How Do Students Imagine The University of the Future?

At the launch of the new UCD O’Connor Centre for Learning, students came together for a two-day creative hackathon to answer a big question: how might we design the university of the future? Organised by the UCD Innovation Academy with UCD Careers Network, UCD School of Architecture, and UCD Foundation, the event invited teams from different disciplines to prototype bold ideas for what learning, campus life, and student support could look like next.

One of the strongest themes across the projects was that a future university should be more human, flexible, and connected. Rather than relying on one-size-fits-all lecture halls, students imagined spaces and systems that support different learning styles, physical needs, and social experiences.

Across the submissions, the ideas ranged from multi-zone learning environments to campus mobility, regenerative sustainability, and collaborative learning models.

Several teams focused on how teaching spaces could better reflect the way students actually learn. Team Future-Era, which won second place, designed a multi-zone lecture hall concept with four distinct areas: an Interactive Learning Zone, a VR Learning Zone, an Audio Pod Learning Space, and a Traditional Lecture Space. Their idea gave students more control over how they engage, whether they need collaboration, immersive technology, quiet focus, or a more conventional teaching setup.The team’s approach was especially strong because it linked accessibility with choice.

Instead of expecting every student to thrive in the same environment, the concept allowed people to move between zones depending on mood, focus, or learning preference. That makes the idea practical as well as imaginative, and it is exactly the kind of student-centred thinking the hackathon aimed to encourage.

Team Homies, on the other hand, focused on how a hybrid model for wellbeing can contribute greatly to a student’s capability of performing well academically. Team Campus Link, which won third place, also put an emphasis on wellbeing by creating a “Wellness Collective” a campus space designed to promote communication, mutual support and mental healing. The space includes The Exchange Room, Sensory Halogen Room, Resonance Café and The Belonging Bench.

Transport was another major theme, with students looking at how to make moving around campus easier, greener, and less stressful. Team Pigeon, which won the People’s Choice Award, created an automated robotic delivery system that users can summon through an app to carry items across campus. Their design aimed to reduce the burden of heavy loads, support students with injuries or limited mobility, and improve inclusion through a practical electric system.

Team Unimove took a different approach, designing an AI-powered SmartPod network that syncs with a student’s timetable and suggests the next class. Their web prototype demonstrated features such as ID scanning, lecture selection, live ETA updates, delay handling, and accessibility toggles. Together, these transport ideas showed that the future university may need to be as much about movement and convenience as it is about classrooms.

Sustainability also featured strongly, especially in the winning Root Cause project, which took first place. Their Sentient BioCampus imagined a university as a regenerative ecosystem, combining renewable energy, circular waste management, biodiversity recovery, and environmental monitoring in one linked system. The team also proposed an app to monitor tree health using biosensors and mobile scanning, alongside composting, biogas, pollinator habitats, native planting, and a wind-powered seed dispersal tower.

The Explorers team also highlighted how campus design can shape behaviour through transport, shelter, and light.

Their observations about sheltered bike parking, covered walkways, and better natural light point to a simple but powerful idea: the university of the future should be designed around comfort, accessibility, and the everyday realities of student life. These projects showed that sustainability is not only about energy systems, but also about how people actually experience campus spaces.