Why Space Matters to Creativity

When we walk into a space, we ask and determine what we can do in that space: What is acceptable? What is allowable? What can happen here and what cannot? What should happen here? We scan the environment, which in its design/structure/furniture helps us produce inferences that allow us to come to provisional answers to […]

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spaces that work collection

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Fostering Inclusivity

How do we, can we, make ‘spaces for making’ inclusive? How can inclusive relationships foster meaningful making? What makes one feel welcomed into or excluded from a particular space serving a particular community of learners? Can makerspaces feel inherently exclusive for students who are not in a particular disciplinary field or who do not look […]

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Design Literacy

We were interested in exploring the notion of “making” outside the traditional disciplinary realms for makerspaces. Then we began asking ourselves if—in fact—making is becoming a new way of being, of being in the world, recognizing that learning as making has the potential to transform human experience in the way that the spread of literacy […]

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A Living/Making Community of Learners

What does a live/make space look like? We are not talking about a live/work place, or a makerspace out in the world. We are asking what might a makerspace be like if you live and work in the same place? Our justification for this question is reflected in the list of items on our poster. […]

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Engaging the Forgotten Stakeholders

During the design phase of a makerspace, various stakeholders (e.g., students, faculty, administration, architects, vendors, etc.) develop a list of student learning outcomes. These are “drivers of success” that the built space and its associated affordances should foster. We call this Makerspace 1.0 — the first iteration of the space.

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LSC Roundtable Collection I: Essays on Designing for Inclusion and Equity

1. Thinking Metaphorically about Spaces for Learning 2. How Do We Disrupt the System? 3. Experience of the User Learner 4. The Yardstick: A New Metaphor for the Process of Planning 5. How Can Space Facilitate the Process of Making Knowledge? 6. Assessing How Spaces Enable Comfort and Belonging 7. Planning and Designing for Inclusivity […]

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Using Space as a Mechanism to Promote Culture Change

In 2013, the University of Arizona was one of only eight universities awarded a grant from the Association of American Universities for an AAU Undergraduate STEM Education Project. The overarching goal of the project at the University of Arizona was to shift the culture to one that embraces evidence-based, active learning strategies. An important component […]

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Personal Reflections from Four Architects: What Keeps Me Up At Night When Thinking About Planning Learning Spaces

What keeps me up at night are always questions about assessment. What keeps me up is how to convince skeptical faculty about the efficacy of “active-learning” pedagogies. What keeps me up at night is about how design has changed, even over my short career. What keeps me up at night is how we need to […]

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How Can Learning Spaces Bridge the Gap Between Academic and Civic Life?

“The questions I brought to this conversation are: ‘what is the purpose of what we do?’ and ‘how do the answers to that question matter to how our students use the spaces?’ Our purpose is to teach students so they learn, grow and have productive, meaningful careers and lives. It is more than scoring on […]

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How Can We Ensure Faculty Buy-in?

How can we ensure faculty “buy-in” to the spaces we are planning? How can we ensure faculty are willing and able to use these new spaces as they have been planned, equipped? What evidence is convincing to faculty?

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Personal Reflection: What Would It Mean If We Began Identifying Existing Institutional Assets in the Early Stage of Planning?

My personal take-away thought from my roundtable experience is the importance of identifying existing institutional assets in the earliest stages of planning. On our campus, we have many: amazing human capital, substantive engagement with a broad community of stakeholders beyond the campus, and a diversity of cultures represented by our students and within our faculty. […]

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From the LSC Roundtables – Descriptors of Spaces that Work

PROCESS/Strategies: A Guide for Adapting a Job-Description Roundtable The LSC Roadmap: PROCESS A Strategy for Planners: Creating a Shared Vision of 21st Century Learning Spaces and Places for 21st Century Learners PROCESS—Strategy: What Keeps You Up at Night When Thinking About Learning Spaces?

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A Conversation with Academics and Architects at WPI: A Job Description of a Space for Project-based Learning

This June 2018 LSC Roundtable focused on a specific pedagogical approach—project-based learning—and on the spatial characteristics and affordances important to the success of that pedagogy. The Roundtable began with participants drawing and describing their mental image of the ideal space for PBL. This was followed by conversations between individuals and teams–about the characteristics of spaces […]

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A Conversation with Academics and Architects at Stanford University: A Job Description for a 21st Century Classroom for 21st Century Learners

Understanding what a space should be, should become, how it enables the desired experiences of those who use such spaces now and into the future is the fundamental responsibility of those who plan, use, and assess spaces and places for learning—all stakeholders in the institutional future. This understanding of how spaces matter to the experience […]

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Job Description for a Classroom

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Questions Academics and Architects Should Be Asking

What we should be doing in the discovery/planning process is asking some really absurd questions: What if the library we are planning now becomes a humanities classroom building in the future? What if we did not think about flexibility as though everything had to turn on a dime? What if we had a better sense […]

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Planning and Designing for Inclusivity

“Our group was drawn together by the similarity of our individual introductory reflections on what keeps us up at night. Each of us said something about not being quite sure we have a clear understanding of who our learners are, about the students for whom we are planning learning spaces. Speaking as an architect, this […]

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How Can Space Facilitate the Process of Making Knowledge?

How can space facilitate the process of “making” knowledge, including demystifying failure, nurturing, and embracing students as assets, and promoting life-long-learning? Our group saw this as an important question as we began to think about students as assets in the learning process. We understand failure as an integral part of the process of generating knowledge […]

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The Yardstick: A New Metaphor for the Process of Planning

Our team began thinking about the dichotomy of approaches to planning learning spaces. One group is concerned about the educational mission and the other about the design work. These are two different perspectives on the process of planning. Architects are thinking about the start of the design process, the solution at the end, and the […]

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How Do We Disrupt the System?

We were asked to articulate and visualize the most audacious question to be asked by a planning team of academics or of academics and architects at the very beginning of planning. We intend to challenge the current planning process, by asking this question: How do we disrupt the system?

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Thinking Metaphorically about Spaces for Learning

We began with an overarching discussion about student-centered, student-focused, student-driven learning spaces. We were fluid about the particular spaces we were thinking about: a lecture hall, lab, makerspace, whatever. Our feeling was that the ideas we were discussing spanned many different kinds of learning and learning spaces, from libraries to spaces for career counseling, and […]

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