SmartCampus-Studio: Fostering Creativity and Design Thinking with Ubiquitous Social Computing Technologies

With globalization and outsourcing, maintaining competitive advantage often requires design innovation that takes into account local user-needs and social practices. Of particular currency to technology students, is gaining an understanding of how to engage in innovative ubiquitous computing application design. In the real world, such applications are typically designed by small teams of creative individuals in a highly iterative fashion. Unfortunately, relevant design skills are difficult to teach through traditional lecture-classroom or project-based independent study approaches which do not provide adequate feedback of iterative designs from peers, the user community and experts, or a suitable collaborative design workspace. To address this pedagogical challenge we are exploring how computing sciences design studios supported by ubiquitous social computing cyberinfrastructure that enables inand out-of-studio learning and interaction, could be used to create the next generation of technology innovators.