Case Club Campus

This was my final design project in my education. Together with my student colleague we contacted Campus Ljungby which is a college in Ljungby. We came to an agreement of what my colleague and I would research which was how to make the students socialise with each other and be more comfortable on campus. We had a great relationship with our client and we came and visited their campus during the project. Since we were only two students in this project we were very invested in all parts of the project.

For this project we focused on gathering data by using a lot of different methods. We conducted interviews, workshops, focus groups as well as a literature review. The focus of the research was to understand how the students socialise and also to understand what they need in order to build relationships. We conducted a workshop with a speculative critical design scenario where students discussed how they would react if they didn't have any opportunity to get to know any of their student colleagues or even meet them. The result gave us concrete data about what students need in order to even start talking with each other and what could happen if they feel like they have any friends in school. Turns out the importance of friendship in learning environments was much more important than what we originally thought.

We started to design a platform for meeting students as a new student. The platform was designed to push new students to start talking to each other by showing up to events and happenings. By creating a space where the students could create and see events it would help the students to get to know students in their class but also other students. Since the school doesn't have the resources to organize events themselves it's easier to let the students create their own. This solution was inspired by how other universities have student associations that organize events but since Ljungby Campus doesn't have one anymore they can instead make this platform.

One thing that was purposely left out in the design was being able to send private messages between students. This was left out to further push the students to attend events and befriend each other outside of the platform. It's easier for people to start talking online if they have met in person before.

We did an evaluation and used tasks and finished with a couple of questions. The evaluation showed that the design served its purpose by creating a place for new students to get in contact with other students. Something that was pointed out as missing was a list of active members. By adding this list the students could more easily associate faces with names which would hopefully lead to them talking to each other. We iterated the design and corrected other smaller things that had importance such as making the names more visible and a simple tutorial of the different functions on the platform. This design wasn't about creating a new way of living or interacting but creating a way for people to get to know each other. There's no actual way to design friendships but you can design a tool for them and that's what this design solution was made to do.