How Planning Happens: Asking Questions

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 […]

spaces that work collection

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Roadmap: Process