The University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Canada redesigned the south entrance to the university. Not really breaking news. What is news is how they came about redesigning the entrance. The University asked the entire student body and staff to submit plans for a new south entrance. They didn’t ask professional architectural firms nor even to its own Architecture and Environmental departments. They wanted the people who actually use the entrance to submit their ideas. That is quite revolutionary and a brilliant example of usability studies.1
The University Newspaper wrote the following about the competition:
Yes, it’s ambitious, but isn’t that one of UW’s strengths? What other university would challenge its own students to design an ideal campus for themselves? These decisions are usually left up to hired planners, maybe with a couple of student surveys. Well, the current South Campus Gateway is a testament to how that can go wrong, and this challenge is a testament to how UW perhaps has more faith in its students than any other average university. Forgive me for sounding patriotic, but the fact that this competition really stresses cross-faculty collaboration makes me buy into the words on those laser-logo banners all around campus. You don’t have to be in planning, or civil, or architecture to have solid design ideas. As i3 committee member Dr. Jeff Casello put it, “everyone is a user of the space.” Ergo, a good design uses everyone’s input.2
People who actually use the entrance are best suited to design an entrance they would want to use. After over 200 submissions, the result was wider sidewalks, four wooden arches and a green space with native plants. The most visible element is a steel uWaterloo sign light by lights and build on a base that doubles as seating around a planter.
The process all sounds rather democratic but it really is using common sense. Design should be about the end-user and not about blue-sky thinking. Sure, it is good to break new ground, come up with good ideas, introduce something new. But like a path through the forest or across a field, an unused path will end up reverting to its natural state. A useful path will be heavily used. Why? Because it fits the needs of the users.
You can more about this project at the following: