Context & Background
Start/End Dates
December 2005 - January 2006 (a 6-8 week timeframe over the Christmas vacation).
Type of Project
A refurbishment to create a Techno-Café as a prototype for a future development in a new build.
Case Study tags: learning spaces, refurbishment, durham university, north-east england, higher education
What was the context of the development?
The University had IT facilities of two kinds: lecturing style where each student had their own machine and all of them faced a central facility (such as an OHP or projector) and labs with desks. Both tried to provide as many PCs in an individual space as could possibly be achieved.
A requirement for all Computer Science courses who have British Computer Society Accreditation is to do a significant group work project within the second year and Durham struggled to be able to get the students to be able to operate effectively within the IT labs because the labs weren't supportive of group activity. Half the group was spread across one half of the room and the others were facing them. Large PC monitors blocked sight lines and there was little room on the desk because of the high volumes of machines that were in the room.
The ethos of the Techno-Café was that an individual should be able to work in a team environment that is facilitated by computers but not driven by them.
Durham designed the space then employed an architect to put it together and to make it real. An IT lab and a seminar room were knocked into one and a bespoke seating arrangement was designed.
Beforehand there was a lot of paper documentation whereas now electronic communication is used. The lighting was designed to be cost effective in terms of energy. They also try to get individuals to take responsibility for turning the equipment off. This was a 'hopeless situation' within the old labs but students look after this equipment because they know for instance the plasma screens suffer from burns if they do leave them on.
At the very beginning students participate in a group exercise called a 'sustainability workshop'. The students have a scenario that they are a company and they want to enter a competition and they must look at how they operate as a company to win a sustainability award. In this way Durham tries to encourage sustainability not only by setting appropriate standards itself but also by getting students to consider the active choices that they make.
Many spaces in the past have been defined by activities that you couldn't do in the facility e.g. you couldn't use a mobile phone, you couldn't eat/drink and many of them encouraged or promoted silence. Few staff would be prepared to operate in that as a working environment and yet students were expected to work a minimum of two hours at a time in such laboratories.
What is it?
The Techno-Café has bar facilities and a vending machine within the room and there is no restriction on the use of any form of technology. The group work areas consist of booths or 'pods' each with a central table, laptops and tablet PCs and a large 48-inch plasma screen at one end of the booth which each of the students can tap into their PC so that they can demonstrate to the rest of the group what they are doing and share documents etc. The pods have backlighting and top lighting facilities for students to dim the lights. They are supportive of the use of individuals who may be doing a presentation and there is a degree of soundproofing between the booths so that one group of students isn't disturbing another.
There are ten booths: two larger booths for eight students and the remainder for six plus a tutor.
The basic technology is supplemented by free 'hiring' schemes and allowing the facility for students to bring their own. The whole place is wireless networked; there are plenty of permanent connections where the students can plug into the network and also plenty of spaces where they can plug in laptops directly to the power supply.
Durham has a collaborative project where students do a joint development - where half the team works within Newcastle University and the other half works within Durham University. Together they have to produce a single piece of software. Communication across the two sites is encouraged which means the students need mobile phones to send text messages and they need Skype facilities.
The development is generating interest from industry and part of the intention was to better prepare students for the kind of role that they would have to work in outside the University life. Industry doesn't develop software on a particular site with a particular group that happens to be sitting in a co-located area. Sometimes they may be working with people in Spain or people in Edinburgh and this kind of collaborative activity is probably one of the first times that it has been attempted within UK HE. Tying the two university timetables together to enable the students to be available at the same time was in itself a challenge.
What happens in the space?
Students actually emulate something that they will then see when they actually go and work in large development companies. IBM has visited to talk about some of the problems and realities of the situation that they are working in. The problems the students are facing are the problems that IBM and all the national and international companies have to operate with every day.
The Techno-Café demonstrates quite clearly the relationship between the work in changing the academic curriculum within the Computer Science programme and the way in which the capital build can be used to better support students to achieve both the current objectives of a traditional programme and the modern and upcoming ideas behind about changing the Computer Science curriculum to bring in these participatory activities.
Students start off with a basic set of requirements and they have to look at them creatively to come up with a system that is going to be attractive to the customer. Teams compete against one another and that encourages them to be enterprising and creative in terms of the interface and functionality they provide.
In 2007 the brief is that the customer would like jogging route planning and tracking software that allows them to record particular runs, to tell how many hills they went up and the speed that they went at and also to compare run after run after run. The students have also been given a PDA and GPS module to integrate.
The groups will do some domain analysis, see what's out there and then come up with a set of requirements and ultimately a design. They take it through every stage of the software lifecycle from the creation and the formation of the idea, the requirements of the customer and what they want to add into the system, the design and implementation and testing. Finally they have a 'trade fair' where all the student groups try to market their ideas by giving demonstrations etc.
Basically this is trying to emulate exactly what happens in industry. The software is developed through a standard lifecycle approach and it is for the students to do their own time planning and work out how to facilitate it. One of the more interesting challenges of computing today is how you make systems usable and fun to use. Something like the Ipod is a good indication as how computing can become so pervasive, so small and so portable and yet with so many different uses. Durham uses the group space to facilitate use of devices such as this and the sharing of documents as well as the actual encoding and testing of software.
Durham avoids describing the space as a teaching room, lab or suite because all of those start to communicate to the students that this is a traditional means of teaching. They want students to see it as is their space so only refer to it as the Techno-Café although it is technically a suite of group work spaces.
It has been used for a broad range of activities: teaching, examinations, induction and tutorials. A tutorial at Durham would typically be around six students for an hour doing activities. Much of the academic's time is just waiting for the students to complete their work so now they are able to run several groups of tutorials at one time. The end of the booth is open which means that a demonstrator facilitating a more traditional lab lesson or an academic leading a tutorial can see and communicate effectively with the students within the booth.
When students tried to collaborate in the old style labs if one of them moved up or down a row they disturbed all the others within that row because students tend to bring sports equipment etc with them. The whole room was full of students and hockey sticks and it just wasn't feasible for them to be able to move.
Finance
Funding Sources
Funded through the HEFCE Centres for Excellence Initiative which had up to £2 million per Centre for Excellence to be spent on capital build.
Cost of Project
The total capital funding was £2.3 million as HEFCE later gave another £300K per CETL.
This is a collaborative CETL with four sites involved: Newcastle, Durham, Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan Universities who each have a Techno-Café. They are all in different forms exploring different ways of supporting their students. Durham leads the CETL and the greatest proportion of the money has gone to Durham. The cost of the Techno-Café including equipment was just under £300K.
Technology
Every booth has a laptop and a tablet PC. The laptop is designed so that any student can produce documentation or work on programming code etc but the tablet PC has specific software because a lot of the work within computing is very visual and therefore this allows much more freedom of drawing. A lot of the work is creativity and so it may enable them to do mind maps or rich diagrams of conceptual ideas or early design work.
There is a 42 inch plasma display at the end of the booth onto which any of those machines, or any other facilities which are plugged into that booth, can display. The principle is that if they want to demonstrate something to the tutor or discuss something within the group they can display it on the large screen and everyone can have access to this.
There is also overlay onto that which is pen and finger sensitive so that they can touch the screen and draw on it in a similar way in which they can draw on the tablet PC. Only those who happen to be at the very end of the booth can draw on it and use it as a finger display facility so the tablet PC emulates that drawing facility and again there is a dual display so that anyone within the booth can draw and have the screen display the notes that they are making or whatever.
The whole facility is wireless enabled so anyone can bring equipment in. There are PDAs that are connected and ample extra networking facilities and power facilities. There is a loaning scheme for students to borrow small electrical equipment, an extra PDA, an extra laptop, an extra tablet or Skype phones or whatever and they can plug these directly into the facilities at the end of the booth.
There are some video conferencing facilities but mainly students use the Skype facility.
Adding Value
First and foremost in terms of the communication between Durham and Newcastle students but also in terms of being able to communicate in a group. The group have access to shared space where they can put elements of their work. In terms of communication within the group - using a laptop as opposed to a desk unit means it is highly movable, it is easy to close away and it's not obstructing the view of somebody in face to face communication. The principle of the equipment is that is not obtrusive in terms of face to face communication but it is supportive of what they want to do.
Another issue Durham spent a lot time thinking about and have managed to deal with is air conditioning. Laboratories can get very hot and, particularly when it's been raining, it really isn't a nice environment for 40 or 60 students. Making sure they had adequate and high powered air conditioning, adequate screening and adequate lighting was something they spent time working through with the architect to make sure they had something that was facilitative of the group environment and that it was adequate for the number of people and the number of machines that were in a particular room.
Success Factors
What Makes The Space Successful?
It was designed with the 'youth of today' in mind. The use of chrome rather than white plastic, whilst adding to the cost, can actually make a huge difference to the look and feel. Using soft materials with soft lighting does make a difference to the way it is perceived. Bright colours in the Techno-Café are done in the traditional Durham palatinate (purple) again giving it a sense of Durham identity but also giving it in a colour that isn't the traditional magnolia. There is 'wavy' lighting on the ceiling that breaks up the hardness of a ceiling and looks a bit towards science fiction.
Giving students a nice facility that enables them to do the kind of work they wanted to do in a very relaxed and supportive environment makes them react very differently to the obvious pressures in an academic programme that is trying to get them to stretch themselves.
Previously they used to get people to log in and log out as a means of recording their stint to make sure they stayed there for two hours. Many are now staying for three or four hours at a time. If you give students the respect and the facilities they appreciate that: they work better and they work longer and they work more effectively.
There is an issue of identity that students feel they need their own space and they like working in there. There seems to be a consensus of ownership of each of the booths: an unwritten rule about whose booth is whose. That degree of ownership is helping the process of bonding which is all very critical if you are going to get a group of six to eight students working together successfully and over a long period of time.
Interestingly students are now concerned about privacy with regard to the competitive element of the project to a much greater extent than when they were in a traditional PC lab. They have even asked for curtains at the end of the booth (much to the hilarity of the designer). They wanted to be closed in and encapsulated in their little booth which is an interesting concept in terms of how they perceive ownership in terms of the location and how they really want to preserve that degree of space as being their own.
What Is Innovative About The Design And The Use Of The Space?
The minimisation of electronic equipment. There isn't one machine each. In situations where they need more they can go to a central facility and collect one. This promotes collaboration.
The lighting is mainly back-lighting rather than overhead. It minimises glare on screens is a lit through plastic material that gives a very warm atmosphere.
The individual tablet PCs are used in a highly interactive way and rather than the interactive white board just being used by a member of staff the interactive white board is for the students. The whiteboard manufacturers had never actually connected a tablet PC directly to a Smart Board before. It is a student-centred approach and it's a natural part of 'no no I want to try I'll show you what I mean' you just hand the tablet to the next student and it's not intrusive.
Top Tips
The current style of lab is coming to a point where very soon it will be obsolete. Most students come with better facilities at home than we are able to provide en masse in a University setting.
The number of students with portable facilities will increase but there will always be something that prevents students, unless its absolutely necessary, wanting to carry around what is in effect heavy and bulky equipment. So there will be a greater prominence of PDAs and mobile phones. Ultimately the mobile phone will be the central resource for communication and storing work.
Universities will be required to provide two or three main facilities. One is communications whereby devices can talk easily to the University networking facilities. Another is some facility where you can have access to a keyboard or a device which could record speech as you couldn't enter an essay using a mobile phone. Students will also need large screens to review and proof read material in an effective way. Finally there will be a need for very specialist printing equipment such as geologists wanting to print out large scale maps.
Needs will become highly focused into facilities that allow plugging into the network, plugging into electricity, recharging of small mobile devices and large scale printing and reviewing facilities. Rather than providing cramped conditions institutions should think about spending less on the actual technology and more on the environment and really supporting the use of an individuals' equipment
Lessons Learned
The first year the Techno-Café was open the students had huge adjustment problems. They liked the facility, they would come in and say 'this is great' they would sit there for ten or fifteen minutes and go back to the old style lab and start typing on their computers. The issue was that they had become so ingrained into the way in which they operated and so used to having an individual desktop machine and they did what you wanted on their machine and then communicated if when they needed to. It was actually very hard to encourage them to use any other approach to working.
The second group, who started straightaway in the Techno-Café did need to be shown how to use the equipment particularly the interactive whiteboard but they were much more clued in to how they were going to potentially use it and much more accepting of the way and the style of which they were working. They were prepared to communicate and to communicate face to face rather than 'well I'll do this and then email you when I've done it'.
Much of the concern about the old style labs is that it wasn't actually a collaborative environment. All they had was somebody passing 'well I've done this' and someone saying 'well I've added this to it'. It was almost as if things were being done in stages by one individual taking responsibility at any given time it wasn't a truly collaborative activity. Those students who started in the Techno-Café straightaway adapted to it quicker and therefore sped along in terms of the way in which they interacted and also the length of time in which they were conducting these activities.
Interestingly it has been used with a number of school children (age 13-14) and they just accepted the environment as it is and they had no trouble in using the interactive whiteboard or equipment. They had some of the facilities in school but they didn't have that kind of design or group work space so they recognised that as new but they were much more aware of the use and format of the facilities and how the could be used and what they were for.
The issue of cabling: there were some interesting discussions whether to only allow students to use the wireless facility. The bandwidth at the moment for wireless isn't really that good so it has been acknowledged that you have to have access to permanent networking facilities and to look at ways to minimise the amount of cabling. If you've got too much cabling on the table then it limits the writing space and ability for people to utilise books.
They recommend going with LCD and not plasma because of the problems with issues of burning.
They were concerned at the risk of electrocution if students spill drinks and have sourced an inventive gadget that protects the transformers under a rubber seal.
They recommend allowing food and drink in flexible environments. The way in which students perceive they are being treated affects how happy they feel and the way in which they treat the environment and spillages don't occur. In the 18 months of running the Techno-Café no equipment has been damaged.
Post Occupancy
Changes Made As A Result Of Feedback
They haven't made any changes yet as this is a prototype set up to get feedback for the second phase in a new build.
At the moment there is a row of networking cables to connect power and networking along the edge of the table. In future they will be run down the centre. Cables will also be fitted with retractable pulleys so that they go back into the designed space.
For the next facility they have ordered LCD screens which gives almost as a good a display quality but doesn't suffer from the burn that you get on a plasma screen.
Contact Details
E L Burd, liz.burd@durham.ac.uk
For photos of Techno-Café go to www.durham.ac.uk/alic/technocafe/
Case study written: 2006/7.
