Connected Campus

How to use IoT to connect people in the working space of the future?

‘The Collective brain’ enables users to access the knowledge and power of the community. This interactive wall connects inhabitants and cultivates inclusive campus environment, applying interactive technologies. Recombining shared data as a trigger to stimulate interactions, allowing peers to express themselves and attain the first level of trust.

Society is changing, so is our work environment. Back in the 80s, futurist Alvin Toffler already predicted that personal computing would lead to the creation of ‘electronic cottage’, in which people can do work in the comfort of their own homes. However, working from home also brings along obvious drawbacks like isolation and eroding the boundaries between home and work life. Yet long-term employment trends and developments in mobile technology have tended to encourage more work from remote locations, more cooperative work that is not collocated, and more federated work that is contingent rather than permanent. In this project, our industry partner ING is creating a campus environment in the southeast of Amsterdam, linking together five office buildings on the Bijlmerdreef. The buildings will be renovated to be more easily accessible and better suited to flexible working. There will be a common space composed of a park and a pavilion in front of the global headquarters, forming a place to meet, feel energized and be inspired. It’s not just about new buildings, but a campus that’s open, inspiring and informal, encouraging flexible working and collaboration, and integrating with the community around it. Ideally it will be an urban hub where businesses, academics and innovators from all sectors can work together in an open and dynamic environment that stimulates creativity and boosts invention, every element of the innovation cycle will be brought together in one place, creating a true ecosystem.

Against this backdrop, the main design challenge lies in how we can apply interactive technologies to connect inhabitants and cultivate an inclusive campus environment. To do so, we will be exploring the strength of combining physical campus space with digital cyberspace, how the two can complement and augment each other, how we can use this synergy to enhance community awareness, how we can apply playful interactive technology to stimulate social interaction and bring the community together, and how we can foster the subsequent collaborations among campus inhabitants.

This project focuses on the Sustainable Development Goals:

 

See our Medium post for more details:

#Connection is more than just a buzzword