Campus Visioning Project
The goal of the project is to articulate a shared vision for the future of the campus. To find out what people value about the campus, Iain Robertson, chairman of Department of Landscape Architecture and a team from his department launched an extensive information gathering process that included distributing hundreds of surveys to faculty, staff and students and posting an interactive survey on the web.
They also held a series of two-hour focus groups across campus that allowed for more intensive discussion about campus boundaries, favorite places, safe and unsafe areas, and the ways people use and enjoy the campus.
"The response was overwhelming," Robertson says. More than 1,800 people answered the surveys and another 120 people participated in the focus groups.
The survey focused on open space and the outdoor environment. It asked individuals to identify their favorite areas, places they would take visitors, parts of campus that give them inspiration, the impact the campus has on the quality of life and parts of campus that seem suitable for more intensive development.
Although the survey involves a self-selected group and is therefore not statistically valid, it raises important issues that future development will need to consider, Robertson says. While the wealth of information is still being analyzed, some preliminary conclusions are possible.
"The large-scale 'skeleton' of the central campus is great," Robertson says, "but there is a danger of relying on it too heavily. It needs to be expanded conceptually to the rest of the campus."
"The project produced a wealth of information that will be very valuable to the master planning effort," says Cindy Brown, Campus Master Plan Coordinator. "It confirms many of our assumptions on what people value about this campus and provides good information on which to build the goals and visions of the plan."