The Prompt
Your school wants to improve the upkeep of campus facilities by creating a new system for reporting any facilities that may need maintenance or repair. Design an experience that allows students to report building or equipment issues on campus. Consider the process of those filing the report and of those receiving and taking action on the issues.
Research
ArtCenter currently uses Onuma’s Building Informed Environments (BIM) systems with a form to generate work order requests for high priority work. If students have minor complaints such as the room get’s too cold to work in or the HVAC does not work at all, they basically have to either personally walk down to security or make a phone call.
The request forms are currently hidden in the navigation bar of the student dashboard called Inside ArtCenter. They are also segmented into separate forms for different issues. Since the students and faculty already have so much going on, most of the time they won’t even remember these forms exist. If they do remember, they don’t usually bother to go down the road of filling out these forms unless it is something really hazardous.
Ideation
I started brainstorming about what all information on a high-level basis is required for seamless communication of the problem between the students/faculty and facilities department.
Things to consider:
- The process of reporting an issue should be extremely simplified for the students and the faculty
- ArtCenter has 3 different buildings and their room taxonomy is really confusing since its all just numbers with very few rooms that have a name, for example, The Immersion Lab
- Facilities should be able to easily go back and forth within the request and know the priority of each task so that they don’t have to take up the responsibility of deciding which task goes to whom and when
Mission
To enable the students and the faculty to easily locate their room and report the issue within to facilities department as well as allow facilities to have an organized form of this information and ensure the reports get solved.
Vision
To create a system that keeps the facilities up to date with all the campus issues and brings peace of mind to students and faculty.
Wireframes
Student/Faculty Side Client: Mobile App
User flow for mobile app (Left to right)
The students would log in using their student IDs for Inside.ArtCenter portal for accessing the ArtCenter Maintenance system. They would then have to go and tap their mobile device on the beacon outside the door of the room. Take a picture of the issue. Describe the problem just to capture the details of it. They can then submit the report and it’s that simple.
Physical Beacon
There will be a beacon installed outside the entrance of all rooms on campus. This beacon will allow the students to find the exact location of their room which will get tagged with their report. It will also allow the employee to trigger the beginning and end of a task.
Facilities Side Client: Tablet App
This application will help workers in the facilities department to keep a track of reports in real-time. The report’s text and images are analyzed and broken down into information that helps classify the problem’s priority and department. This, in turn, can auto-assign employees on particular tasks which fall under their job description.
In order to ensure that they have actually looked at the issue and tried to resolve it, they have to tap the beacon to begin the process of diagnosis. Then once they are done inspecting and repairing they are required to take a picture of the fixed service and update the status of the report.
High Fidelity Mockups
Since design students and faculty would be the end-user of the mobile app, it is more visually distinct and abstract. It borrows some design language from ArtCenter’s brand. Whereas the tablet app focuses more on visibility and information being as easily accessible as possible. This is to ensure that the maintenance employees don’t have to spend time looking around in the app.
