A PLAYGROUND FOR NOVICE ENGINEERS AND BEYOND

The Innovation Playground is a living lab for co-creation accessible for all faculties and research programs situated in the main building of The Hague University of Applied Sciences (THUAS). It has shown to play an important role in building social, learning, and professional communities that reach beyond the intended purpose. Due to budget restrictions, the dedicated staffing and accompanying programming were eliminated. In this case, the fourth challenge on operational scheduling and staffing of the workspace, presented in the syllabus (Crawley, Malmqvist, Östlund, Brodeur, & Edström, 2014) is encountered. To avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater, this paper captures the value of the space and programming for its users and types of usage, primary and auxiliary. It answers the key question: what needs do the Innovation Playground fulfill for all its users? It focuses on uses beyond the educational and users beyond the engineering domain. Cases and spaces of multidisciplinary education beyond the technical domain are rare to find within the CDIO body of knowledge. The CDIO framework is optimized for engineering education, yet the value of these spaces for members across an institute (such as internal research partners and external network) is overlooked with this perspective. The syllabus touches upon the community building aspects as a result of the design-implementation projects (for students and faculty staff). The valuable activities, as expressed by its users, are teaching and learning modes that contribute to community building, such as advanced and simple design-implementation projects, collaborative design projects, extracurricular design projects, tinkering mode and self-guided learning (Young et al., 2005). For non-student users, this community building value is endorsed. Other intangible values for non-student users include a space to conduct and reflect on educational innovation, cross-disciplinary educational collaborations, and expanding networks within and outside of the institute to work with real-world clients.