This is my fourth year at the IU School of Informatics. The first two were spent getting a master’s degree in human-computer interaction, before I extended my academic journey to pursue a Ph.D. in Informatics. As a result, there are only a handful of students who can claim a longer relationship with the SOI graduate program. With 3-4 years left on my student clock, I am invested in ramping up the student participation in administrative planning and general advocacy. One of the highest goals is creating more and better spaces for student collaboration.
This post is a long read, but it contains important information about the current and future state of collaborative student spaces at the IU School of Informatics.
Strengthening our Student Voice
The Graduate Informatics Student Association (GISA) hasn’t been involved with decisions at the administrative level, despite an initial charter to provide “a forum for students to voice their opinions, concerns, and ideas regarding curriculum, facilities, professional development, and other relevant issues.” The social needs of a few grad students were met, but activities usually came in the form of selecting which bar to swarm after classes on a Thursday night. Some scattered other positives aside, GISA failed to provide more than an informal means of uniting students.
Things have changed since the GISA constitution was first written. The masters degree program is larger, in terms of both students participating and research interests. A Ph.D. program was added, too. Now in its third year, it guarantees at least two more years of growth in the graduate student population. There is a new dean about to point the School in a direction that will influence past and future students as much as the current crop. There are more facilities to manage, and an entire cultural integration with the Computer Science department. The School of Informatics has grown up, but GISA has not.
That is changing. By the start of October, the graduate students will have a re-imagined GISA (possibly with a new name) that will deal formally with matters of community, technology, research, professional development, social bonding, and institutional voice. We are in a process of self-organizing into areas of interest, identifying student leaders and crafting short- and long-term agendas to advance advocacy in all areas. In current discussion,
- A mentoring lineage, from alumni down through new recruits
- Unconference on the future of the School of Informatics, jointly with CS
- Placing students in key discussions, including the Dean’s new strategic planning committee
- Granting larger access to technology for students
- Opening up some technology requests into an ad-hoc community response
- Creating incentives for students to design, implement and document mission-critical systems
- Outreach to other university student organizations for coordinated events
- Providing student input into hiring of new faculty
- Student-led design of rooms in the Informatics buildings
It is this last one—the design of rooms in the new “Beta House” Informatics building—that got the most attention Friday.
Disappearing Spaces
Last Wednesday, a small focus group of HCI graduate students met to discuss how the “Design House” might be used in the future. Professors Jean Camp, Kay Connelly, Kalpana Shankar, and Lesa Lorenzen-Huber got a grant to convert the Woodlawn house into a new living lab to research independent living for elderly residents. On the surface, that translates to an infusion of technology, cross-department collaboration, and restricted use of half of the building. The deeper consequence is a complete loss of the studio culture being developed by HCI faculty.
With the Informatics graduate lab becoming a conference room, there are few spaces left for collaborative design. A survey of available spaces shows this list of possibilities … and the reasons they aren’t options for current students:
Eigenmann has a half dozen meeting rooms on the two floors the School currently rents. However, the trek across campus has always been a disincentive to group work, and the rooms are often occupied with research groups, administrative meetings and classes. Besides, Eigenmann is on the way out. Any space that building adds now won’t be there after this semester.
Lindley Hall houses the Department of Computer Science, the other half of the Informatics family. The two programs, still just a couple years from merging, are culturally segregated, save for a few colloquia and the occasional class. Lindley has a nice little hidden room on the second floor with a whiteboard and some couches, but the same disincentive to using Eigenmann exists with Lindley. Proximity inspires collaboration, and Lindley isn’t close enough.
The current overcrowding severely limits use of the Informatics Building to the main lobby, a small graduate computer lab crowded with computers, and the kitchenette area. However, the list of potential space is longer, including a usability lab (currently a crowded AI room), the pervasive lab (requiring key access), and two basement meeting rooms (one designated for undergrad and another now a conference room). There are three classrooms, one filled with computers, that can work in a pinch, but instruction is their main purpose. The most interesting space is the research lab hidden away on the third floor. Most students don’t even know it exists. Perhaps new director Beth Plale can open up use a bit.
The Design House has seven rooms, a basement and a garage. After the grant, though, it is likely that students will be limited to one shared meeting room scheduled on a reservation system. Half of the bottom floor—including the kitchen—is being transformed into an apartment, the Living Lab. Access to the unfinished basement will be restricted to the garage. The upper rooms are going to be designated office spaces, the largest one supporting the grant and the two smaller ones possibly being assigned to Ph.D. students. That leaves the large downstairs room and another partially-sectioned room that, practically, can be used only if no one has reserved the space. As a studio space, Woodlawn won’t work.
Our best hope is found in the many nooks and crannies of the Beta House, next door to the main Informatics building. The place is huge. The current iteration of the floor plans calls for the entire basement to be divided into four spaces designated for AIs and a large room on the top floor to become the Ph.D. lab. In both cases, the debate is whether these spaces should include assigned desks or general open assignment to a group of students. I strongly favor the latter, as long as we also design spaces for quiet study alongside the open collaboration. There are six other major rooms that can be influenced by student input, even if their use will be for other groups.
What is missing—at least from the HCI perspective—is support for studio design culture. The Design House was it, and it is no more. Rather than building on that, we are finding even finding spaces for group work difficult.
In the short-term, the Beta House may help. The two first-floor classrooms are going to certainly be unused in the spring semester. That could open up an opportunity to run the HCI/d II course in those spaces and make use of the wall space. Once the summer hits, however, designers in the program will again be looking for places to share their work by posting it on walls. Maybe the solution is one that involves the entire university, as the Design Studies Initiative might suggest. It is ironic that their choice of home page visuals is a picture of last year’s studio class taking place in a building that no longer supports that work.
Informatics Prime
Informatics has never been contained in a single building on campus, and that won’t change with the Beta House renovation. The School began at the turn of the century as a virtual program, with faculty and space pulled from several other departments around campus. When Informatics evolved into it’s own entity—spurred by state funding—the growth exceeded the limited space it had, in a converted sorority house on 10th and Woodlawn.
By the time I arrived, the program’s massive hiring in 2004 forced the rental of office space in Eigenmann, a partially-converted dorm several blocks away. Even though the plan is to abandon Eigenmann in February when we move into the Beta House, we are stuck being a multi-facility school until some alumni can invent the next Google and get us a building to house everyone (including Computer Science, who live seven blocks south in Lindley Hall). In the meantime, the Beta House site looks like it will try to become Informatics Prime, housing the Deans, administrative staff, a few classrooms, at least half of the department research areas … and the students.
The basement of the Beta House will eventually be home for student AIs.
Few faculty seem to be clued in on what is happening, beyond the general timetable to vacate Eigenmann early next semester. Presumably, that migration will end in the new building. From a student perspective, the only known meeting about the innards of the new building came last spring, inconveniently scheduled during a once-a-week three-hour social informatics course attended by a dozen Ph.D. students (including me). Even so, there were some students who expressed interest in attending but didn’t show up, causing some embarrassment to the School—the developers donating resources to the effort were effectively stood up. The lack of adequate communication on both sides of the fence is a problematic early tradition of SOI that needs to be squashed.
Ph.D. students will share a large space on the top floor.
What can you do?
The funding for the building is substantial enough that some interesting things can potentially be done with the collaborative spaces. Just walking through the building Friday, we could imagine whiteboard walls and tables, interactive monitors in the dormant fireplaces, localized soundproofing for designated quiet areas, re-usable projection areas, and even trains delivering messages throughout the building. The point is: the time to impact the design of such spaces is running out, but the current atmosphere is one of inclusiveness.
Led by a few active graduate students as part of the movement to strengthen GISA, the technology department coordinating the renovation is expressing a willingness to have students dictate a large part of how the spaces are designed and used. Conversations will begin shortly with individual groups, like bioinformatics and complexity, to discuss use of their own areas our 10th Street buildings. Furniture needs to be ordered soon thereafter, and with each passing week our opportunity to impact the spaces we will be using diminishes. The time to act is right now.
- Understand the Space—There is a website published to document the progress of the building, including pictures and floor plans. While this information is a bit out of date, it is informative enough to give you an idea about our constraints and opportunities.
- Seek Inspiration—Take a look at other collaborative spaces in use elsewhere. Mine interesting ideas, and gather support for why our own spaces should look the way we want.
- Give Money—Probably, this option only applies to those in the extended SOI family (ahem, alumni) who actually have some gainful employment. But if you have some cash to spare, think about giving some to the School and earmark it for student use. If students had their own operating fund, perhaps some of the bureaucratic red tape could be avoided.
- Provide Input—This request is not just for current students but also speaks to alumni and even prospective students. This is your building, too. What happens here, how it looks, and the impression it makes on others will impact how strong the School becomes. A strong program equates to a more valuable reputation and resource for future professional opportunities. I would love to see a few alumni create a Google doc and work together on a unified statement to suggest design ideas for the spaces.
- Consider Future Projects—The number of future collaboration spaces is also an opportunity to build an infrastructure for future informatics projects. Got a capstone idea that involves the design of spaces? Get your ideas in order enough to make some suggestions to get the building rigged to help your research. Running a company with some software or hardware to develop? Get involved enough to see if you can use the space to test your product on students, staff and faculty. Think about tomorrow, but do it today.
