Beyond the coffee shop: what happens when we remove design constraints

In hospitality education, we teach courses in neat boxes. Course A covers theory. Course B explores creativity. Course C focuses on design tools. Each has its own assignments, its own outcomes, its own grade. Students complete them sequentially, and we hope—somehow—that they will connect the dots later. But what if the structure itself prevents the kind of thinking we claim to value?

In autumn 2025 at Haaga-Helia, we merged three separate courses into one unified project. The experiment emerged from a simple observation: our students were learning the same concepts three different ways, but never seeing how they fit together. We were teaching them to think in silos while expecting them to work holistically.

What happened next really changed how we see course design, turning our assumptions upside down.

Three courses, one impossible brief

The three courses—Experience & Transformative Economies in Hospitality and Tourism, Creative Hospitality and Tourism, and Experience Design Process and Tools—formed the first part of our Major in Experience Management. They shared 90 % of their students. Yet administratively and pedagogically, they operated as separate entities.

We asked ourselves: what if students needed all three perspectives simultaneously to solve a real problem?

The opportunity arrived when a commissioner approached us with a challenge: create a concept for NABS (Not A Book Store)—a multisensory space that would reimagine what coffee shops and bookstores could be. What is the ‘third place’ of the future? The brief was not about incremental improvements. It asked: what if we started over completely.

Rather than splitting this into three individual course projects, we took an unconventional approach. We made it the core challenge for all three courses: one commissioner, one brief, and one final presentation, but examined from three different perspectives.

Falkner and Stålbrandt (2023) found a pattern in career counseling education: when students work with actual stakeholders rather than simulated cases, engagement shifts from completing an assignment to solving a problem that matters. For our students, this turned the project from a simple academic task into something tangible.

From anxiety to breakthrough

We deliberately chose how we framed the challenge. The brief was not to design a better café-bookstore hybrid. It was: What experience do people need but do not know they’re missing? This required shedding every assumption about what these spaces ‘should be’. And students initially resisted—hard.

Week one felt chaotic. Students kept asking us to define success criteria. They wanted examples and benchmarks. One team asked if we had photos of good café-bookstore concepts they could reference. Another wanted to know the ideal space for the idea. A third asked whether the concept needed to include coffee at all—and seemed genuinely worried when we said that is for you to decide.

The anxiety was real, and we recognised it as necessary. Stember (1991) describes interdisciplinarity as the integration of the contributions of several disciplines to a problem or issue: but integration only happens when students cannot retreat to the safety of a single disciplinary approach. We had to create space for productive discomfort.

We introduced minor cases—smaller explorations within each course lens. In the theory course, teams researched the background behind Experience Economy. In the creativity course, they wrote blogs and learned to enhance them with AI, using critical thinking to evaluate the results. That had nothing to do with NABS. In the Experience Design Process course, they kept focus on understanding the process and the purpose of tools in designing experiences, keeping NABS in mind.

These exercises served a purpose: they let students practice thinking without constraints in lower-stakes environments. By week three, we noticed a shift. The questions changed. Instead of asking what we want from them, students started asking ‘what if we tried this’. Instead of looking for existing café-bookstore models to improve, they began questioning the category itself.

• What creates genuine community value when people feel increasingly isolated?
• What emotional response have we never tried to design for in hospitality spaces?
• What if we removed every assumption about how people are supposed to move through a space?

Exploring the unanticipated

Due to the breakthrough and new understanding teams started to explore directions we had not anticipated.

One group designed their entire concept around slowness. Not ‘slow coffee’ as a marketing gimmick, but genuine architectural and experiential choices that made rushing physically uncomfortable. They called it The Pause. Entering required walking through a transition space with gradually dimming lights and sound dampening. The furniture was too comfortable to perch on briefly. The books were arranged to encourage browsing, not quick searching. Even the coffee brewing happened in full view, taking exactly seven minutes, with nowhere to wait except in the space itself.

Another team grappled with ‘solitude in community’—creating zones where people could be alone together without the social anxiety of sitting by themselves in public. Their concept included ‘privacy alcoves’ with one-way acoustic panels: you could hear the ambient life of the space, but others could not hear you. They prototyped this using cardboard and tested it with classmates, discovering that people stayed 40 % longer in these semi-isolated zones.

A third team proposed The Blackout Space—a room where people could genuinely stop. No phones (they would be stored in lockers). No clocks visible. Books selected specifically for requiring slow reading. The only light came from adjustable reading lamps. Their research question was simple: in a world of constant connectivity, what happens when you design for true disconnection?

After the third week, students stopped describing their concepts abstractly and started showing us prototypes. Rough sketches became cardboard models. Mood boards turned into spatial mock-ups in empty classrooms. As one student stated.

I finally understand why we needed all three courses. The theory told us what transformation means. The creativity helped us imagine it. But the design process made it real enough that we could test whether it actually worked.

The course integration brought a new level of understanding

This aligns with research on design thinking in hospitality education, which emphasises co-creation, iterative prototyping, and empathy-driven design as tools for developing higher-order thinking (Zhu et al. 2016). But experiencing it firsthand—watching students move from abstract concepts to testable prototypes—revealed to us something deeper. The integration was not just pedagogically sound. It was necessary.

When students prototyped The Pause and tested it with peers, they discovered their original concept was too aggressive. People felt trapped rather than encouraged to slow down. So they adjusted: the transition space became optional. The furniture remained comfortable, but some ‘perching spots’ appeared near the entrance. The seven-minute coffee ritual stayed, but something quicker could also be ordered if needed.

These iterations happened because students could apply theory (understanding what transformation requires), creativity (imagining alternatives), and experience design (testing and refining) simultaneously. In separate courses, they would have submitted the first version and moved on.

By the final presentations, students were naturally referencing all three courses. Theory informed their choices about transformation design. Creativity helped them imagine beyond existing categories. Design tools let them prototype and test. They did not think of these as separate disciplines anymore—they were just different ways of exploring the same challenge.

What the integration taught us lecturers

After the final presentations, we gathered feedback. One comment stayed with us as it captures exactly what we had hoped for but could not have predicted. The students did not just complete assignments: they experienced integration.

Having one large project instead of multiple small ones helped me connect topics more deeply. I could see how theory, creativity, and experience design tools actually work together instead of just hearing that they should.

Thomas (2000) found that project-based learning improves engagement, critical thinking, and real-world problem-solving because it mirrors how professionals actually work. Beane (1997) argued that cross-curricular instruction helps students apply knowledge in authentic contexts. But reading this research is different from watching students discover these connections themselves.

One student told us he kept waiting for the moment where we would tell the students what the answer was. When that did not happen, he realised they had to figure it out themselves. He found it terrifying at first. But then understood that was the point.

Yes. That was exactly the point.

Students do not lack ideas. They lack permission to pursue ideas that do not fit existing templates. They lack experience having ‘unthinkable’ concepts taken seriously by real stakeholders. Students could pursue directions that made them uncertain because someone outside the classroom valued that uncertainty.

Real briefs with real stakeholders change student behavior in ways artificial assignments never do. Students cared about whether their concepts worked because someone other than their instructors would evaluate them.

Intergrated and authentic learning is our choice in the future

This semester reshaped how we think about course design. Integrated learning is not just a logistical convenience—it is a pedagogical necessity for developing the kind of thinking hospitality needs.

We are not returning to separate projects. The question now is: How do we build entire programs where thinking beyond categories becomes the baseline expectation rather than an experimental exception? We have identified three principles for future course integration.

• Shared briefs must come from real commissioners with genuine needs. Academic exercises do not create the same cognitive demand.
• Discomfort must be designed in deliberately—students need space to struggle with ambiguity before solutions emerge.
• Iteration requires time and feedback loops that single-course structures rarely allow.

Goodyear (2015) describes teaching as a design challenge itself: educators must create conditions where learning becomes possible, not prescribe exactly what that learning looks like. This semester taught us that some of our most carefully designed course structures were actually preventing the learning we valued most.

The hospitality industry faces challenges that do not respect disciplinary boundaries. Climate change, labor shortages, technological disruption, shifting guest expectations—these problems require integrated thinking across marketing, operations, finance, and design. Falkner and Stålbrandt’s (2023) study of authentic learning in career counseling found that students working on real projects with actual clients developed stronger collaborative skills, creative problem-solving abilities, and practical judgment compared to traditional coursework.

If we want students ready for that reality, we cannot teach them to think in fragments and hope they’ll integrate later. We have to design learning experiences where integration is the only option.
Next semester, we are expanding this approach to additional courses. The question is not whether unified projects work—this semester proved they do. The question is: What other constraints are we imposing without realising it, and what happens when we remove those too?

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