collaboration & space

My aim is to enhance the academic culture of the university by better facilitating collaboration between the students and teachers. I have made observations on the nature and trends of work and study spaces occupied within university. My opinion is that university is a place that should encourage students, lecturers, researchers and scholars to collaborate, teach and brainstorm ideas in order to meet a shared goal in their respected areas of interests. I have noticed that work and study spaces have been built to only provide ‘room’ for these groups to work in, however, I find it somewhat inefficient in how these people are able to gather and let alone collaborate with one another.

The driver of collaboration is the ability to communicate with another person or group. I find that face to face collaboration is most effective compared to online collaboration because communicating to someone directly provides more depth in discussions and the experience is not quite the same compared to the online alternative. Collaboration is essential if people want to meet a shared goal.

I feel that the problem lies with how spaces are arranged. Spaces are closed and sealed off; this creates a boundary for students and teachers to collaborate as it is difficult for them to search and meet with one another. Because of this, I see that teachers and students are quite separated from one another. It is possible that we could change the layout of the spaces; and make each space open, however it would be quite unnecessary. The only other way to solve this problem is through utilizing technology.

This concept and idea would imply a change in the way we experience the spaces we occupy at university. I would like to explore the idea of how we can interact with the spaces around a building. By creating spaces that interact with the students, it will help them be aware of what spaces are suitable for collaboration with other fellow students and/or teachers. How can we make spaces interactive and help us better collaborate with one another? By collecting student information about their areas of interests and courses taken in the semester, I plan to use that information into a database that will be published on a website. Each student is to login with their details (by using a username and password) and depending on the occupancy levels and time, they are provided a suitable room that would help them collaborate with others with the same interests and courses. I find this useful because it can help stimulate their ideas about certain areas of interests through collaboration. Thus, people can collaborate more effectively through the use of technology.

By creating this environment, that is, the ability to place people together in terms of their areas of interests through technology, it is possible that the quality of work and research from university can be further improved. This can have the potential for students and researchers to have a better depth of understanding with their chosen area of interest.

Hence, I would like to achieve a system which is able to place people to a space that will allow them to collaborate with other people with similar areas of interests and courses to help better stimulate ideas.