Sophomores' project aims to reduce campus design flaws

As your alarm clock sounds, you spring out of bed in anticipation of your busy day. You have it all planned out; a quick breakfast in Dewick and then a stop at the gym before Calculus. You choose a helping of eggs and contemplate the cereal selection as you squeeze through the small gap between the two cafeteria buffets. With a backpack full of books, a gym bag, and a full tray, you snag your backpack strap and lose your balance. And there you are _ on the ground, drenched in milk and Extra Marshmallow Lucky Charms.

Sophomore Engineering Psychology majors Spencer Gerrol and Allison Yale completed a project last fall that aims to eliminate such mishaps from a Tufts students' daily routine, by identifying and fixing design flaws in several campus buildings. The students' assignment was to design something that would accommodate people's needs, capabilities, and limitations.

Psychology Professor Salvatore Soraci, who assigned the project, said that Gerrol and Yale's realization of the assignment was original because while "...other student projects involved cultural factors in website design, statistical reasoning flaws, the redesign of dangerous street intersections, etc.," the two chose to focus on the University with the hopes of eventually reaping the benefits of their labor.

"This is actually a chance to improve our everyday lives here at Tufts," Gerrol said. "We hope that students will keep their eyes open for problems they encounter and send us suggestions at fixtufts@hotmail.com."

Through surveys, group brainstorming sessions, and touring the campus, Gerrol and Yale familiarized themselves with what they considered to be the campus's most prominent design flaws. After creating a list of over eighty problems encountered in dorms, athletic facilities, dining facilities, academic buildings, and classrooms, they evaluated the severity of every item and selected a few from each category to focus on.

"We've done a preliminary phase, gathering data and doing research for what problems exist, and now we have to see what we can realistically fix," Gerrol said. "We want to start with the minor stuff, like having the forks in Carmichael dining hall be placed in the bins that say 'forks' rather than 'knives'."

As an effort to have an impact on the Tufts community, Gerrol and Yale will present their findings to The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (THFES) in anticipation of heading a campus improvement project. Ideally, THFES board members would apply for Tufts Community Union Senate funding, although Yale notes that Campus Facilities could help to realize some of the project's goals.

"Depending on how much input we get from other people and how much funding we are able to get, we will start out with the small stuff and move on from there," Yale said. "Obviously we can't put elevators in all of the buildings right away."

Installing elevators is in fact one of the many goals identified by the project. "We want to make the campus more accessible to the students, and buildings like Anderson are not handicap-friendly," Yale said. "One of the problems is that there are many offices on the upper floors and not everyone has access to those levels."

THFES has tried to achieve similar projects' goals in the past, but according to Senior David Cades, the Society's treasurer, "[the THFES] budget is minimal, which is why we haven't been able to do much." To gain funding, Cades suggests that Gerrol and Yale turn their findings into a research project and apply for a grant through the Univeristy's Undergraduate Research Fund.

One of the project's findings was that while good lighting allows users to be comfortable and to work without visual strain, campus dorms such as Miller and South have dim lighting with a yellow tint, which negatively affects the efficiency of the rooms as workspaces. Two possible ways to improve the ambient light in the dorm rooms would be to install more powerful lights or to make the light-cover more translucent.

Miller and South residents were not the only students living on campus to voice concerns about their dorm rooms. The 100 surveys handed out by Gerrol and Yale to random University students revealed that Haskell Hall residents find the numbering of several suites to be counterintuitive.

For example, the suite upstairs from the 320's is numbered 310's. "This is a violation of spatial natural mapping," explains the students' project. It is also a relatively simple and inexpensive problem to fix, as the suites simply need renumbering.

In Dewick dining hall, the sneeze guard over the salad bar is completely parallel to the food surface and hinders people from reaching from one side of the buffet to the other. If the shield were inclined, the horizontal length would be shorter, making food easier to reach. Also the height of the sneeze guard does not protect the vegetables from the germs of the shortest students. "Keeping facilities sanitary is a serious human factors concern," Gerrol explained.

A prevalent complaint on campus of late has been the inadequacy of athletic facilities. Gerrol and Yale discovered that the large doors that appear to be the main entrance to the Gantcher Center are always locked, and that in fact the entrance to the gym is a loading dock on the basement level.

"Even though there is a small sign, the location of the entrance should be clearer," Yale said. "Once you are inside, you see several hallways and sets of stairs with little indication as to where they lead; better signage would be a big help."

Another problem regarding user satisfaction is the need for equipment that can be used by both left and right-handed individuals. Computer mice in buildings such as Halligan, Anderson and Tisch are shaped to fit the contours of the right hand, but Gerrol and Yale's project urges the University to invest in ambidextrous mice at each computer station to avoid limiting left-handed students to certain machines.

"It's surprising that a school like Tufts, which is one of two universities in the country that has an undergraduate human factors program, has so many problems," sophomore Engineer Nikhil Kalghatgi said. "Some of the ideas [Gerrol and Yale] thought of are not just good 'fixer-uppers,' but necessary."

Kalghatgi noted the wisdom of Gerrol and Yale's recommendations to exchange the sloping desks of the Olin Center and Bromfield-Pearson. "Books and papers just fall right off if you aren't holding them down, and in nearly every class, I hear something fall off of someone's desk. Its' not like it's just annoying, it's inefficient and more importantly, distracting."