but a designed experience, and where every physical decision needs to carry an idea.
The nine steps ran across three phases.
Phase 1
Initial brainstorming
Empathy mapping with students, faculty, and parents. Idea generation and voting sessions with the GIIS team. A structured ideation process that moved from free association to a spreadsheet of vetted concepts, each paired with a specific discipline intersection.
Phase 2
Design mapping
Team reviews with GIIS leadership. Technical input on what was structurally possible. Design commission for each approved concept. Copywriting for every panel and installation. First-stage completion and feedback integration.
Phase 3
Design execution
Final artwork for every installation. Vendor intervention and production. Completed artwork incorporated into the space. Experience training for the school team so they could explain each installation to visitors, parents, and prospective students.
Emotion flow
chlorophyll mapped the emotional journey a visitor would experience moving through the space. The design was not room-by-room. It was an arc. Every design decision was tested against it.
Anxious at entry
Intrigue
Excitement
Calm
Pride
Aspiration
The System
Twelve floors. Eight-to-ten ideas per floor.
The school has two wings: a secondary wing of five floors and a primary wing of seven floors. Each floor was given a theme drawn from the central “connecting the dots” idea.
Within each floor, chlorophyll designed eight to ten distinct experiential ideas: wall installations, interactive panels, take-home handouts, and digital touchpoints. In total, the project produced over 100 unique learning experiences embedded into the architecture of the school.
5
Floors
Secondary wing
Continents as themes. Each floor connected the continent’s geography, history, culture, and science to the disciplines taught on that floor.
Africa
South America
Australia and Oceania
North America
7
Floors
Primary wing
Elements of nature as themes, calibrated for younger students, where the connections between subjects are more tactile and immediate.
Roots
Trunks
Canopy
Antarctica
Clouds
The Visitor Centre
Six stations. The first impression before the first classroom.
Before any visitor reaches a teaching floor, they move through the visitor centre:
six stations that set the tone for everything that follows.
01
Windows of Inspiration
Large glass panels connecting art and science, nature and machines, unique ideas and problem-solving. Designed with 100 teachers and 2,000 hours of concept development. The panels feature DaVinci, Samuel Morse, and Rube Goldberg: three figures whose work crossed the boundary between art and science, and who are each introduced to the visitor not as historical figures but as examples of what happens when a person refuses to stay inside one discipline.
02
Pillars of Knowledge
Structural pillars treated as content. Each pillar carries a different knowledge theme, turning a passive architectural element into an active part of the school’s intellectual environment.
03
GIIS Scent of Happiness
A sensory dimension introduced at the entry. Scent as a learning cue and a memory anchor: the smell associated with the school becomes, over time, the smell associated with curiosity and discovery.
04
Framework for the Future
A display articulating GIIS’s educational philosophy in visual form: what the school believes about learning, and how the space is built to reflect that belief.
05
Learning through Experience
An interactive station demonstrating the school’s approach to kinaesthetic learning. Visitors encounter the concept before they see it applied across twelve floors.
06
Magic Miura
The Miura fold: a Japanese origami technique used in aerospace engineering to fold a flat surface down to a fraction of its size. The station gives every visitor a take-home handout demonstrating the fold. The handout is the first piece of educational content the visitor touches. The message it carries: the most useful knowledge often comes from an unexpected direction.
The Work
A selection of installations from across the twelve floors, each connecting two disciplines.
Art + TelecommunicationSamuel Morse
The window installation in the visitor centre dedicated to Samuel Morse places his identity as an artist and his invention of Morse code side by side. Visitors encounter him first as a painter, then as an engineer. The glass surface makes both visible simultaneously: the aesthetic of the code and the engineering logic of communication occupying the same space. The message is structural: the person who changes how the world communicates does not have to choose between the arts and the sciences.
Origami + Aerospace EngineeringThe Miura Fold
A Japanese folding technique that allows a flat surface to collapse to a fraction of its area, used in the solar panels of space satellites. The take-home handout given to every visitor at the entry demonstrates the fold. A larger panel explains the aerospace application. A school that hands you an origami problem at the door is telling you something about how it thinks education works.
Economics + Current AffairsHyperinflation
A wall panel on the South America floor tells the story of hyperinflation through Venezuela: what caused it, what it felt like to live through it, and how it connects to the everyday economics of purchasing and value. Abstract macroeconomics made tangible through a specific historical moment that students at the school would have heard about on the news. The panel works because it starts with the familiar and moves to the principle.
Design + Interactive DesignBuild Your Own Flag
Five principles of flag design: simplicity, symbolism, no more than three colours, no text or coats of arms, uniqueness. A display of all South American flags as examples. An interactive touchscreen kiosk where students apply the five principles to design their own flag. A projector shows the result in full size. The installation is on the South America floor, where the flags of fourteen nations become a design brief.
History + AgriculturePotato’s Tale
A world map mural tracing the potato’s journey from its origins in Peru (11,000 BC) to North America (1719), Europe (1590 to 1600), Asia (1600), and Australia (1800s). A food history lesson told through migration routes. The potato, which has altered the course of wars and famines, becomes a way into world history that does not start with kings or battles.
Colour Theory + PsychologyPerceptions
A Rorschach-style installation on the primary wing. Primary colours, secondary colours, and the psychology of what we see when we look at abstract shapes. Visitors are asked: “What do you see here?” They are invited to create their own blot painting on paper and put it on the wall so it inspires others. The installation is interactive in both directions: students add to it, and it grows.
Engineering + BiologyTug o’ War
An elephant wall mural on the Africa floor with an interactive display measuring tensile strength. The text explains that bones are among the strongest materials found in nature. An elephant’s femur can support 100,000 kilograms. A display lets students measure their own muscle strength and compare it to the force required to beat the elephant. The engineering principle of tensile strength is taught through the biology of the largest land animal in Africa.
Biology + MathematicsA Log Book of Time
Tree ring cross-sections, each labelled with a year and a location (Amazon 1920, Amazon 1920, working forward). The rings of a tree are a mathematical record of time, rainfall, and climate. The installation turns a corridor wall into a timeline measured in growth rings. A walk down the corridor is a walk through a century of ecological history.
Science + SustainabilityCarbon Footprint
A Singapore-specific breakdown of carbon dioxide sources, presented through an infographic built around the Merlion: 60 per cent from industry, 21 per cent from buildings, 14 per cent from transportation, four per cent from other sources. A second panel asks students to calculate their own carbon footprint on an iPad. “Shrink Your Carbon Footprint” presents four actions. The installation makes a global environmental concept local and measurable.
History + MusicTune In to America
A wall installation tracing the evolution of music genres in America as a way to understand history. Blues in the 1920s, emerging from Mississippi and the African-American experience. Bop in the 1940s. Rock and Roll in the 1950s. Soul in the 1960s. Hip-Hop from the 1970s onward. A video screen in the centre plays music from each era. History taught through what a generation chose to listen to.
In Numbers
100+
unique learning experiences across the school
12
floors, each with a distinct discipline theme
1
central idea: connecting the dots
What We Delivered
01
Innovation Dash™: nine-step innovation-led design process
02
Empathy mapping and stakeholder research
03
Floor theme development and discipline pairing
04
Visitor centre concept and station design
05
Installation concept, copy, and artwork for 100+ experiences
06
Vendor management and execution oversight
07
Experience training for the GIIS team
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