University of Tomorrow Studio (discontinued)

The Q5 studio, a collaboration between the Building Knowledge groups Design, Data & Society (DDS), Complex Projects (CP), and Architecture Archives of the Future (AAF), is all about rethinking the future of higher education spaces.  In a world shaped by data and new technologies, students will explore how and where learning happens.

Students will work with real-world partners from academia and society to imagine what tomorrow’s universities might look like—and how they could better meet changing educational needs.  

The focus is on the very beginning of the design process: how do you even start to shape a brief for a place that supports future learning? Through hands-on design tasks, you’ll learn how to translate early ideas and ambitions into strong, visual concepts.  

Students will use a mix of lectures, workshops, and group research to explore how space and education connect. They will investigate a real site and create future scenarios through collaborative workshops and smart data visualizations. The studio sees the input from experts working on TU Delft Campus Rotterdam and at the Nieuwe Instituut, a cultural centre in Rotterdam, focusing on architecture, design, and digital culture. The goal is to better understand how space shapes learning—and how a client figures out what they want from a new learning environment. 

The final submissions will include group contributions which make up 50% of the final grade. The design brief will have individual components which will make up the other 50% of the final grade. All outputs will be assessed using a formal rubric. The final assessment will be in week 9. Week 10 will be education-free to leave time for students who need to repair. Students pass the course with a 6.0 or higher. With a lower grade, the course can be repaired to change the grade into a pass. The repair is unsupervised and needs to be completed within 2 weeks after the end of the course. When the repair is unsuccessful, the student needs to follow the entire course again, or possibly another Q5 elective in the third education period.