Designing Buildings and Spaces for the Cellphone Generation

SCUPer Mary Jo Olenick was the March guest blogger for The Chronicle of Higher Education's Buildings & Grounds Blog. Now she takes her turn in a live, interactive "brown bag" on the Chronicle website on Thursday, May 22 at Noon Eastern time. Why don't we join in? You could continue this discussion F2F in the AT & IV, Learning Space Design roundtables at SCUP-43 on Monday and Wednesday mornings.

Architects and planners who design for colleges must be aware of how today's students live and how their social networks function. Before cellphones spread across campuses, for instance, students relied on common gathering spaces for both planned and spontaneous meetings. Now that just about every student has a cellphone, though, students have much less need for lobbies and atriums — they can track down their friends instantly. And generous public spaces will not encourage social interaction if there's a stigma attached to being seen without your friends (you should at least be seen talking to them on your cellphone). So should that space be devoted to some other use? What other new priorities for planners and architects have been prompted by the cellphone generation? Are traditional notions of the college campus due for a radical rethinking?