What if you woke up one day with your OPIM professor's face staring down at you?
If you decide that non-linear optimization problems are just too much in the morning, the offending academic could be exorcised from your dorm room by a simple touch on the wall.
The floor-to-ceiling media wall could then fade to a more peaceful scene. Think verdant pastures and bubbling creeks.
Once you've fully revived yourself, you could tap the screen again to tune back into the lecture. You could even make yourself breakfast while absorbing those Excel models.
Could this sort of cushy life be possible at Penn? The university's director of housing, Doug Berger, seems to think so.
"Sooner or later, it's just going to be natural, and we'll see some of these features in homes," Berger said.
Berger has been a member of the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International for the past 27 years. ACUHO-I organizes a dorm room design competition called the 21st Century Project, which seeks to build a vision for campus residential living 25 years into the future.
The designs submitted have been pretty cutting-edge. The winning "flexDorm" plan envisions modular rooms built off-site and then stacked on campus. Each room is fully customizable, with foldable furniture and mobile walls.
If several suites of students want to get together to watch Monday Night Football, the room partitions can be moved to create a larger hang-out space. On the other hand, a student who needs privacy for studying can slide walls around to box herself into a corner.
Space is optimized by turning a bathroom into a shower stall, with a single sink-and-toilet unit sitting on a water-repellent floor. The illusion of space is enhanced by translucent media walls doubling as windows.
Other designs from the 21st Century Project include collapsible rooms which could be shipped to study-abroad sites and toilets which generate electricity from waste.
Personally, I'm a fan of the programmable media wall idea. Imagine no more sneaky charges appearing on your Penn bill from the holes you left in the drywall after hanging up posters.
The designs are not meant to be "so far out there that it's like Star Trek," says James Baumann of ACUHO-I. The organization hopes to use these concepts to build a prototype on an actual campus.
Certain universities have already taken steps towards these dorms of the future. The new $36-million Park Hall at Ball State University features rooms with mobile furniture, a laundry room that automatically e-mails students when their loads are done, and a dining hall that receives online orders for takeout.
A possible obstacle to the construction of futuristic dorms is the rapid rise and obsolescence of new technologies. When Berger arrived at Penn nine years ago, most students owned desktop computers with huge towers and monitors. Penn Housing ordered large desks to accommodate all this hardware.
"Now we've gone back to little space-saving desks because students are using laptops and sitting in their beds to use their laptops. All those desks we bought nine years ago, they're very functional, but we wouldn't buy them today."
Penn Housing will likely center its efforts on sustainability, whether that means using eco-friendly materials or flexible building designs which can be altered decades from now.
Berger cited monitoring of water use and energy levels across buildings as a focus. For example, a test laundry room at Mayer Hall tracks water use by the machines.
Students need to be a part of this effort, says Berger. "It can't be about an administrator standing in an office and looking down."
A green roof atop King's Court-English House is a step towards integrating ideas on sustainability with residential life. The roof will reduce heat in summer, provide insulation in winter, and support a habitat for wildlife.
"I'm all for it," says Huascar Canaan, a College senior and RA on the Biosphere floor in King's Court-English. Canaan believes that house residents view this construction positively. He says everyone wants to know what it's going to look like.
KC-EH residents will cease living in suspense once the green roof is unveiled in the fall.
We may have to wait a decade, though, before we can order our dorm rooms online and ship them to campus.
Rina Thomas is a Wharton and College senior from New Orleans. Her e-mail address is thomas@dailypennsylvanian.com. The Gospel According to Thomas appears on Thursdays.
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