“Open to all those who dare to invent the future…
For students, faculty, staff, and even our far-flung community of alumni, the Media Union offers a radically new environment for learning, teaching, and performing.
Both a physical commons for the North Campus and a virtual commons for the entire campus–open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week–the Media Union will initially house:
An on-line library of the future
A laboratory for virtual reality
Interactive multi-media classrooms
High-tech theater and performance spaces
Cutting-edge design and innovation studios
But the most important part of this project is its unpredictability. Creative people will continually reshape its mission and determine its impact.”
(1996 Dedication Brochure for the Media Union)
The opening of the Media Union in 1996 was a significant and tangible commitment by the University of Michigan, in partnership with the State of Michigan, to provide all members of this learning community free access to some of the most sophisticated and transformational tools of the emerging digital revolution. Conceived as a model for the Library of the Future, the building architect for the Media Union project captured the challenge of creating a physical environment to meet needs when we cannot anticipate the changes still to come as “…designing a building full of unknowns.”
While the Media Union (aka Duderstadt Center or DC or “The Dude”) was sometimes portrayed as a library for the University’s North Campus, in reality the design team of deans, faculty, and staff responsible for the design of the new facility envisioned it as more akin to the MIT Media Lab for students and faculty of the North Campus academic programs. It was designed as a high-tech collection of studios, laboratories, workshops, performance venues and gathering and study space for students. Its original program statement in 1993 (see Appendix A) portrayed it as an Internet portal to the world (since the Internet was still rather new at that time). Although it was designed to provide space for the library collections of the College of Engineering and Schools of Art and Architecture, its function as a “traditional” book-based library was never a major part of the vision. Instead it was a place intended for collaboration and innovation in teaching and learning, a place where students, faculty, and staff could access a technology-rich environment, a place open to all “who dared to invent the future”.
More specifically, this 250,000 square foot facility, looking like a modern version of the Temple of Karnak, contains almost 1,000 workstations for student use—including Pentiums and Macs and Unix machines such as Suns and Hewlett Packard workstations. It has thousands of more network jacks for students to plug in their laptops, and wireless modems if they wish to work in its surrounding plazas and gardens during the summer. The facility contains a 1.5 million volume library for art, science, and engineering, but perhaps more significantly, it is the site of our major digital library project. There is a sophisticated teleconferencing facility, design studios, visualization laboratories, and a major virtual reality complex. Since art, architecture, and music students work side-by-side with engineering students, the Media Union contains sophisticated recording studios and electronic music studios. It also has a state-of-the-art sound stage for “digitizing” performances, as well as numerous galleries for displaying the results of student creative efforts. Consequently, the Media Union is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so that students have round-the-clock access to its facilities.
That building full of unknowns has in the last 15 years become the home for a large and evolving collection of new information and communications technologies far beyond the resources of any one school or college to acquire and maintain. As part of a top research university library, the Media Union’s collection of digital assets and resources requires constant renewal with the latest versions of software and hardware, and an expert team of professionals who enable U-M users to get up-to-speed and use them productively for innovative research, teaching and learning. Rationalizing significant investments in cutting-edge resources by enabling free access to a shared, expertly-supported collection of assets has enabled a widespread culture of innovation in digital technologies at the U-M. Students and faculty are free both to envision and to lead, hands-on, change in disciplines being transformed by the digital revolution – from engineering, the design arts and medicine, to economics and government.
Today the Media Union (aka Duderstadt Center or DC or “The Dude”) has become one of the most active learning spaces in the University, providing thousands of students with 7x24 hour access to rich resources including libraries, advanced technology, workshops, performance venues, and high quality study and community gathering spaces. Yet, perhaps because of its unusually high level of student use, the DC has increasingly taken on a more operational character providing learning services based on commodity technology rather than its original vision as a source of innovation and creativity. In a sense, production has driven out much of the innovation that characterized the DC during its early years. Furthermore, while the facility has become one of most heavily used student facilities in the University as space for study, computer access, and gathering (“Meet me at the Dude!”) it has lost much of the deeper engagement of faculty and graduate students characterizing its early launch with state-of-the-art technology and activities. Although many academic programs continue to view its unique faculties as absolutely critical for their activities–particularly in the performing arts–many other faculty members know it only as a welcoming place to meet colleagues for a cup of coffee and a sandwich (i.e., MUJO). It is time to refresh this successful model of shared investment and open access to the next generation of resources that will enable the U-M learning community to meet the challenge of the “new unknowns”.
Rationalizing significant investments in cutting-edge resources by enabling free access to a shared, expertly-supported collection of assets has enabled a widespread culture of innovation in digital technologies at the U-M. Students and faculty are free both to envision and to lead, hands-on, change in disciplines being transformed by the digital revolution – from engineering, the performing and design arts, and medicine, to economics and government.
Today, the Media Union (aka Duderstadt Center or DC or “The Dude”) has become one of the most active learning spaces in the University, providing thousands of students with 7x24 hour access to rich resources including libraries, advanced technology, workshops, performance venues, and high quality study and community gathering spaces. Yet, perhaps because of its high level of student use, its mission today is more one of providing learning services than its original vision as a source of innovation and creativity. It is time to refresh this successful model of shared investment and open access to the next generation of resources that will enable the U-M learning community to meet the challenge of the “new unknowns.”
To restore its original intent, we suggest a new vision of the DC as a generalization of the library itself, adding to the traditional library role of providing access to objects (books, archives) that facilitate inquiry and learning new technology-based resources functions that enable creativity, innovation, demonstration (e.g., performance) and impact on society. More specifically, beyond its current role as a gathering space for student learning activities:
The DC would become an innovative center for discovery, learning, invention, innovation, demonstration, and deployment utilizing state-of-the-art technologies and facilities and assisted by expert staff. It would provide the resources to support a community engaged in the creative transition from concept to technical realization.
It would serve as a new form of public good, an innovation commons, where students and faculty would come to work together with expert staff mentors to develop the skills and tacit learning acquired through studios, workshops, performance venues, and advanced facilities such as simulation and immersive environments. It would encourage experimentation, tinkering, invention, and even play as critical elements of innovation and creative design.
It would invite and enable the creation of highly interdisciplinary teams of students and faculty from various academic and professional disciplines, providing a Greek agora, where people could come to network, exchange knowledge, and create new ideas with experienced staff.
Beyond providing a platform for learning, discovery, creation, and innovation, it would also be a place for studying new paradigms for these activities and propagating them to the rest of the University. In this sense it would serve as a “skunkworks” for the future of learning and discovery, a “do tank” rather than a “think tank”, where new paradigms could be created, explored, and launched to serve society.
In 1994 the Media Union was renamed the James and Anne Duderstadt Center in honor of the 11th President of the University.
