Bringing Together Engineering, Architecture, and Art Students to Creatively Solve Community Design Issues

摘要

The University of Hartford established the Center for Integrated Design (CID) to bring together faculty and students from engineering, architecture, art, and business to work on issues facing the University's neighboring communities. Service learning projects have been an integral part of the course work in each of these disciplines, but outcomes of these discipline specific projects were not coordinated to solve the larger problems facing the communities. Also, students did not gain any experience working with other disciplines and learning how to communicate with both technical and non-technical team members. One successful project that was recently completed by the CID was for the town of Bloomfield, Connecticut. The goal of this project was to provide short and long-term recommendations for enhancing the center of town. The project consisted of three phases. In phase one, students from engineering, architecture, and art worked together during the summer as paid interns. They reviewed town records; collected data on items such as architectural styles, sidewalk conditions, lighting conditions, and signage; and performed traffic and pedestrian counts. In phase two, course projects in the three disciplines were conducted using the data collected in phase one. For example, a team of senior civil engineering students worked under the guidance of Bloomfield's Town Engineer and Connecticut Light and Power (CL&P) engineers to design the layout of ornamental street and parking lot lights. Other course projects were a water quality study, town center threshold study, town center redevelopment study, and town center way-finding project. In addition, students involved in these projects participated in a focus group meeting where town officials and residents were interviewed to get their perception of the existing town center and their vision of an ideal town center. In the final phase of the project, the student interns and faculty developed a list of recommendations that were then presented to Bloomfield's Town Council. Assessment of the project by faculty, students, and town officials indicated that there was excellent integration of the student interns from the three disciplines and that the students benefited by being involved in a multidiscipline project. An area of improvement that was identified was to incorporate a multidiscipline team approach into the course projects themselves.