Monthly Archives: January 2012

Designing Space to Facilitate Creativity and Collaboration.

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Is Sweden’s Classroom-Free School the Future of Learning?
by Liz Dwyer; re-posted by Zakary Zide

The traditional setup of school classrooms—straight rows of desks with accompanying chairs—doesn’t do much to foster creativity or collaboration. Many experts have proposed redesigning classroom furniture, but a Swedish school system wants to take things a step further. Vittra, which operates 30 schools in Sweden, is seeking to ensure learning takes place everywhere on campus by eliminating classrooms altogether.

The newest Vittra school, Telefonplan, opened its doors last August. Designed by architecture firm Rosan Bosch, the Stockholm-area campus seems more like a creative space you’d find at Google or Pixar than a school at all. Students can work independently on their laptops while lounging on one of the “sitting islands” in the photo above. If they need to collaborate with their peers on a project, they can take advantage of spaces like “the village”—a tiny house for group work—or the more open “organic conversation furniture” pictured below.

Jannie Jeppesen, the principal of Vittra Telefonplan writes on the school’s website that the design is intended to stimulate “children’s curiosity and creativity” and offer them opportunities for both collaborative and independent time. Vittra doesn’t award traditional grades, either—students are taught in groups according to level—so maximizing diverse teaching and learning situations is a priority.

The open nature of the campus and the unusual furniture arrangements reflect the school’s philosophy that “children play and learn on the basis of their needs, curiosity, and inclination.” That’s true for kids all over the world, so let’s hope educators in other countries begin to pay attention.

More interesting photos and content here.

Today’s Materials: willow, reed, cardboard and burlap

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The current program in Art Studio 10 is inspired by artist Patrick Dougherty and his natural sculpting process. Using willow, reed, cardboard and burlap, children and grownups are encouraged to explore and experiment. The environment of the space inspires collaboration as visitors create, interact with, and name the sculptures. Our works in progress grow and evolve through techniques such as weaving, tangling, looping, attaching, threading, twirling, wrapping and bending.

Davinci meets semi-articulated Whale Skeleton

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Had a great day of design exploration with Environmental Architect Scott McGlashen and artist Brit Howard. Talk about creative collaboration – it’s amazing what can happen when the flood gates open and the creative kraken is unleashed!

After considerable discussion and consideration, we realized that we were focusing too much of the design on the base of the installation.  We had gotten carried away with making a really cool looking car that had a dangly thing hanging off of it.  We had to back up and remember that the most interesting, compelling, and playful component of the prototypes were the bouncy, dangly arms, and their sonic qualities.

So we decided to emphasize and elevate the bouncy length of the arm in order to maximize it’s playfulness and interactivity.   Calling upon the nearby coast for inspiration, we thought, why not hold the arm up with the architecture of a whale skeleton.  With a backward looking eye, we turned to the site’s historical past for additional material, engineering and aesthetic clues.  Once an active military base, we didn’t have to look much further than Davinci’s catapult (and mechanical drawings).

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, start your engines.  Or non-violent catapults-cum-giant-interactive-wind-harps, as the case may be.

Thoughts on Creativity

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For the past couple of weeks, the Creativity Installation project has had me immersed, thinking about and exploring topics such as form, function, interactivity, collaboration, safety, invention, discovery, and of course, creativity.

 

 

 

 

Through the research process, I have been able to identify and ground the design language in the history of the Museum’s site, including it’s relationship to the military, it’s proximity to the ocean and the Golden Gate Bridge, as well as the local weather conditions.

I also found some incredible inspiration images!  I’m now a minor expert in the design typology of antique horse drawn sleighs and carriages, vintage tanks, tractors and wooden wagon wheels.  It’s been interesting to follow my thought process as I connect the design dots between angler fish, snow mobiles, a pair of earrings, steam powered bulldozers, a radiator fan, the sculptures of Martin Puryear and the architecture of Rena Dumas.

 

 

 

It was somewhere between the angler fish and the radiator fan that I started thinking about my creative process.  Studies (Getzels 1988) have found that creative people tend to:
• Have a “discovery orientation”
• Are more risk taking than average
• Flexible to changing direction
• Possess a willingness to question norms and assumptions
• Ask novel questions
• Have wide interests

I have found that through the process of gathering a mountain of information and following countless leads, I eventually reach a kind of creative saturation / tipping point.  At times it feels like getting sucked into a creative vortex (in a good way).

It goes something like this:
After immersing myself in the subject -examining it from as many angles as time and budget will allow, and after deconstructing it down to it’s essential components- I find that I have to stop consciously thinking about it.  I have to allow my mind some time to digest and process all on its own, in the background of my life.  And then a day or so later, I’ll be looking at a magazine or a movie or a plant and all of these ideas, images associations and connections will start to rush out of mind – and I scramble to capture as many as I can.

I’ve found that you can’t engineer lucky accidents and creative solutions, but through diligence you can trust (anticipate) that they will eventually happen.