David Gillette, Michael Haungs, Thomas Fowler
California Polytechnic State University
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From January-June 2016, students in the Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies program at Cal Poly will work with students from the Architecture college to re-design a set of pedestrian freeway underpasses for the city of Sacramento. These underpasses are currently under-used; many locals consider them to be unsafe and/or unwelcoming spaces. The LAES and Architecture students will work in a series of interdisciplinary teams to develop new designs for these civic spaces to make them more appealing, safe, and welcoming using different media display technologies, and innovative uses of light and shadow. The student teams will also devise methods to connect the spaces with each other, even though they are on opposite sides of the city. This design and development process begins with a multi-disciplinary workshop that concludes with presentations to faculty and the coordinating architecture firm in Sacramento. A winning design will be selected and that design team will be funded to refine their design for final presentation to the city of Sacramento in June 2016.
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The primary goal of this project is to replicate (in an academic setting) the social, political and technical aspects of interdisciplinary civic design, resulting in a real-world outcome. We are currently developing new methods for assessing the hybrid student learning for this project. Since this is a work-in-progress, we don’t now know how it will conclude, but we will discuss the results of our experiment with collaboration and assessment, no matter what happens by June.