May | 2012 | Emergent Form

One of the great things about the workshops on Learning Space Design last week was seeing the students interact with the different furniture and settings in a thoughtful way. Then to record their thoughts and take the ideas back to the tables for discussion. Some of course, couldn’t wait that long and engaged in discussions over lunch. Fantastic.

Another thing that impressed me a lot was the eloquence and thoughtful conclusions and commitments from the tables at the end of the day – most from the students on video in front of 200 people. Surely this is a huge source of ideas, imagination and experience we should tap into when designing anything from classroom furniture through various spaces through to whole school dynamics and space use.

Why stop there? In a time when the options for learning are exploding in terms of technology support, space design, context, timing and mode of learning – who knows what works better than the student. Couple this with a teaching staff who can tap into this source of ideas on a continuous basis for refining, sharing and extending the thinking across the school and even beyond.

Then we jointly develop winning innovations that take each unique learning space to reality.

Project: Learning Space Design workshop series

Year: 2012

Client: Architects, Educators and Facilities Planners

Focus: Innovation, Capability

By: Emergent Form

The increasing importance of re-thinking the way we design spaces for learning becomes more obvious with each wave of new technology, the increasing pervasiveness of internet access and the need to accommodate the shifts in teaching styles and learning styles. The best way to take advantage of what is known and discovered in Western Australia and indeed the world, is to take advantage of the pilots and experiments and then applying the most appropriate to each unique situation.

The workshop held in November 2011 with Prof Stephen Heppell (#heppelltime) showed a demand for more information on this topic and that there was now an appetite to consider new approaches since most schools had completed rounds of maintenance and update building as a result of the Federal money injected post the GFC. Now was time to consider the next round of building in the context of these shifts. It was with this in mind that Emergent Form, together with Xcite Logic and EIW Architects came together with Prof Stephen Heppell to run a one day workshop at the University Club in Crawley.

Exploring the new cannot be done by schools and education institutions alone and so this workshop series involved architects, facilities planners, builders, furniture makers and educationalists. In fact, the tables for the main workshop were comprised of most of these groups – importantly with Students too. The aim here was to explore the best examples from around the world with Prof Heppell and then look at six WA examples as case studies to be discussed with a panel of experts. Added to this, the students were able to try combinations of furniture and record their thoughts on iPads to bring to the tables for discussion.

The keynote by Prof Heppell is below as is the case study session.

Keynote – Prof Stephen Heppell

WA Case Studies – Paul Houghton, Stephen Heppell, Alec O’Connell, Lara Mackintosh, various others…

Archive For May, 2012

Learning from students

Learning Space Design