Category: Blog (page 35)

By Rachel Davis, Design Research Team Lead (Trademark Licensing)

Do UofT students feel a sense of pride, and if so, how do they express it? That is the focus of investigation for the 2018-2019 Trademark Licensing project team.  UofT’s Trademark Licensing office is partnering with the Innovation Hub to explore how student narratives regarding institutional pride can lead to positive engagement with University of Toronto brands.

Before we began collecting data, we did some exercises to get our initial thoughts about the problem and solution on paper. Making our assumptions explicit was a crucial step for us, since we fall into the same demographics as the students we planned to research. We wanted to ensure we to mitigate the risk of subconsciously relying on our own experiences to answer this question.

By Kate Bowers, Senior Project Assistant & Nick Feinig, Senior Research Assistant

Many factors contribute to an ideal learning environment on campus, and the Transforming the Instructional Landscape (TIL) team lead by Academic and Campus Events (ACE) is working hard to understand deeply how student and faculty needs can be incorporated into classroom design.  In fact, over the past two weeks, the TIL team has run a series of events to ask students and faculty, “what makes a classroom great?”  From movable furniture to screen-sharing capabilities for students, newly created classrooms on campus enable a shift in both how students think about learning and how faculty think about teaching.

By The New College Dining Hall Research Team

In the summer of 2018, The University of Toronto Food Services reached out to the Innovation Hub to help gather insights about students’ eating experiences on campus. They were in the initial stages of redesigning the Audrey Taylor Dining Hall at New College and were looking to get a better sense of how the physical space, social environment, meal plans, and food options could better meet students’ needs.

By Shirin Gerami, Design Research Team Lead (Family Care Office)

The Family Care research project is born out of a partnership between the Innovation Hub and the Family Care Office at the University of Toronto. The overall aim of this project is to answer the question “what are the experiences of students with family responsibilities, and particularly student parents, at the University of Toronto?”