More about Nugent Hall at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, specifically designed for the accommodation of students with very difficult disabilities.

Each of the rooms on the first floor, which houses 17 disabled students and three personal assistants, has adjustable hospital beds and high-tech accessibility features. The rooms have a motorized ceiling-lift system, which some of the students use to move from their beds to their bathrooms. Students slide or are helped into a sling suspended from the ceiling; then, with a remote-control device, they or their assistants activate the lift, which runs along tracks built into the ceiling.

The building is designed to integrate students with and without disabilities. The top three floors include disabled students who are able to live more independently, as well as students without disabilities, and both groups share the dining hall. A cardio room includes exercise machines that a student can use from a wheelchair. Buses stop at the dorm every half-hour during class times to take students anywhere on the campus.

Here is more from the university website. 

SCUP's first virtual event shared across the continent was a SCUP/PBS satellite telecast “Creating Tomorrow’s Learner-Centered Environments – Today!” How does the vision and content of this 12-year-old telecast fare after 12 years of high-speed change in higher education?

Find out on SCUP's YouTube channel, Plan4HigherEd, as we have sliced that telecast up into eleven 10-minute chunks for your viewing pleasure. Or, just watch all eleven of them right here:

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link to the initial source for 'Screened' Out: Display Screens as Functional or Aesthetic Design Elements.

Sometime back in the 1990s, I made a case for screens—video monitors, computer displays—as the architectural ornament of our time. As Notre Dame has gargoyles, we have our screen-size talking heads. For this, I apologize. I’ve now decided that it’s time for the age of the ubiquitous screen to be over. 

***

 

My evidence for this is thin; screens big and small are still proliferating. But I’ve had a series of conversations with interior designers about what the future might look like, and most of them downplayed technology’s role in their aesthetic. Words like authentic and homelike have replaced wired or smart. And I take it as a good sign that in New York, the gathering places for a new generation of digital entrepreneurs are self-consciously creaky: the new Breslin at the Ace Hotel, the old NoHo hangout Tom & Jerry’s, “a place so low tech you can’t even run up a credit card tab,” as Susan Dominus writes in the New York Times. 

***

Oddly, it was a recent visit to MIT that suggested that this might be more than wishful thinking on my part, that perhaps the technological project we embarked on in 1990s, the relocation of all our transactions and interactions to screens, is pretty much over.