Designers
Designers
Designers
From Wandering To Belonging
Reimagining the city as a campus built on belonging and collaboration
Key Words
Designers
Dhwani Goyal
SUMMARY
I began with a contradiction I saw every day in New York City: creative students are surrounded by people, yet feel profoundly alone. After interviewing 50+ students across Parsons, NYU, FIT, Pratt, and other urban campuses, a deeper question emerged—if the city doesn’t have a campus, what if we build one? I discovered that belonging comes from repeated encounters, shared rhythms, and familiar faces, all missing in urban student life. The Collective is my response: a digital campus that transforms everyday cafés and studios into reliable hubs for collaboration, community, and belonging—reimagining the city itself as a campus.
challenge
I identified a core gap: students lack consistent spaces and systems to form repeated social and creative connections. While they have access to cafés, studios, and co-working spaces, there is no structure that helps them find familiar faces, collaborate regularly, or feel a sense of belonging. Students expressed needs around proximity, affordability, creative alignment, and comfort. This revealed an opportunity to design a system that organizes existing spaces into reliable social hubs, transforming individual workspaces into shared campuses that support collaboration, routine, and community over time.
Outcome
The project ultimately took the form of The Collective, a digital campus platform for creative students in New York City. Rather than creating new physical spaces, it organizes existing cafés, studios, and partner venues into reliable hubs centered on proximity, affordability, and creative alignment. Through features like group sessions, shared events, and visible social presence, the platform enables repeated encounters and ongoing collaboration. This directly addresses the market gap between fragmented urban student life and traditional campuses by providing the structure, rhythm, and familiarity students need to build community.
MEET THE Designers:
Dhwani Goyal