Design a functional university campus

Overview

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Goals

The goal of the exercise is to design a university campus with specific characteristics. The user acts as a member of a team responsible of building the campus. The customer drives the project by giving some global specifications about the campus. The team will also consult with the customer on a regular basis, receive feedback about their progress and updated building orders. The team consists of a product owner (the interface with the customer), the scrum master (managing the team) and several team members responsible of creating the product.

Learning Objectives

Through this exercise students build: - Capacity to work with customers, to listen to their needs, and to translate customer input into project requirements - Problem-solving skills - Designing skills - Capacity to work within limited resources - Collaboration skills and the ability to assume different roles in a team - Presentation and communication skills

Context

Agile design is a project management and implementation process that aims to more closely address the needs of customers. The process originates from software engineering, however it offers benefits in broad engineering principles and has applications when: - The user requirements are not fully understood from the beginning - The user requirements are fluid and may change during the implementation process Agile design interleaves the design and implementation cycles of a projects. This is contrary to traditional "waterfall" project implementation practices, where the design, implementation, and evaluation phases of a project are distinct. Agile design is not applicable in all cases. It offers the most benefits in projects where the user requirements do not need to be explicitly defined in a blueprint before the production process starts. In manufacturing, this may not be the case. But in other situations, for example designing digital services for customers, it may have high applicability. This exercise demonstrates how agile design can be applied beyond software engineering, and specifically in urban design. Students are challenged to design a highly livable university campus taking into account the desires of the end customer.