Creating a physical hub of innovation on campus can support creativity, collaboration and entrepreneurship. Here are things to consider before getting too far into the process.
How to Launch a Campus Innovation Center
The Human Factor in Learning Communities
Throughout 2015, Metropolis’s publisher and editor in chief Susan S. Szenasy visited leading architecture and design firms across the country as part of the Metropolis Think Tank series of discussions on key issues surrounding human-centered design. On February 19, 2015, she talked to designers and principals of the San Francisco architecture, design, and consulting firm Gensler and their consultants about new approaches to education, technology, community building, and the role of irreverence and play in shaping a new educational landscape. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.
5 Ways Digital Tools Are Transforming the Education Space
K–12 thought leader Eric Sheninger offers guidance on how to manage an arsenal of digital tools in the classroom. Digital tools are transforming essential elements of the education space. Understanding how they are affecting teaching and learning will help you figure out which tools are useful and how best to implement them.
New Research: Students Learn Better in Classrooms with Views of Trees
What if what is outside a school’s windows is as critical to learning as what’s inside the building? A fascinating new study of high school students in central Illinois found that students with a view of trees were able to recover their ability to pay attention and bounce back from stress more rapidly than those who looked out on a parking lot or had no windows. The researchers, William Sullivan, ASLA, professor of landscape architecture at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Dongying Li, a PhD student there, reported their findings in the journalLandscape and Urban Planning.
Innovation Challenge Blends Active Learning, Students and Professionals, and Fun
In January 2016, DLR Group sponsored our third Innovation Challenge, this one held at the Minnesota School Board Association Conference (MSBA), in Minneapolis, Minn. The firm initially introduced this competition at the National School Boards Association (NSBA) Annual Conference in 2015 in Nashville. We use the event to observe how kids learn and interact with professionals in a real-life setting, which ultimately influences our future designs.
Why Schools And Hospitals Should Be More Like Theme Parks
Understanding how designers create theme parks could help us reimagine our most important social institutions.
How Low-Cost Designs Can Support High-Tech Classrooms
Although technology is an attractive add to a stale classroom, stuffing schools with high tech tools isn’t the answer to offering dynamic learning experiences. Technology is certainly a part of that solution, but the rest of the environment has to also be considered and curated. To expect any standalone product to change the dynamic of a classroom feels unrealistic.
Classroom Ergonomics: Getting Children Posture Perfect
Designers are working incredibly hard to achieve workplace comfort for adult employees through ergonomic furniture, sit-stand desks, active spaces and touches of greenery to help physical and mental health, but what about our children’s work spaces?
New study indicates students’ cognitive functioning improves when using standing desks
Do students think best when on their feet? A new study by the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health indicates they do.
Findings published recently in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health provide the first evidence of neurocognitive benefits of stand-height desks in classrooms, where students are given the choice to stand or sit based on their preferences.
Just Released: BIG and Leo A Daly’s Cascading Design for a Public School
Stacked bars fan around a central axis in a scheme that merges an experimental outlook with distinct academic needs.
EDUCATION TRENDS: THE VIRTUAL CLASSROOM
With a multitude of education trends coming to light, virtual learning is among the most common, and most effective in American classrooms. Using a blend of resources, virtual learning provides students with an opportunity to immerse themselves in classes taught online. How the class is conducted depends on the preferences of the instructor and the students. In some cases, communication between the instructor and students takes place mainly through email as assignments are completed. This type of virtual classroom does not rely on video communication technology, and is easy to blend with traditional, in-class learning. In a different type of virtual classroom, some instructors may choose to communicate their information by purely employing video communication technology. These courses are usually independent and are not part of a blend with a traditional learning classroom.
New-school: ZAS create non-conformist design for York University
How can a school building reinvent the way students are taught? ZAS Architects give us a demonstration with their recently completed design for Toronto’s Bergeron Centre for Engineering Excellence at York University.
Forget 'Sit down!' Students now standing up to learn
While the concept of standing desks is still a new one in education, there are examples across the country of schools moving away from the traditional "sitting all the time" approach to a standing and moving environment.
The New Learning Environment: Student Focused, Student Approved
When we embark on a new project, the aim is to gather feedback from key stakeholders and multiple user groups to ensure our design meets the needs of our client. Arguably, one of the most important voices is that of the end user, or the student.
Over the past decade we’ve seen a shift in the types of spaces students prefer. At the onset of every project we ask the simple question “how do you learn best?” and we continually hear three common factors that can be creatively weaved into our final design solution.
HIGHER EDUCATION/ A WORLD OF CHANGE
Did you earn your college degree back in the 20th century? Then perhaps you remember a freshman History of Ideas lecture at 8am—the one you sat through with 300 other sleepy students. Your professor stood at a podium and chalked words on a blackboard while students scribbled notes and dozed. Remember the card catalog at the library? Call slips? Typewriters? Maybe you had a pager to keep in touch with friends. Or, perhaps you had to rely on pay phones or the wall-mounted phone in your dorm room.
The Latest Fresh DIRTT: Rafael Vinoly Architects
Ubiquitous, easily accessible technology was a critical element for this school of medicine’s new multi-story facility built on top of an existing building. The 16 classes had to be able to support different types of learning and instruction, from lectures and collaborative projects to individual study and research. Writable surfaces were used as often as possible to maximize the working space; and carefully integrated room schedulers and key card access ensure the rooms are used efficiently. Technology also played a key role up front: the school used DIRTT’s 3D ICE® flythroughs to fully understand how their space would look… and as a powerful fundraising tool to offset construction costs.
Indiana University Global and International Studies Building
The new Global and International Studies Building defines an important cultural and academic crossroads at the heart of campus. Home to the new School of Global and International Studies and many of the language, literature and culture studies programs in IU’s College of Arts and Sciences, the new building provides flexible spaces for teaching and learning that extend beyond the classroom to foster collaboration and inter-disciplinary education.