Learning Environments Extraordinaire!

I ran into a cool thing that could have great impact on how we design learning environments at Kinnarps, a Swedish furniture company, in Kinnarp, a minuscule village in Sweden. Kinnarps have created an office environment at their showroom that’s composed of 18 different environments and they invite organisations to come and work in that environment for a day or so... Generous and fine enough but now to the brilliant part: they study HOW you work and WHICH environments you prefer to use. The result is kind of a fingerprint: This is how your office should look like, if if you worked in your preferred environments... Guess what the most popular environment is? -"The Library"a dark blue room with subdued light and persian rugs, not your standard office space...

Just imagine that you did the same exercise with a school (and you really could do that at Kinnarps). Imagine that you offered students and teachers the showroom for a day or a week, what would happen, which spaces and places would be used and which would not be used? Imagine they were offered a couple of classrooms alongside the showroom, how intensely would they be used?

I'm not saying we should have showrooms as schools but I do think that we should consider the connection between the kind of learning we want to take place and the places we choose or create. If given the choice, how would your preferred mix of environments look like? For one: at the showroom i Kinnarp they have a system where employees organize themselves and the working environment within one system. Just imagine this being done in a school: Teachers choosing the right learning environment for the kind of processes and learning the want to promote. -Bye, bye standard schedule!

Another interesting fact: Kinnarps has investigated average rate of utilisation in any office to somewhere between 30-40%. This creates a possibility: you can raise the quality of the working environment by paying less for square meters and put the money into well defined environments suited to your firms particular needs. 

Again, do the trick in a school: What kind of environments would be high in demand IF a school could create and environment that was 100% adapted to their preferred needs and methods? -I mean, the only reason for a school to have an environment with 90% classrooms must be that pedagogy to 90% is built on the assumptions like: of 1 class = one teacher, 25-30 students = a group, ”interaction”=”within a class”, ”teachers=work separately, not in teams”, ”classrooms=multipurpose=neutral and equal design” etc. This should be questioned since it contradicts most of our curricula and the skills we need to promote. Great schools have done this and and we at RAU are supporting some of them. - Great projects coming up soon, and we will keep you posted!

/Ante Runnquist