The Smart Campus
The theme of the course this year is on Edinburgh University as a ‘Smart Campus’ = as a key institution in the city, with thousands of staff, students,and a huge estate, how can we use data generated by university operations and student activities to develop interventions to meet some live challanges: The student experience, the caring university, and reaching zero carbon.
The University in the City
You will be working with the University in the City as your focus, research area and canvas for intervention. The University is one of the most important institutions in Edinburgh, the biggest emplyer, with the largest estate of buildings, and is a leading innovator in carbin reduction. It hosts students from all over the world, of many ages and backgrounds, cades the challenge modernising the student experience and its relationship to students, and the staff, while maintaining and caring for centuries old traditions. Your challenge is to gather and use data from the campus and its staff and student, and propose and test ideas and prototypes that could effectively change the University for the better, taking in to account the multiple agendas and values of the university management and community, and the resources available
In order to narrow down the scope of what you do, you have the opportunity to work with a number of university organisions that will help you focus your research and design around their area of work.
Your project work will be divided into five phases over the course of the semester. Descriptions of the phases can be found by following the links below:
- Preparation
- Design Sprint
- Digging Deeper
- Development
- Reporting
Design and Design Methods
The core of a DDC project is closely related to how we think about design. Here, design is about the processes of identifying and solving problems, often with input from other people affected by those problems, and often by trial and error. We adopt the broad definition of design by Herbert Simon, namely “devising courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones”.
Design methods are a form of exploring the world, often via trial and error: considering options—even options that sound strange, uncomfortable or impossible—and then developing “interventions” as experiments to see how we can change the current situation. In DDS, we will use participatory design; this is a design process which aims at involving all stakeholders (e.g., residents, firms, businesses, students, policy officers) in defining problems, helping focus on solutions, and evaluating the effectiveness of interventions.
Design, as a discipline and a collection of processes, has no requirement to use technology. There is also no requirement to build physical or digital artifacts. Design may be mostly about ideas, and imagining how something could potentially work very differently than it does now. Many designs may involve technology, or make physical objects, but only where this seems appropriate for the problem at hand. You may be designing a “service”, an awareness raising campaign, and policy proposal or a data collection programme.
Data
Data plays an important role in our approach to design. First, we need to understand “the existing situation”, and we use data as an essential tool to reach this understanding. Second, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention, we need to collect data that will helps us measure this. Data includes information that tells us about organisations, things, places, people, processes and practices and their relationships.
What is Data? gives a quick overview of different kinds of data that we will use in the course. One important distinction is between subjective and objective data. Although it’s hard to give a completely watertight definition, subjective data will involve people’s thoughts, emotions and values, while objective data is based on observations of physical phenomena. The collection of both tyes of data requires tested ‘instruments’ - questionnaires, participant samples, technical devices, group discussions, administrative record keeping methods, outputs of models etc, and using this to create evidence for design, knowledge, building relationships, or promoting an idea or course of action.
Two kinds of data
As part of your DDS project, you are required to use both subjective and objective data. In addition, you are required to use some existing data and also to collect some new data. So your project should involve at least one of the data scenarios shown in these diagrams:
