Bring Your Own Campus Idea

Some ideas arrive before a project does. You have noticed something on campus that could work better, or you are carrying a half-formed idea you have never tested on anyone.

Two things make this different from bringing your own community project. Scale: campus changes that work are small and specific - one building, one service, one habit, one semester. And company: the strongest Living Labs are teams built around an idea no single person arrived with. There is a workshop early in semester for exactly that.

What you hand on counts as much as what you finish. Menstrual Equity on Campus and Every Drop Counts are here because one team left the work in a state the next can pick up.

You will practise the part a listed project hands you already solved: working out what the problem actually is, then narrowing it until it fits a semester. You will also learn to work on an idea that stops being only yours, and to build something a stranger can continue. Leaving a project that outlives you is the harder skill.

You do not need a finished idea, only a real observation about how something on campus works.

Find out who owns the thing you want to change - a service, a space or a policy each have someone responsible, and one conversation saves three weeks of guessing. Then look at what has been tried here already, including the projects on this page.

Set out in your Course Pathway Plan and agreed with whoever owns that part of campus: the change you propose and the problem behind it, who you are working with, and what you will trial at what scale.

Then the handover, which in a Living Lab is not optional: the trial, the data or the prototype written up clearly enough that a team who has never met you can take it further.

Recommended to students who have noticed something on campus that ought to work better, would rather shape a project than be handed a brief, and are willing to pick up someone else's unfinished work.

Two cautions. Anything touching a building, a service or student data needs the permission of whoever runs it. And a semester-sized experiment with a clear result beats a campus-wide proposal with nothing behind it.