Trend Forecasting for Academic Spaces

“Don’t try to follow trends. Create them.”

- Simon Zingerman

Technology-Led Education

Learning environments are undergoing a drastic transformation and with the growing technological and spatial impact on educational models, as students become more engaged in technologically enabled learning and educators rethink the ways of teaching using technology as an integrated part, spaces need to be re-designed with the various application requirements.

In view of the current devastating global outbreak of the novel coronavirus and its subsequent effect on education, new ways of learning and educating are making the educators and students more technology friendly, which will be carried forward to the phase when they will be going back to their institutions, but by then their needs would have changed.

Active Learning

Research has shown that the learning environment has physical, social and cognitive effect on students and their performance. Active learning is the keyword here. Earlier the classrooms were designed to accommodate lecture mode, but now the educator has become more of a facilitator and the stress is more on individual focused study, collaborative group projects, and brain-storming sessions. All these require students to be creative and innovative. They need to keep changing their posture and should have inspiring spaces around them. Technology needs to be in-built in the space to facilitate online gathering and sharing of information, one to one interaction requires separate space dividers, and students need to take rejuvenation breaks for which they require wider corridors with setups enabling them to do so.

The space design should support student engagement. Academic spaces need to be flexible, multi-purpose, each space needs to be broken down into different zones to cater to different posture-change requirement.

Providing these Active learning classrooms has measurable improvement in grades as well as enhancing their skill sets for critical analysis, problem solving and innovative thinking.

Reinventing Classrooms

Over the past few years the importance of having breakout spaces outside the classroom has been accepted as essential design requirement, this will be increasingly implemented to promote peer to peer interaction-led learning. The furniture provided in these areas need to have inbuilt technology for ease of internet access as well as have charging facility.

Small pockets of different posture setting will need to be provided for students to change seamlessly between different modes of learning. Every student needs a dedicated space, but several zones can be set up for groups, reading, and classmate gatherings. It surrounds the space offering different choices from where one can work. Classrooms to have mobile and height adjustable tables with technology access, high tables with stools to have quick ideation sessions, video-conferencing enabled furniture with capability to display multiple screens for project work, social settings in corridors, banquettes and workbenches provide convenient places for last-minute class preparation or to quickly debrief with a faculty member or fellow student afterwards. Writable walls to allow spontaneous learning. These spaces would need to be designed and furnished for maximum versatility.

The Way Ahead for Academic Spaces

The coming years will witness a revolution in the way knowledge is transferred and embodied, which will trigger the need to reboot the educational spaces to accommodate the rapid rise and inclusion of technology.

The new way of learning and designing will bring together the best of technology-empowered learning into bricks and mortar institutions. The outcomes can be positively impacting, for teachers as well as their students. The design and furnishings of educational spaces would also be crucial to their success, both to support new models of education as well as to attract high-calibre students and faculty.

This brings us to conclude that the new-age academic design will have synergy between space, pedagogy and technology.