Students will investigate the local tensions around data center development, analyze how place-based evidence and community voices shape a just design challenge, and begin framing an evidence-based direction for later research, empathy work, and prototyping.

Students will gather and analyze community-based evidence about data center impacts and local values through interviews, listening, source analysis, and empathy synthesis. They will document stakeholder needs, fears, aspirations, and assumptions in structured artifacts that prepare teams to define a site-specific design problem in the next phase.

Students will synthesize community research, environmental evidence, and site constraints into a clear design brief for a just data center campus. They will define measurable criteria and constraints for both the campus concept and PSA direction, test their framing through critique, and revise their problem definition before moving into ideation.

Students will generate several distinct campus concepts, compare them against community-informed criteria, build low-fidelity prototypes, gather critique from peers and outside stakeholders, and document a first revision cycle for both the campus proposal and PSA direction.

Students will complete two documented revision cycles to strengthen their data center campus proposal and PSA materials, using critique, partner validation, and evidence to improve environmental performance, cultural responsiveness, and public communication before the final showcase.

Students will present their final just data center campus proposals and multimodal PSA campaigns to an authentic audience, respond to critique with evidence, and complete a final self-assessment that documents how community feedback, revision, and collaboration shaped their work.