Campus of the Future: Inspiring Community

On Monday March 21^st Cole Roberts, Arup San Francisco, and Francesca Birks, Senior Foresight and Sustainability Consultant based in New York, teamed up to host and facilitate a client-facing Campus of the Future workshop as part of the Society for College and University Planners (SCUP) ‘Inspire Community’ themed conference at the Seattle University campus. This work was funded by the Region’s Education Business and builds on a similar event held in Washington DC in late 2009.

The Campus of the Future workshop convened stakeholders from campus planning, architecture, engineering and other university groups to explore the drivers which are shaping campuses of the future. The day began with participants being invited to share their opinions of the emerging trends which are influencing the future of education. Stakeholders then considered and selected the most significant social, technological, economic, environmental and political drivers for education. The workshop then explored possible campus futures organized under the axes of curriculum distribution (physical vs. digital) and community orientation (integrated vs. segregated). This was followed by an exercise in empathy where participants were asked to adopt a campus of the future persona so that they could better understand and anticipate campus planning and pedagogy needs in the future.

The objective of the workshop was to encourage participants to consider the ways in which higher education might physically evolve given the futures emerging in the next 10 to 15 years. Our goal was to increase awareness amongst our collaborators and clients of Arup as a committed thought leader in the education space.