Data, Observations, and Theories
Over the past week, the team has been busy conducting more interviews and doing a lot of user research. We’ve also been keeping an eye on several hotspots for collaborative study on campus, and taking note of how people interact with the space.
After hours of research, observing, and talking with hard-working students, we identified four main areas of concern:
- Meeting like-minded peers — are students promoted to be social?
- Social comfortability — do you feel like you belong in the space?
- Finding mentors/helpful peers — can you grow from being in the space?
- Physical space — is the space comfortable, nearby, and conducive to productivity?
Many spaces on campus don’t really meet these criteria very well.
One common offensive across several study spaces was table size. On first thought, one might assume that students need big tables so they can fit everything they need in front of them. However, it turns out that students can’t gather around huge tables. Even the rooms with the word “collaborate” painted on the wall had tables so large you couldn’t work with anyone sitting next to you without them being a few feet away. The single-studiers were in heaven — the collaborative students couldn’t collaborate. Other features of the room, like whiteboards and outlets, were also very misplaced. The majority of the room was no where near the resources that they could use for group work.
Not a worry for our team though — we just used the empty wall for a sticky note board instead.
Another common problem often not taken into account about a space is designing features to be socially acceptable to use. For example, in one of the lounges we examined, there was a completely open wall with a standing desk. Standing desks, in theory, are wonderful. They are good for your posture and reduce strain on your back. However, being the only one standing in the room makes people feel uncomfortable, or like they don’t belong in the space. Because of this, the standing desk seems to always go to waste.
Over the next week, these observations, along with several other interesting insights, will become the basis for a new round of data collection. Some of the more interesting numbers we agreed to look into:
- Table width
- proximity to whiteboard
- location on campus
- theme or lack of theme to the space
- number of outlets
- intensity of lighting
- number of mentors available / hours of access
Hopefully gathering information about these elements will help build associations that we feel are strong enough to attempt implementation of our data. As a bit of a head-start to that segment of the project, I recently spoke with Jay Kunin, the head of the Moxie Center for Entrepreneurship at UCSD. He works closely with The Basement, which is UCSD’s new incubator space. The space is large and fairly well equipped for collaboration — the only problem is that they keep it closed off to the public except for short events every few weeks. If coming meetings go well, hopefully we can open up the space to the entire student body, and use it as a testing ground for innovations in student collaboration!
Until next time ~
