Exploring Campus and Community Dashboards as Tools for Connection, Learning, and Resilience

What if buildings, a campus, or whole cities could teach? Campus and community dashboards are digital platforms that make real-time flows of energy, water, environmental conditions and community life visible. By doing so, they transform the buildings and communities we inhabit from passive backdrops into active components of the learning environment — engaging occupants, fostering systems thinking, strengthening social norms around sustainability, and deepening connections between institutions and the communities they are embedded within.

This Learning Lab brings together faculty, staff, and students from Oberlin College (Ohio) and Hamilton College (New York) to share complementary stories of dashboard development — one expansive, one at a beginning stage. Oberlin pioneered campus dashboard technology starting in the early 2000s, deploying real-time resource-use displays in individual buildings and later across an entire campus. The work then expanded into Oberlin's K–12 schools, the local community, and more recently to the Great Lakes Science Center and MidTown Cleveland, a majority-minority neighborhood. Peer-reviewed research on these implementations demonstrate measurable shifts in pro-environmental norms, systems thinking, community connection, and conservation behavior.

Hamilton College is now embarking on its own journey. With support from a Siemens grant, Hamilton faculty, students, and staff are piloting a campus resource-use dashboard and exploring its potential integration into courses, co-curricular programming, and the Clinton Central School District. As with Oberlin, Hamilton's story is one of discovery: listening to stakeholders, co-designing with students, and figuring out what matters most to a particular place and community.

Presenters will include students, faculty, and staff from both institutions as well as a representative from Siemens, reflecting the collaborative, cross-sector nature of this work. Together they will illustrate how dashboards serve as platforms for education, engagement, and empowerment — and how the process of building one is itself a powerful form of learning.

Participants will leave with a clear understanding of what campus and community dashboards are; familiarity with implementations ranging from dormitory to citywide scale; insight into the discovery and co-design process required to make dashboards locally meaningful; and inspiration to consider how this approach might work on their own campuses.