Campuses traditionally had physical edges.  Boundaries marked by walls, gates and signs defined ownership and identity.  While these markers remain, many institutions have made their boundaries less distinct. Students and faculty move seamlessly back and forth from physical to digital, from the campus to its digital doppelgänger.

Projects across the country point to hybridization – a morphing of building types and fluid patterns of use.  These are not just nearby storefront classrooms or branch campuses; nor are they whole new campus projects 10 time zones away. These are different.  Retail enterprises dealt with this phenomenon as their brick and mortar stores encountered Amazon and its ilk.  The buzzword of choice was phygital.

Innovative programmer/planner of campus environments, Elliot Felix has used the term phygital to describe his firm’s academic library projects.  The Hunt Library at North Carolina State is an early example.  The library and its resources are first digital and then physical, reversing the conventional understanding.  Libraries organized around this inversion, are better suited to meet the needs of faculty members and students living in the flow of digital/physical life and learning.

Physical Hybrids

Previous campusmatters posts have dealt with the physical transformation of libraries and classrooms, and their enduring value.  Other hybrid forms are now emerging. They have a wide range of footprint sizes and degrees of permanence, yet they share two essential characteristics:  origin in a phygital world and belief in the importance of face-to-face interactions – individuals sharing place and time.

At the heavy-footprint end of the spectrum are buildings that combine academic and business models on campus, not off campus. Lassonde Studios at the University of Utah is one example of the morphing of traditional building types.  The building combines student residences with learning, meeting, dining and maker spaces. The combination of living, dining and learning has been a well-understood pattern since Oxford and Cambridge.  Added to this traditional mix are makerspaces and the intentional selection of an evolving community of entrepreneurial students and faculty members.  This building manifests a new way of thinking about curriculum and campus building space.  Students explore and create businesses without disciplinary silos. The focus here is nurturing entrepreneurship rather than traditional areas of study; connecting to the digital/physical flow of business rather than college cloister.

Northeastern University’s network of graduate program sites has a much more modest footprint.  The term satellite, not campus, is used.  Starting in Charlotte in 2011, Toronto and three locations on the west coast have been added.  All are explicitly linked to business settings rather than stand-alone outposts. The San Francisco satellite is “embedded directly” in a WeWork site.  Viewed from these distributed vantage points Northeastern has no edges, nor is there a sharp line between academic programs and business acumen.

At the other end of the spectrum would be the developing concept of the Georgia Tech Atrium, intended as a global distributed presence with the lightest possible physical footprint. Planning is underway for a network of locations serving past, present and future students with advising, mentoring, connecting and creating resources.  The project seeks to provide the face-to-face qualities of campus interaction without a campus.  We can think of it as digital plus, rather than campus minus.

Between these bookends a growing number of educational institutions and related business are being hybridized or newly created. Purdue’s creation of Purdue Global through the acquisition of Kaplan storefronts and online expertise is recent example of hybridization.  Minerva has 7 global residential locations.  Its non-disciplinary curriculum led by a worldwide faculty via video, doesn’t need much of a physical footprint other than the where students live.  For these students, the city is the campus.  The strategic partnership of 2U and We-Work links students to existing online programs with the services of a co-working space.  All of these are examples of the dissolving edge of campus, physical signs of the digital transformation of higher education.

Campus Planning Challenge

Campus planners have long protected and enhanced the physical campus.  Among campus qualities have been defining when you were on campus and when you aren’t. The changes, now well underway, require a new vocabulary for campus planning and a new set of skills.  Slowly, professional conferences are beginning the exploration of a new type of terrain.

As the edge of campus dissolves into placeless digital formats, the ambiguity of campus boundaries leads to both physical and linguistic anachronisms.  A nomenclature appropriate for the hybrid campus will take some time.  Many still speak of dialing the phone or ccing someone on an email.  In the emerging hybridized institution, walls and gates are insufficient to describe the design challenge. These physical markers are being mirrored by a digital equivalent:  network access.

Against a backdrop of declining markets for traditional colleges, public and private institutions are seeking to exploit their own ecological niches.  As a result, there will be more physical hybrids: conceived first as digital and retaining only the optimal physical presence. As the digital transformation of higher education continues campus planning will have to expand its view beyond walls and gates.  This will require a change in perspective and vocabulary that encompasses the physical campus as well as its digital doppelgänger.

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