Future of student campus experience 2030

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Engagement length: 5 weeks
Sector: Education
Team: Principal + Designer
Object of design: Service Experience

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A renowned Australian university is building a new campus in the Parramatta/Westmead district as a part of the Greater Sydney Development. The university wanted to explore what future experiences the new campus might need to provide for in 2030 and beyond.

Applying a speculative design philosophy, we interrogated the university’s strategic vision with students, unpacking future implications to the campus and the university’s existing service model.

• when the modes of learning changes to multi-disciplinary, what will degrees and enrolment look like?

• What if new students want to specialise in deep expertise before they want to become multidisciplinary?

• How might we make every campus feel connected, virtually and physically?

Context/ challenges

• The future of work is shifting to multidisciplinary ways of working and delivery, employers are valuing mindsets and hands-on skills.

• Lifelong learning as an industry is evolving faster than ever; more short-term and commercial options are available to people to up-skill and be job-ready.

• While university education is credible, they are perceived as cumbersome, inflexible and expensive.

• There is a risk in building beautiful buildings that do not truly support the service and experience the University wants to deliver based on their strategic vision. 

Approach

We reviewed existing documentations on the University's strategic vision, external future drivers of change to understand and consider how they might impact future service solutions. We took on a rapid approach with a five week timeline:

• Co-creation process with 32 current students across all levels and disciplines of study.

• Conducted 4 student co-creation and validation workshops.

Value and outcome of this work:

• This work resulted in experience vignettes across all aspects of the campus and district, alongside major findings, implications and opportunities to further investigate.

• The vignettes of future student experiences helped to anchor a collective conversation between business units, academic streams, operations, campus experience, infrastructure development and participating partners.

• Understanding what the strategic vision will mean to infrastructure development.