Designing Spaces for Learning and Living in Schools: perspectives of a 'flaneuse'

The design elements of school learning spaces - classrooms, laboratories, libraries, studios - have the potential to position learners and teachers and to prohibit, authorise, situate and regulate the ways in which learning takes place. Approaches to the designing of learning spaces can fail to take into account the changing social, cultural, pedagogical and technological factors impacting on learners and teachers. How can such taken-for-granted spaces accommodate the needs of learners and teachers and respond to the demands of 'rich task' curriculum and 'real world' learning experiences? Acknowledging Donald Schon's (1983) perspective that 'all occupations engaged in converting actual to preferred situations are concerned with design', this paper is linked to a site visit and workshop conducted in the Ken Thamm Information Resource Centre at Immanuel Lutheran College, Buderim as part of the 2005 Australian Curriculum Studies Conference Blurring the Boundaries – Sharpening the Focus

Libraries in transition: evolving the information ecology of the Learning Commons: a sabbatical report

This sabbatical report studied various models in order to determine best practices for design, implementation and service of Leaning Commons, a library service model which functionally and spatially integrates library services, information technology services, and media services to provide a continuum of services to the user

Designing with Care - Interior Design and Residential Child Care Final Report

This exploratory study examined the attitudes to a range of design interventions in four residential care homes for children in South Lanarkshire. The project set out to identify the benefits and disadvantages to young people and staff of a change in approach to the design of interior spaces. It was undertaken by Farm7 (specialists in design research and consultancy) and the Scottish Institute for Residential Child Care (SIRCC). The main focus of the research was to evaluate design interventions aimed at removing 'institutional' approaches to design in the care environment and improving the experience of looked after children. This involved the commissioning of interior design consultants Graven Images in the development and design of South Lanarkshire's residential children's homes. Post-occupancy evaluation of the four residential homes was undertaken with the participation of both looked after children and staff. It was envisaged that this study would contribute to the development of design guidance that will promote a more systematic approach to the design of care environments. This will allow social work and design professionals to draw on a design framework in order to significantly enhance the experience of looked after children and staff

Collaborative Practices that Support Creativity in Design

Design is a ubiquitous, collaborative and highly material activity. Because of the embodied nature of the design profession, designers apply certain collaborative practices to enhance creativity in their everyday work. Within the domain of industrial design, we studied two educational design departments over a period of eight months. Using examples from our fieldwork, we develop our results around three broad themes related to collaborative practices that support the creativity of design professionals: 1) externalization, 2) use of physical space, and 3) use of bodies. We believe that these themes of collaborative practices could provide new insights into designing technologies for supporting a varied set of design activities. We describe two conceptual collaborative systems derived from the results of our study

Designing and evaluating mobile multimedia user experiences in public urban places: Making sense of the field

The majority of the world’s population now lives in cities (United Nations, 2008) resulting in an urban densification requiring people to live in closer proximity and share urban infrastructure such as streets, public transport, and parks within cities. However, “physical closeness does not mean social closeness” (Wellman, 2001, p. 234). Whereas it is a common practice to greet and chat with people you cross paths with in smaller villages, urban life is mainly anonymous and does not automatically come with a sense of community per se. Wellman (2001, p. 228) defines community “as networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging and social identity.” While on the move or during leisure time, urban dwellers use their interactive information communication technology (ICT) devices to connect to their spatially distributed community while in an anonymous space. Putnam (1995) argues that available technology privatises and individualises the leisure time of urban dwellers. Furthermore, ICT is sometimes used to build a “cocoon” while in public to avoid direct contact with collocated people (Mainwaring et al., 2005; Bassoli et al., 2007; Crawford, 2008). Instead of using ICT devices to seclude oneself from the surrounding urban environment and the collocated people within, such devices could also be utilised to engage urban dwellers more with the urban environment and the urban dwellers within. Urban sociologists found that “what attracts people most, it would appear, is other people” (Whyte, 1980, p. 19) and “people and human activity are the greatest object of attention and interest” (Gehl, 1987, p. 31). On the other hand, sociologist Erving Goffman describes the concept of civil inattention, acknowledging strangers’ presence while in public but not interacting with them (Goffman, 1966). With this in mind, it appears that there is a contradiction between how people are using ICT in urban public places and for what reasons and how people use public urban places and how they behave and react to other collocated people. On the other hand there is an opportunity to employ ICT to create and influence experiences of people collocated in public urban places. The widespread use of location aware mobile devices equipped with Internet access is creating networked localities, a digital layer of geo-coded information on top of the physical world (Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011). Foursquare.com is an example of a location based 118 Mobile Multimedia – User and Technology Perspectives social network (LBSN) that enables urban dwellers to virtually check-in into places at which they are physically present in an urban space. Users compete over ‘mayorships’ of places with Foursquare friends as well as strangers and can share recommendations about the space. The research field of Urban Informatics is interested in these kinds of digital urban multimedia augmentations and how such augmentations, mediated through technology, can create or influence the UX of public urban places. “Urban informatics is the study, design, and practice of urban experiences across different urban contexts that are created by new opportunities of real-time, ubiquitous technology and the augmentation that mediates the physical and digital layers of people networks and urban infrastructures” (Foth et al., 2011, p. 4). One possibility to augment the urban space is to enable citizens to digitally interact with spaces and urban dwellers collocated in the past, present, and future. “Adding digital layer to the existing physical and social layers could facilitate new forms of interaction that reshape urban life” (Kjeldskov & Paay, 2006, p. 60). This methodological chapter investigates how the design of UX through such digital placebased mobile multimedia augmentations can be guided and evaluated. First, we describe three different applications that aim to create and influence the urban UX through mobile mediated interactions. Based on a review of literature, we describe how our integrated framework for designing and evaluating urban informatics experiences has been constructed. We conclude the chapter with a reflective discussion on the proposed framework

Brokering between heads and hearts: an analysis of designing for social change

This paper describes a fluid and responsive design process identified among certain practitioners involved in solving social problems or inspiring social change. Their practice is both user-centred and participative in its approach and addresses the shortcomings of many top-down initiatives. These people work tactically to weave together policy knowledge, funding opportunities, local initiative and ideas for improving social and environmental conditions, acting as connectors, activists and facilitators in different contexts at different times. Although their activities are recognisably related to more conventional designing practices, the materials they use in finding solutions are unusual in that they may include the beneficiaries themselves and other features of the social structure in which they are effecting change. We present an ethnographic study of practices in designing that focuses on social initiatives rather than the tangible products or systems that might support them. We explore the how design practices map to the process of winning local people's commitment to projects with a social flavour. To situate the discussion in a political context we draw on de Certeau’s distinction between strategic and tactical behaviour and look at how our informants occupy a space as mediators between groups with power and a sense of agency and those without. Keywords: Social Change; Ethnographic Action Research; Discourse Analysis; Designing In The Wild</p

3D online spaces for teacher education: mapping the territory

[Abstract]: If familiarity with games played out in 3D online spaces is truly a defining characteristic of the emerging generations of learners then teacher educators need to attend to these environments both as venues for teacher preparation and as a subject of study for preparing teachers who will be expected to work in such environments. As an aid to investigating possible applications of 3D online spaces in teacher education some means of mapping out the territory to be explored is desirable. This paper proposes one such map and suggests examples of applications that might be explored various areas of the map

What lessons can be transferred to higher education learning landscapes from the leadership, governance and management processes of school design projects?

This review reports experiences from the schools sector in involving stakeholders in the processes of managing school building design. Its aim was to see if any of this could offer guidance for higher education as their learning landscapes are reconceptualised. School architects and designers have gradually accepted grater stakeholder involvement especially from pupils and to a lesser extent from teachers and many innovative ways have been found to make their participation authentic. These could be adapted in higher education together with teacher education in new pedagogies and better liaison with governors

Designing Familiar Open Surfaces

While participatory design makes end-users part of the design process, we might also want the resulting system to be open for interpretation, appropriation and change over time to reflect its usage. But how can we design for appropriation? We need to strike a good balance between making the user an active co-constructor of system functionality versus making a too strong, interpretative design that does it all for the user thereby inhibiting their own creative use of the system. Through revisiting five systems in which appropriation has happened both within and outside the intended use, we are going to show how it can be possible to design with open surfaces. These open surfaces have to be such that users can fill them with their own interpretation and content, they should be familiar to the user, resonating with their real world practice and understanding, thereby shaping its use

IAMS framework: a new framework for acceptable user experiences for integrating physical and virtual identity access management systems

The modern world is populated with so many virtual and physical Identity Access Management Systems (IAMSs) that individuals are required to maintain numerous passwords and login credentials. The tedious task of remembering multiple login credentials can be minimised through the utilisation of an innovative approach of single sign-in mechanisms. During recent times, several systems have been developed to provide physical and virtual identity management systems; however, most have not been very successful. Many of the available systems do not provide the feature of virtual access on mobile devices via the internet; this proves to be a limiting factor in the usage of the systems. Physical spaces, such as offices and government entities, are also favourable places for the deployment of interoperable physical and virtual identity management systems, although this area has only been explored to a minimal level. Alongside increasing the level of awareness for the need to deploy interoperable physical and virtual identity management systems, this paper addresses the immediate need to establish clear standards and guidelines for successful integration of the two medium