Ride-Sharing Services and Boundary-Blurring Buildings: A Vision of the Future Campus

Todd J. Van Emst, Opelika-Auburn News via AP

Once upon a time, campus buildings had clearly delineated missions that rarely overlapped. As Lauren Scranton, a campus-planning expert, puts it: “This is where you sleep. This is where you go to class.”

That appears to be changing, and technology is often the catalyst. Look no further than what’s happening to college libraries: These days they’re designed to be social hubs as much as book repositories.

That got Ms. Scranton, knowledge and innovation leader in the Spokane, Wash., offices of NAC Architecture, wondering: “Is the residential-education experience going to go away? If not, what will it look like in 10, 15, 20 years?”

She brought that question to The Chronicle when we asked readers to tell us what puzzles them about innovations in higher education. Her question got the most votes, so we set out to investigate.

What struck us most about Ms. Scranton’s question was her interest in how the so-called internet of things could reshape residential life. Often abbreviated as IoT, the internet of things is the term applied to our increasingly networked way of living, in which personal devices, buildings, and vehicles can connect with each other automatically via sensors and other technology. Experts estimate anywhere from 20-billion to 50-billion devices will be part of the network by 2020.

As the IoT develops, Ms. Scranton said, she could imagine a great deal more blending of the type that libraries have undergone. Will that change the way institutions design their residence halls? Will colleges have better ways of monitoring student health — or other student activities, for that matter? Right now, said Ms. Scranton, the internet of things is “not even on the radar.”

A few campus-technology experts have tried to put it there. Educause Review, for example, featured the topic in its summer issue. But most of what’s been written about the IoT and colleges is focused on technical matters or privacy concerns, not so much on the impact it could have on culture and residential life.

For that take, we turned to a futurist, Anthony M. Townsend, an urban planner and author of the book Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia (W.W. Norton & Co., 2013).

Mr. Townsend foresees the IoT bringing a big benefit to campus life — along with some potential downsides. “Computing is a very cheap material now,” he says. The IoT “allows you to put intelligence into things that used to be dumb” and use them in more complicated ways, he says.

The Campus as Test Bed

It could also change how colleges think about the way students interact with their campuses and other physical assets. One of the most obvious uses, he predicts, will be in machines and facilities that aim to exploit the sharing economy and automation. He predicts colleges will become bigger test beds for transportation-sharing services of various forms — a smart system for skateboard sharing, anyone? And a “really extreme version for dormitory life,” as he calls it, could incorporate some version of the “hot racking” that the Navy uses, in which three submariners share the same bed over in shifts over 24 hours.

“Young people in college are open to trying new products, new services, new ways of living,” he says. “Campuses are also usually pretty self-contained, and they’re separated from the larger world in many ways, so it gives you the potential to do things that you couldn’t do elsewhere.”

That makes campuses strong candidates to be early adopters, he argues. “Automated vehicles are probably going to get deployed on college campuses a lot faster than they will in Manhattan, let’s say.”

As he notes, there’s a hidden underbelly to all that. “Your phone has multiple cameras, it has motion sensors, it has GPS, it can tell an awful lot about who you are and what you’re doing without you telling it anything” he says. “When people sell you a smart product, an internet-connected product, they’re putting as much sensing capability into it as they can to gather as much information about who’s using it and what the context is.”

For the students of the future, that means the makers of these devices and facilities can deliver a better experience and better services. But as Mr. Townsend notes, there’s no real regulation — or even good ethical standards — right now about where the limits should be drawn. “In most cases, you don’t own the data that your smart refrigerator, or even your smart phone, is collecting about you,” he says. College campuses “could be the places where people find where that oversteps the boundaries, and they’ll be constantly inventing new norms.”

Enter the Private Sector

Mr. Townsend says he doesn’t expects the IoT to make physical campuses obsolete. Instead he echoes Ms. Scranton’s point about blurred lines.

“All the things that happen at university are going to become a lot bigger and a lot less distinct,” he says. “These kinds of technologies make it much easier to create buildings that mix functions.”

“The idea that a lab building or a classroom building is a distinct thing from a residential building” will recede, he says. “If you look at the most interesting university buildings the last couple decades, they start to push that as hard as they can.”

And just as commercial technology products and services have become embedded into the educational core of college life, Mr. Townsend says the internet of things could also change the way colleges handle students’ lives outside the classroom.

Because IoT businesses often turn internet-connected versions of traditional products into subscription services, Mr. Townsend predicts that “the private sector will have a much more present role inside the physical spaces of residential life.”

For example, colleges could have thousands of vehicles on a campus that are technically the property of a private company. Dormitories could feature products that are still owned by a company that monitors them on a second-to-second basis. “A lot of those products will be doing things like collecting data that’s really sensitive to the people in the building — about their health, their activities, the food they’re eating, the laws they may be breaking,” he says.

Whether or not universities want this kind of public-private partnership, “they may get it without even asking for it,” according to Mr. Townsend, because of the products people are going to be carrying into those buildings.”

There are still plenty of skeptics about the potential impact of the IoT — including at least one Twitter account devoted to mocking the trend. But Mr. Townsend sees it as a phenomenon that colleges ignore at their peril.

“Public universities are going to have to be much more aggressive with this stuff for the same reasons they were aggressive with MOOCs and distance learning — because there’s so much financial pressure on them,” he says. “Anywhere there’s technology that promises a productivity edge for them, or higher asset utilization on the expensive real estate and buildings they have, they’re going to have to find a reason not to go for it.”

Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her new book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.

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