Kathleen Brandt
Assistant Professor
Design Department
Syracuse University
Brian Lonsway
Associate Professor
School of Architecture
Syracuse University
We will be introducing our work developing Thinklab as a collaborative environment, system, and set of tools, and in lieu of our preparation of a document for now, we can refer everyone to the project’s website: thinklab.syr.edu. Also (shameless promotion here), we justyesterday won an international design award for Thinklab in the category of Educational Initiatives. Info on this award is linked to from the site link above, and there’s more info on the project there. Of most direct relevance here is something we wrote in our application to the awards program:
The problem:The two applicants for this award were involved in a cross-disciplinary university-community teaching collaboration on the subject of food system sustainability. During this effort, a number of problems were discovered that led to the foundation of Thinklab.
-Between academic disciplines, methodologies, languages, and perspectives vary tremendously, impacting the ease of conversation around common themes.-Community groups represent strong stakeholder positions that often are quite divergent, even conflictual, even as they focus on shared problems.-For projects that have long-term implications, and have been worked on by various stakeholders for a long time, very little collective memory exists such that would reduce project duplication and increase the capacity for projects to build accretively and intelligently over time.-Technology-based collaboration, visualization, and archiving systems are plentiful and offer great benefits to brainstorming, collaboration, and learning, but are difficult to access by many, financially and interactively.
The context:The context for this project is higher-education, where learning opportunities for community-engaged collaboration are encouraged, but are siloed by disciplinary academic departments.The Challenge:The challenge was to support transdisciplinary approaches to creative exchange among students, faculty, and community stakeholders outside of the university, in a technology-rich setting, to foster co-learning around complex issues. As a part of this process, the brief was defined to make technology-based learning and collaboration systems available to multiple stakeholders, and to provide a structured yet experimental laboratory for engaged learning through creative applications of technology, technique, and tools.