Publish at April 01 2014 Updated April 24 2024
If you teach, whether to adults, youth, or children, you know the strong constraint that space places on your activities. Your group is making noise, and there's the colleague poking his head through your room's door demanding that you quiet down. It's hot in your room and you'd rather go outside, but there's no outdoor space where your students can comfortably sit. Some would like to work alone while others engage in a heated discussion, but the narrowness of the room does not allow for differentiated activities.
And the worst part is that, with few exceptions, new educational buildings do not change anything fundamental about the canonical division of space into boxes called classrooms. At most, they add a few free-walking spaces, a cafeteria (which, by the way, you have the hardest time getting your students out of when it's time to go back to class), and a few benches if you're lucky enough to have a courtyard or garden, which are in any case not plentiful or practical enough for you to use regularly.
Rosan Bosch, a Dutch designer based in Copenhagen, Denmark, has decided to change that, radically. She outlines her approach in a talk at TEDx Indianapolis.
She was first approached by a Swedish organization as part of the design of a new school, the Vittra School Telefonplan in Stockholm. This project involved student, teacher, and community representatives from the start. The discussions were extremely productive, but Bosch was struggling with how to turn all this input into concrete proposals for spatial organization. Until 5 fundamental and recurring needs emerged, materialized as icons:
Let's take a look at their meaning, from left to right.
"Mountain": refers to spaces for frontal communication, one person in front of a group, with a stand to hang or show items.
"Cave": refers to individual, concentrated work spaces, separated from their environment.
"Campfire": refers to meeting spaces, in which small groups can be formed and discussed freely.
"Watering hole": refers to free-flowing spaces facilitating informal exchanges.
"Hands on": refers to spaces in which one can move, use one's body, make.
Rosan Bosch had found the key opening the door to dialogue between building users and designers, which she would not stop using thereafter.
On the floor plan of the Swedish school, these different spaces have been materialized. Most of them are open because it's easier to get people to move around than the facilities, Rosan Bosch wisely says. Others are closed to facilitate concentration and not to disturb other users. In this school, as in others, it is the design of the space that induces appropriate behavior. But unlike traditional buildings, here there was recognition of the diversity of needs depending on the times, the nature of the activities conducted, and especially the individuals.
The school in question accommodates children and youth from 6 to 16 years of age. It is therefore not a question of creating a favorable environment for the "little ones" and then returning to a more traditional organization, when school irrevocably becomes something serious. Everyone benefits from this new organization and finds their place in it.
The furniture has been redesigned, too. See for example these "organic" tables, with non-rectilinear edges: you can thus choose the distance that separates you from the person opposite. Or these very low seats but with very high backs that allow students to sit in two rows and thus follow several on the same laptop screen.
Ah yes, computers: at this school, students are given a laptop at age 6 and move around with it, carrying everything they need to work.
Luxury school? Not really. Take a close look at the photos of the various learning space design projects created by Rosa Bosch's studio: you'll see that there's nothing ostentatious about the furniture and decor, nor is it made of luxurious materials. Instead, everything is cheerful, colorful and hyper-functional.
Of course, these new kind of schools are better suited to project-based learning that makes extensive use of digital tools than to traditional teaching based on the transmission of knowledge and the standardization of learning methods. But precisely: since we admit that this teaching must evolve (see our dossier dedicated to education tomorrow), let's be consistent and tackle the question of how to organize the space that facilitates this mutation. Perhaps we will then succeed in ensuring that pupils and students of all ages do not desert the places of knowledge, but that on the contrary they rush to them, insofar as they are recognized as people with their particular tastes and needs and with a level of autonomy denied by the current organization.
References:
Bosch, Rosan. "Designing for a better world starts at school: Rosan Bosch at TEDxIndianapolis." YouTube. Last modified 17 November 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5mpeEa_VZo.
Rosan Bosch Agency, Copenhagen: http://www.rosanbosch.com/en
See in particular the page presenting the projects, which show that R. Bosch used the principles of spatial organization developed for the school world in many other settings (companies, museums, universities, hospital): http://www.rosanbosch.com/en/projects
Illustrations:
1: screenshot from Rosan Bosch agency website, Vittra School Sodermalm project
2: screenshot of the Designing for a better world str-arts at school: Rosan Bosch at TEDxIndianapolis
video.3: screenshot from Rosan Bosch agency website, Bornholms Efterskole project
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