Collectively Defining a Smart Campus:
A Summary of Northern Arizona University Smart Campus Retreat
Northern Arizona University is developing a new campus master plan. This master plan will emphasize "Smart Campus" capabilities to provide students, faculty, staff, and visitors with a unique experience. Smart Campus is on the minds of many Higher Education institutions and our work with NAU will define what it means for NAU.
NAU's Smart Campus will:
· Drive new efficiencies and contribute to our efforts to reduce carbon emissions
· Effectively manage resources
· Optimize existing space before creating new
· Promote other aspects of our strategic roadmap, vision, and mission across the NAU system of campuses
On July 18, 2022, participants from Northern Arizona University (NAU) and NAU's technology partners gathered for a full-day retreat on-campus to explore inspiring ideas, opportunities, aspirations, critical questions, and potential solutions for creating a smart campus plan for NAU. The retreat's purpose wasn't to solve the problems but to discover what is possible.
Smart Campus Retreat Fast Facts:
· 120+ Participants
· 8 hours
· 7 states represented
· 1,500+ post-it notes
The full-day retreat was organized into two sessions: Level-Setting and Ideating
Morning Session: Level Setting
The morning session was focused on level-setting NAU's current and near-term technological capabilities. NAU leaders outlined the current state of IT and Smart Campus elements on campus currently.
Guest Speaker: Sean Hartnett, Microsoft
During lunch, Sean Hartnett, Industry Director of Smart Spaces and Real Estate, presented on Microsoft's current Smart Campus initiatives.
Highlights from Sean's presentation:
High-level trend: It is no longer good enough to tell someone how an individual asset performs within a building. Asset owners want to know how the environment or ecosystem is functioning. A connected ecosystem brings together all the disparate technologies into a single environment.
Digital Twins enable the ability to fuse the physical world that is happening right now into adigital one to measure performance and run simulations on the environments. It is the construct of how you enrich the physical world together – the spaces, the people, the actions that take place in a single environment A recent study by the IDC has determined that up to60% of all assets will be digital twin enabled
Current challenges that need to be solved:1) Siloed systems, disconnected applications, 2) Reactive, break/fix models, inability to automate processes, 3) Centralization of data
At the bottom, it is facilities-centric – optimizing and maintaining buildings more effectively. These elements tend to be easier to measure. Most organizations tend to start with the base.
As organizations obtain more data and monitor their facilities they move into the middle section, focusing efforts on safety and total usage of resources.
At the top, it's about people within the buildings – enabling them to be more efficient, effective, and productive. These elements are more difficult to measure.
You'll see on page 2 of the summary dashboard at the end of this white paper that the ideas are organized into these capability levels.
Afternoon Session: Ideating
The afternoon session was focused on ideation. The participants worked through a series of activities that promoted the generation of ideas.
The retreat was organized into four overarching themes that remained consistent in the collection, analysis, and summary of the data:
· Infrastructure Evolution and Climate Responsiveness
· A Connected Campus Experience with smart buildings, data, and automation
· Effective Administration, Business Practices, and Robotics
· Teaching, Learning, Research and its intersection with technology
ACTIVITY #1 Rapid Brainstorming: In the style of a Hackathon, participants were asked to generate ideas on the four overarching themes that asked:
What are important points of focus for NAU as we create and implement a Smart, Sustainable Campus Master Plan?
First, participants recorded their gut idea –what is the most important point of focus?
Then participants built onto those with 6-8 more post-its that layer onto the gut ideas. These were ideas, goals, questions, concerns, risks, and actions.
Finally, participants voted on the items that resonated the most.
The raw data for rapid brainstorming is organized into the dashboard at the end of this summary. The data can be sliced into parent topics that summarize the data into snackable bites.
Summaries of each theme:
Infrastructure Evolution and Climate Responsiveness
o Understanding our carbon footprint. What is my individual, departmental carbon footprint? This increases accountability and can be a catalyst for action.
o Education and awareness. Communicating impact to the larger community –Improve, measure, report, and verify on-campus resource usage
o Scalability, elasticity, and reliability of infrastructure. Scale as the number of users and devices increase
o Transportation infrastructure and climate-friendly transportation
o How do we pay for this?
A Connected Campus Experience with smart buildings, data, and automation
o Dynamic parking aligned with schedules.
o Dashboards – monitor everything and provide access to everyone
o Using data to healthy buildings and air
o Identified redundancies
o Do we need "tech-free" spaces for disconnecting?
Effective Administration, Business Practices, and Robotics
o Just in time. Using occupancy and utilization information to provide things (transit, deliveries, services, etc.) Where do the drones and robots go?
o Staffing. Do we have the staff to do this? Are we planning on things we don't have the staff todo?
o Ease of use. There are a lot of apps. How are we focusing on a better and more seamless experience for all campus users?
o Create and show value. What is in it for me? If I'm opting to share data, what is coming back to be? How are we planning for reinvestment of this benefit that NAU is getting?
Teaching, Learning, Research and its intersection with technology
o Access and equity. How does everybody experience these tools? (on-campus, off-campus, virtual learners, rural areas, partners, out of state, etc.
o AR/VR. How can everyone access these digital spaces as this is being distributed across the curriculum?
o Who is an instructor? Community partners, alums, students, etc. How do these initiatives align with the goals of diversifying faculty and staff and honoring and embracing indigenous wisdom and voices?
o The Data. There is going to be and already is a lot of data. Is the data being analyzed to see patterns that help connect rather than reinforce existing silos?
ACTIVITY #2: User Stories: NAU's campuses serve a wide variety of people. Each participant chose a "User Story." This activity is about empathy –putting themselves in other people's shoes. Dig deep into how these users will interact and interface with the physical and virtual environments at NAU. All user stories are found on page 4 of the dashboard.
ACTIVITY #3: See, Feel, Measure: As we begin to imagine a smart campus, we asked:
See (Observe):
o What would you observe happening?
o What physically changes?
o What would look different?
Feel (Report):
o What would people be able to tell you about their user experience?
o How could this improve NAU?
Measure:
o What data points are needed?
o What new data could emerge?
All see, feel, and measure results are found on page 4 of the dashboard.
Analyzing the data: The planning team triangulated the data between the user data and the two activities. This process reveals outcomes when you tie the actions and goals of the user stories to the see, feel, measure outcomes and the rapid brainstorming ideas.
These themes start to reveal a set of themes that can be further explored throughout the coming year and incorporated into NAU's IT Strategic Roadmap and Campus Master plans.
Connectedness between the User Stories and See Feel Measure
1. Attract more students
2. Reduce costs
3. Automated components for ease of access
4. Improved stakeholder experiences
5. Seamless integration
(see the full list on page 4 of the dashboard)
Connectedness between the User Stories and Rapid Brainstorming Ideas
1. How building options integrate new technology as it is introduced
2. Integrate technology into NAUGO
3. Support faculty to effectively utilize and integrate emerging technology
4. Addressing gaps in remote learning
5. Better accessibility to health resources
(see the full list on page 5 of the dashboard)
Next Steps
The Campus Master Plan will dive into:
Confirmation of space needs analysis and recommendations for future space use on campus (post pandemic planning)
Campus vision plan with land-use shifts, property acquisitions, historic assets planning, facility recommendations and proposed campus framework plan (including remote campus sites)
Multi-modal plan with recommendations that address sustainability and safety goals for all modes of circulation
Landscape plan with recommendations that address open space, landscape, and stormwater goals
Placemaking opportunities that address equity and representation of NAU's diverse and indigenous campus populations
Student Life plan with recommendations that address student housing, on-campus dining, recreation, and wellness goals
Infrastructure and Utilities plan that provides campus systems recommendations to achieve NAU's net-zero and Resiliency goals
Implementation plan with project priorities or desired phasing, and necessary sequencing or relocations
Proposed project list with cost estimates, total cost of ownership information, and high-level programming information
Resiliency, Sustainability, and Smart Campus Planning layered into all sections as key drivers to the master plan
