SENSESCAPE: #summerstudio13

Image © Gensler

Future Campus—#summerstudio13 is a candidate to win a Place by Design award in at this year’s SxSW Eco conference, and we’re looking for your vote! Please click here to vote, and note that you can vote multiple times for a single entry.

Campuses worldwide are beginning to change in many ways. In a time when more than half of the world’s population resides in cities, students are being confronted with new ways of learning and interacting. As students become increasingly dependent on technology, the pace and competitiveness of their work is heightened, leaving many feeling isolated and stressed.

One of our four teams of students in Gensler New York’s #summerstudio13, a summer intern pro

gram in association with Design for America Barnard / Columbia, identified these stresses among their own group and on campuses around the world. In response, they have designed a series of small-scale physical interventions for the Barnard and Columbia campuses in Morningside Heights. Titled Sensescape, the proposal seeks to offer some comfort for fellow students.

Casting aside digital interface in the hopes of relieving the stresses of college life in the 21st Century, Sensescape is a structural installation that focuses on the basic human senses of touch, sight, sound, and smell. The systems slip into already-existing circulation routes, each site-specific structure isolating a singular sense. The installations are scalable to the particular location, providing a platform to interact with others, and allowing student users a moment of reprieve. In one instance, a malleable wall is imprinted with traces of the people that have come before you. The wall collects or releases heat, isolating the sense of touch, and acts as a record keeper for user’s stresses. The experiential nature of these installations provides elements of discovery, surprise, playfulness, and delight to its users.

The collaboration between Barnard + Columbia Design for America students and Gensler interns from schools around the country has lead to a design that has potential for a widespread positive impact. By focusing on stress as a unifying experience across all college campuses, this team was able to synthesize their diverse perspectives that come from attending schools both urban and rural, big and small. Although Sensescape was designed for a dense urban campus, the largely self-sufficient and adaptable structures can easily be integrated into more suburban or rural environments.

The final project will be presented in August, to an invited panel of representatives from Barnard and Columbia. The Sensescape project team has also created a “guidebook” in order to help campuses across the country rollout and implement this program, identify sites and artists, and create their own Sensescape.

Stay tuned for further developments and continue to follow our progress on Twitter in August! #summerstudio13

Team 3: Mark Hartenstein, Kendall Herman, Louis Jin, Wei Kou, Pradthana Likitplug, Lainie Turkish, Lauren Wolff

Hannah Dewhirst is a marketing specialist in Gensler's New York office. Contact her at hannah_dewhirst@gensler.com.

Kendall Herman is the co-President of the Columbia/Barnard Chapter of Design For America.