Campus master planning is traditionally about “land use” and incrementally adding new facilities. In the future it must be about changing existing facilities to meet new patterns of behavior. ______________________________________________________

Our campuses have been developed for traditional students and yesterday’s patterns of mobility. As student patterns change and more on-line and off-campus activities accumulate, will the demand for campus facilities not only realign, but decline? Can the campus be downsized? Or can we stop building new classrooms and focus on retrofitting existing facilities and expanding on-or-off-campus residential facilities for students who want blended learning experiences and access to campus and university town life (both day and night)?

The traditional campus now caters to less than 16% of students (usually the 18 to 25 year-old student). What are the models for the campus of the future? Some would suggest that an apt model is the track from the library to the football stadium and the bars in between (for those who consider the campus as the greatest entertainment venue ever conceived by mankind for 18-25 year-olds). Will the campus continue to be a place for “growing up”? Or will it be a base of operations for peripatetic faculty, researchers, and students? How much space, and of what kinds, will the campus of the future need?

And how do we get there from here?

These conditions will accelerate with the quickening pace of technological innovations in the future. The impact of mobile, pervasive technology will be advanced by what Ray Kurzweil talks about as “the Singularity,” the time when the capacity of machine intelligence available to humans will exceed the existing base of human intelligence. Kurzweil predicts that this will occur by about 2020 with the confluence of revolutionary developments in artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and robotics. These developments will create new levels of human-machine intelligence that will be utilized in research, learning, and human development. They will usher in new ways of experiencing knowledge and intelligence. Not to mention new dimensions of “knowing.” These developments will further the dilution of the importance of the campus as a physical place.

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