Improving the campus experience at the University of Toronto through student-led design
By The New College Dining Hall Team
These past few months, our team has been investigating student and staff perspectives on how the New College Dining Hall might be redesigned to offer an innovative, multi-use community eating space. When this process drew to a close, we then presented our data and analysis to the University of Toronto’s Food Services stakeholders. We brought forth three themes that emerged throughout our research: comfort, community and communication.
By Charis Lam, Design Research Events Lead
As students, we often think of staff as curating the university experience for us—laying out the processes and procedures between us and our degrees. Yet, staff are not just responsible for providing the university experience; they also share it, albeit from a different perspective. Through the Future of SLP (Student Life Professionals) project, my team had the chance to take a peek into this perspective.
By The New College Dining Hall Team
This academic year, our team has been trying to answer this question: how might the New College Dining Hall be redesigned to offer an innovative and multi-use community eating and social space for students and staff? We conducted long-form ethnographic interviews with staff and students, as well as with New College Dining Hall users and students who eat primarily at other dining halls.
By: Charis Lam, Design Research Events Lead
At the Innovation Hub, we believe in designing for student success by listening to their voices. Yet, student success is not a pillar, standing alone. Students move through the university together with, and supported by, staff and faculty. Thus, helping student-facing staff succeed in their roles and feel fulfilled by their careers is important to both staff and students.
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?”
By Joey Youssef (Team Lead) & the Multi-Faith Centre Research Team
In this blog post series, we introduce you to each of the Innovation Hub’s research teams this year, as well as provide some project details. To learn more about the research questions, see here. Below, you will find a brief statement from the Multi-Faith Centre’s research team, regarding why they decided to join the I-Hub and this particular project.
By Nick Feinig, Senior Research Assistant (for the ACE-Transforming the Instructional Landscape project)
What do instructors and students have to say about instructional space at UofT? Quite a lot, it seems! Beginning in the fall of 2017, the Innovation Hub undertook an initial ethnographic study combining long form empathy interviews, participant observation in classrooms around campus, and data lifted from a social media campaign as part of ACE’s Transforming the Instructional Landscape (TIL) project. Instructor feedback was also solicited through a dedicated portion of the TIL website. Analysing this data, our research team determined that both students and instructors recognize the importance of thoughtfully managed space to the learning process, while the former in particular have powerful memories associated with certain campus spaces.