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The Thomas M. Siebel Center for Design at the University of Illinois

The Thomas M. Siebel Center for Design is located at 1208 S. Fourth St in Champaign Illinois, on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Siebel Centers on Campus

On the University of Illinois campus in Urbana-Champaign, there are currently two Siebel Centers. One is dedicated to Computer Science and the other one that is covered in this article is dedicated to Design. The Siebel Center for Computer Science as said above is separate from the Siebel Center for Design. The Siebel Center for Computer Science, which was completed in 2004 is a 225,000-square-foot building that Thomas M. Siebel donated $50 million to construct the building. The building is located at 201 N. Goodwin Avenue Urbana Illinois and is the main computer science building on campus.

Thomas M. Siebel Background

Thomas M. Siebel is an alumnus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign which he graduated with a bachelor's in history in 1975, a master’s in business administration in 1983, and a master’s in computer science in 1985. Siebel has donated a minimum of $161 million to the University of Illinois as a way to pay it forward to allow for more students to follow the same success that he has had. Siebel also works with his wife, Stacey Siebel, with the charity to assist in donating to the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Background on Siebel Center for Design

Siebel Center for Design’s mission for the project “To practice, model, and teach design thinking, using human-centered design, in collaboration with others, to reimagine our campus, community, and collective world” was first established in 2016 and opened in August 2022. This is a center for both students and faculty of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign along with being open to the public. The center was built from a gift from the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation worth $25 million.

Areas in the Building

Siebel Center for Design’s 68,000-square-foot educational center with an upper lobby, a lower lobby, multiple classrooms, a workshop, and a “garage.” Starting with the Upper Lobby, there are spaces to work with access to electric outlets and USB ports for any potential needs that rise up, and the tables in the Upper Lobby are able to be moved around to allow for larger groups of people to work with each other. The Lower Lobby is similar to the Upper Lobby in terms of accommodations, the main changes are the differences that the seating is not as flexible and can often be stationary. The Lower Lobby has access to an amphitheater that can be used from 7 am to 12 am that can be utilized as a way to present to an audience. The Shop, which is the workshop on the lower level of the Siebel Center for Design, is a place specifically for students to be able to work on as many projects as they can. The Shop provides many resources for students to use including but not limited to laser cutters, water jet cutters, CNC counters, woodworking tools, large format printing, 3D printers, cameras, and a media studio. To access some of these resources at the Siebel Center for Design you need to do training that is provided by the official website. The “Garage” is a space for some of the bigger projects that students work on campus, and one of the current uses for it is for the Illini Solar Car that is built by students on campus. Another resource that the Siebel Center for Design has is the equipment checkout which can be used for checking out any of the equipment that can be used anywhere else on campus.

In order to access The Shop and resources from the Equipment Checkout, the University of Illinois students are required to present their school ID card, also called an iCard, to gain basic access to these resources and need to get further authentication with a GRIT Card and training modules to fully access these resources.

Siebel Center for Design holds events all throughout the year that are listed on their website, these events include anything from student-based events to events that help people learn more about the multi-disciplinary options that the Siebel Center for Design offers for students. These events help students better understand the ways in which they can participate in utilizing the resources that this campus has to offer.

Ideals for the Siebel Center for Design

The courses that are provided by the Siebel Center for Design are focused on the idea of design thinking and human-centered design to help students become better equipped for learning. Human-centered design is an important part of creating solutions for a general population by being able to identify the unmet needs of the population by developing these solutions collaboratively and iteratively. The idea of human-centered design is for creating a problem-solving technique that allows the people doing the problem-solving to have real humans to help solve these problems. The benefits of having real people testing the problems create practical solutions to problems that have been proven to actually be helpful allowing for the solutions to be overall more thought out than other potential problem-solving methods. The type of human-centered design that the Siebel Center for Design focuses on is the fact that the research is done in groups to better understand the problems that come up.

Bohlin Cywinski Jackson and the Design Process

The building was made by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, who had a quintessential role in creating the building for the Siebel Center for Design. As a company, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson has a goal of creating buildings that generally allow in a lot of light and utilize materials in such a way that they provide a generally good place for students' mental health. The space was also designed to encourage inspiration to create ideas within this space.

Resident Teams and RSOs

The Siebel Center for Design has a program to allow for student groups or recognized student organizations (RSOs) to have a space within the Siebel Center for Design to utilize the space to be able to create and design within their groups. The Siebel Center for Design provides storage space to allow these students to store various materials that they might need on the premises. The residents are also able to access the space using access through their student identification (iCards) to allow them to access the space at any point in time.

Team for the Siebel Center for Design

The Siebel Center for Design has a team that is composed of developers, designers, and managers to help regulate the general outlook of the building. The other parts of the team include SCD which plays a big role in furthering general design structures while helping to reach SCD's goal of focusing on human-centered design. Then there are SCD scholars who assist in exploring the ideas of human-centered design while getting some hands-on experience in the workplace.