Designing a better future learning space now!
This is what I shared at "What We Do".
This project is a collaboration between 3 students, Arthur Harsuvanakit, Judy Chang and myself at the Rhode Island School of Design from different backgrounds (Architecture, Interior Architecture and Industrial Design) coming together to design the future learning space for a Architecture for Humanity competition. As we began doing research in the history of education and how schools are designed based on the philosophy of teaching and learning of the day. The most important and striking conclusion we made is that the changes in the physical space can never keep up with the changes in teaching and learning philosophy. This changed our approach to this project from this point on, we didn't want to fall into this ever ending cycle, where the design for the future is not going to be relevant in the near future.
The challenge now is to make existing (no-longer future) spaces relevant to the current philosophies. We reached out to local schools in Providence, Rhode Island and decided to work with Classical High School. This is a school built to be modern in the 50s in the brutalist style, with the heavy use of concrete and a floor plan that is hard to understand. The space is unwelcoming and reminded me of a prison. The school is scheduled to be remodeled and renovated in 2017 although the layout of the school no longer serve their purpose and philosophy.
Instead of waiting years for the government to intervene, we saw the opportunity to empower the students to make changes to the school now with what they have. Rather than conforming to the top-down philosophy, we adopted the bottom-up approach. We want to empower students and give them ownership over their learning space. As we started to work with the school, we decided to create a learning program for the students after school. We created a discussion space where we talked about the frustrations that the students and the school faced, however it is when we can look beyond the frustration and realize the real challenge, that we can start to make a difference.
We identities two main issues that we want to tackle, the lack of identity and community. As we walked around the school, we saw that the students have used murals to cover up the nasty concrete walls. We walked into one of the stairwell dubbed as the Imaginary stairwell, embeds a powerful story. A group of students stayed after school hours to put up an installation to encourage the seniors as they took their SATs by spelling out "Imagine" on the wall. This installation encouraged more students to go out of their way to use the space now that it is different.
Being inspired by the student's efforts, we decided that the best strategy is to make small and manageable interventions in the school by the students to respond to student's frustration, create identity to spaces and to help create a better learning environment. The first intervention we made is to respond to the frustration of the poor circulation in the school. With the student's idea of creating traffic signs, we pushed it further and used tape art to put arrows on the walls leading to the right door in which you should go through. We were able to use art to solve a real problem, created identity and got people talking.
Our next project is a little more complex and more ambitious. We were going to respond to the lack of recycling in the school and the lack of community. We wanted to design an object that could embody these story and history. We designed a piece of interactive furniture made out of cardboard that could be moved around and manipulated. The final product is one that creates a space for students to interact and learn from each other; one that generates conversation and respond to a very real need. This is just the beginning of the building process, we are hoping to build a 20 feet "snake" that would really command the space.
This object is design to wear down, and as it wears it embeds the history of the school and the students who interacts with it. The idea of the project is not to design beautiful objects, but to use objects to define and enhance existing spaces to be more effective in engaging students in conversations and learning.
The challenge is to look beyond the furstration and see the opportunity. It is always closer than you think. We broke free from the old cycle and see what is relevant now.
We will be designing more objects for the school, so keep checking back for updates.
