Designing for the Cellphone Generation: A ‘Chronicle’ Discussion

Amy Christmas, an architect in the higher-education practice at the S/L/A/M Collaborative, will discuss designing for the cellphone generation on The Chronicle’s Brown Bag discussion forum on Thursday at 12 noon, U.S. Eastern time. (Ms. Christmas will fill in for Mary Jo Olenick, who is unable to take part.) The topic is designing campus buildings for the cellphone generation.

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?

Participants can ask questions ahead of time by clicking here.