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High stakes
Dundee & Angus College is one of Scotland’s largest secondary education providers, with between 16,000-18,000 students enrolled annually across its full-time and part-time programs. The College operates across three campuses and offers students a wide range of courses, including accounting, construction crafts, computer games and Esports development, cyber security, and performing arts.
Dundee is Scotland’s fourth largest city and faces significant socioeconomic challenges, including high levels of child poverty, unemployment rates above the Scottish average, and a higher prevalence of substance abuse.
Dundee & Angus College is seeking to transform their campuses to drive growth and regeneration in the area, with an estimated value of £1.8 billion. To do this, they first needed to answer some key questions: How will the College operate in future? How can new buildings help transform the local community and bring education, employability services and support together in one place for the first time in Scotland? How can the architecture embody the College’s values?
The Dundee & Angus College leadership team brought in Aéto to help chart their path forward.
The art of the possible
Rather than beginning with floorplans or room schedules, we began with conversations.
We immersed ourselves in the College, spending time with the principal, with the leadership team, and in and around the existing campuses to get a better feel for what the project could become.
From there, we designed workskhops that encouraged leaders to move beyond today’s operational challenges and imagine the College twenty years from now. Through that conversation we started to draw out what they wanted from the project – for the students, for the College, and for the local community.
To help spark discussions like these, we’ve created a deck of conversation cards to shift dialogue away from solely focusing on buildings to consider people, purpose and possibility.
Across our workshops, we’ve seen leadership team members shift from protecting individual domains to embracing a much more collegiate and altruistic mindset – all through the power of conversation.
Throughout our time with them, we saw firsthand how the Dundee & Angus team embraced the magic of meaningful exchange, starting to lay down the first brushstrokes on the future they could co-create.
We then facilitated a follow up offsite workshop with the entire leadership team as well as the appointed architect, where through a series of exercises we helped them articulate their vision for the College in the future. Together we explored how education might change over the coming decades. We discussed emerging technologies, the future of work and the evolving needs of learners, asking what new courses the College might one day offer as well as which existing ones might disappear altogether.
Just as importantly, we explored what success should feel like. Could the building itself embody qualities like kindness, belonging and opportunity? Could it strengthen connections between the College and the wider local community?
Pen to paper
Ideas are most valuable when they can be shared. Our role wasn’t simply to facilitate discussions; we needed to synthesise hundreds of thoughts and ideas into a clear and compelling vision that leaders, architects, government officials and partners could all sign up to deliver.
We took all this away and weaved together what we heard into a vision booklet that speaks to the ambitious, one-in-a-generation opportunity ahead. More than just a report, it became a tool for alignment.
Its accessible format means it can be carried into meetings with ministers, architects, city officials and industry partners, ensuring everyone is working towards the same ambition. It spells out the size of the prize and what getting it right can mean for an area ripe to benefit from the investment.
The vision booklet helps bring to life possibility that accompanies the College’s transformation, helping leaders, partners and stakeholders rally around a shared ambition. By creating the conditions for meaningful conversations and clear strategic thinking, Dundee & Angus College now has a compelling vision to guide the next stage of its journey.