Vision for Future Campus Experience

ArtCenter College of Design: Vision for Future Campus Experience

PROJECT

CLIENT

ArtCenter College of Design

SERVICE

Strategy

INDUSTRY

Education

ArtCenter partnered with Continuum to envision the future of ArtCenter's campus experience.

Challenge

ArtCenter College of Design, in Pasadena, California, was expanding. Literally. The school’s culture, resources, and people stretched across two campuses. All of which forced the school community to ask: How could ArtCenter best serve its students, faculty, and administrative staff across a dual campus?

For help answering this question, the school turned to Continuum in September 2013. Our objective: To understand how the entire ArtCenter population navigates the physical and digital environments on campus, in terms of work, information flow, and community building. We were tasked with developing a vision to guide the future of ArtCenter’s campus experience across the Hillside, South Campus, and beyond.

Awards

IDEA Finalist

Research & Insights

Remove the Disruptions

We learned that the concept of a centralized educational environment is outdated. Enabling a creative work-flow across on/off campus locations was critical for students and faculty to achieve their educational goals and manage the conservatory demands of ArtCenter’s curriculum. The main barrier to achieving this goal was the experience students, faculty, staff have with ArtCenter’s infrastructure on a daily basis. ArtCenter’s administrative platforms, its communication tools & processes, and spaces meant to enable individual and collaborative work, currently disrupted the workflow on- and off campus.

Two Homes

ArtCenter students told us that they think of two distinct environments to get their work done: home and campus. When it comes to “making,” these environments are disconnected from each other. For example, the work saved on ArtCenter’s server could not easily be accessed by students from home which resulted in the interruption of their creative workflow.

War Rooms for Nomads

Students and faculty reported that they felt like nomads on campus, wandering with their belongings and seeking spaces to collaborate outside of scheduled classes. There were few spaces outside of sponsored project rooms and individual studios that gave students permission to create dedicated “war rooms” and allow the creative process to unfold over time, without imposed limits. Assembling and disassembling work on a daily basis disrupted the student’s thought-process and impedes collaborative work.

Bring on the Collaboration

We learned that the majority of Art Center students considered interdisciplinary collaboration skills and experiences a prerequisite for a successful career start and actively looked for opportunities to connect with their peers, but often lacked the resources and therefore skills to collaborate effectively. Enabling a seamless creative workflow requires a technology infrastructure that bridges devices, platforms across multiple work environments. Students and faculty clearly needed project spaces that allow teams to build their creative thinking over time, on and off campus.

Solution

Following an extensive socialization program of our strategic vision across the ArtCenter community, our insights and recommendations are guiding ArtCenter’s campus expansion on multiple fronts. Some of which include the following:

First, ArtCenter’s repurposed U.S. Postal Service mail distribution center now offers open studios and shared exhibition spaces. Emphasis throughout the renovation was put on increasing transparency and establishing a more fluid dialogue between departments, the classrooms, and open social spaces. Second, the beloved Hillside library expanded its reach to the South Campus to provide space that acts as multi-modal connective tissue for students and faculty across departments. There is currently a satellite student store on the South Campus as an interim solution, as well as vending machines stocked with supplies. Finally, ArtCenter recently launched a new website in February 2016 and has a planned re-launch of Inside ArtCenter, the College’s intranet/resource site.

Results

From the changes, ArtCenter has seen a real increase in feelings of community on campus. For instance, the school’s Williamson Gallery hosted OUTSIDEIN, its first truly dual-campus exhibition, demonstrating a unity across the two campuses. Outdoor murals and a social media competition augmented the indoor display and help create a sense of cultural unity. In another unifying move, ArtCenter graduation moved from a tent on the Hillside campus, which accommodated roughly 1,500 guests, to The Pasadena Civic auditorium, a more central location between campuses, which increased capacity to 2,000.

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