Agora

Describe the current situation at your campus.

Since the last 10 years Beirut city was growing fast in the real-estate domain making it impossible to buy a big piece of land and build a large campus for the students. Since AUST campus is located at the heart of Beirut district, AUST had several problems acquiring new properties to enlarge the campus and make more like foreign universities. The growing process of the campus was made by buying or leasing properties in the entourage of the main campus and trying to expand slowly to reach its maximum few years back. The campus consists of 6 medium to large buildings with basketball court and parking spots, and under each building a cantina for students to eat and meet and two libraries to study. The entertainment area are relatively small comparing with the number of students registered at AUST thus most of the time students tend to seek other places to meet and study outside the campus.

What AUST students need after my observation a unified place to sit and meet and share resources together to maximize their learning experience and be familiar with more than one field and gain face to face experience and interaction with other colleagues in the university or the world. They need a place to share innovative ideas and projects compare new products and validate their research’s to learn how to be creative in the business field.

Furthermore, students’ needs to feel comfortable in the campus they need to feel at home learning and creating their projects. Students needs to enhance communications between other students or groups from other majors to have a wider vision and start designing their future. Last but not least students should get more In contact with organizations and companies, they should know what is going on in real day job and the mission of every organization.

All these needs form a mystery to be solved using design thinking method to validate that we need a place like AGORA for the students to get...