OVERVIEW THE

Before the start of my first semester of college, I, like many other first-year students, walked through my class schedule to locate all my classes. I made sure to leave early on the first day, so that I would not be late, and subsequently arrived to class chronically early. Since my first semester of college, I have worked with several first-year students who prefer instead “wing-it” their first week of class, and as you can probably imagine, are often late to said classes. But, it’s hard to fault them for this error in judgment when North Classroom’s 5th floor can only be access from one side of the building, Plaza has a mezzanine floor, the only elevator to get to the second floor in West Classroom is actually in the Arts Building, and Tivoli 479 is really on the second floor instead of the fourth, and it’s outside.

As a first-year student, you are juggling not only making friends, waking up on time, balancing your finances, doing your homework, but now to top it off you have a question for the bursar’s, but you don’t know if you talk to them at Lynx Central or Lynx Connect. Instead of building your sense of belonging to your new college environment, you’re lost, confused, and probably more than a bit frustrated.

In his research on student belonging, Terrell Strayhorn argues that finding belonging is “a fundamental need for all people” like food and shelter.1 This means that before you can focus on other things, like turning in your math homework, you are seeking to fulfill your need to belong.2 If this need is not satisfied, a college student is less likely to graduate from college.3 And so, for my project I decided to evaluate Auraria Campus through the lens of a first year student to explore the ways in which user experience principles could be used to design wayfinding solutions to help reduce the time it takes for first-year students to find belonging on campus.

1 Terrell Strayhorn, College Students’ Sense of Belonging: A Key to Educational Success for all Students (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 9.

Roughly a decade ago, in 2012, the Auraria Higher Education Center (AHEC) proposed a long-term master plan to revitalize the urban nature of the campus. Auraria Campus is shared between three higher education institutions: the Community College of Denver (CCD), Metropolitan State University of Denver (MSU), and the University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver). As a result, the campus land is divided into different “neighborhoods” for each institution in addition to a shared portion of campus.4 The intention of these neighborhoods is to provide space for each institution to complete building projects while also maintaining a collaborative space; individual projects would have to abide by set guidelines to align with the identity of Auraria Campus.5 In addition to establishing campus neighborhoods, the 2012 plan also focused on ideas to improve the user experience of campus such as updating the different campus “entrances” to visually establish Auraria Campus as being separate from Downtown Denver.6 The plan also detailed architectural changes to campus to allow for more walkable routes, outdoor seating, and bicycle use.7

In the years since the publication of the 2012 plan, few of the proposed construction projects have been completed. As a result, Auraria Campus has not improved the campus user experience for new students. While the campus is not large, AHEC has not provided campus users with wayfinding systems to welcome and guide students around campus. Without obvious guidance around campus, a new student will begin to have a negative impression of Auraria Campus’s identity and credibility in addition to remembering their experience on campus as an unpleasant one.8 This negative impression is a result of having a more challenging time locating buildings, classrooms, offices, and resources across campus due to a lack of wayfinding. Strayhorn describes this as drawing upon one’s “working memory” but “trying to manage too many activities simultaneously can overdraw ‘working memory’ (also known as one’s ‘bandwidth’) and lead to poor output, loss of quality, or failure. Similar wisdom holds for college students craving a sense of belonging.”9 If a first-year student is using up all of their working memory trying to navigate campus, they will have to wait longer to have enough bandwidth to begin to satisfy their need to belong. faculty,

2 Strayhorn, College Students’ Sense of Belonging, 9.

3 Strayhorn, College Students’ Sense of Belonging, 16.

4 From Vision to Reality (Denver: Auraria Higher Education Center, 2012), 31-48.

5 From Vision to Reality (Denver: Auraria Higher Education Center, 2012), 31.

6 From Vision to Reality (Denver: Auraria Higher Education Center, 2012), 80-123.

7 From Vision to Reality (Denver: Auraria Higher Education Center, 2012), 35-43.

By creating a consistent wayfinding system across Auraria Campus, a first-year student will be able to dedicate less energy to finding their way around campus and instead focus on building their sense of belonging. A wayfinding system will also build AHEC’s integrity with first-year students in addition to building Auraria Campus’s identity as an urban campus shared between three institutions. Having positive experiences with the campus enables students to share their positive experiences and encourage others to attend school at one of the higher education institutions.

Between buildings, even buildings within the same neighborhood, the hierarchy, color, and other visual cues on signage is inconsistent, confusing or in the wrong locations. The Lawerance and Larimar bridge signs make one think that they must go down to the river to find certain buildings. Some signs blend in with the color of the walls. The map in North only exists at one entrance.

The “entrances” to campus do not visually communicate the end of Downtown Denver and the start of Auraria Campus. The general Auraria Campus signage is limited and resembles CU Denver’s brand style instead of AHEC’s.