... ...Learning SpaceCreative Workplaces

September 2004

Its now almost exactly a year on from our launch party in September 2003 – so how are things going ?

We have just returned from a very short break in Venice, soaking up the atmosphere and the sun, and walking until we dropped. A wonderful opportunity to reflect on how things have been going, and where we want to take things next year.

We had hoped to celebrate our first year with a learning / sharing / experimental event for friends, colleagues, and people we work with – and then try to establish this as an annual event. As things turned out we have been too busy to manage it this year; but walking around Venice we came across people working on setting up the exhibitions for the architecture biennale – which made us think of setting up our very own biennale, starting in September 2005. Watch this space for further details.

Work with Schools and Colleges

Over the last year we have been working on a number of new building and extension projects with schools and colleges, helping them to articulate a shared vision and think creatively about learning and learning environments, and encouraging them to involve children, students and the whole school community in the process. Our work with the Ellis Guilford school was covered in some detail in the article Learning by Design in the CABE Education magazine 360degrees.

In March 2004 we worked with OPUN (the East Midlands Architecture Centre) helping to plan and facilitate the CABE Education Regional Seminar ‘Hand in Hand’ – exploring how schools and designers can work together to enrich the curriculum.

We have also been working on a creative spaces project with Creative Partnerships in a couple of primary schools, focussing on creative use of outside space. This has been a fascinating collaboration involving artists, teachers and the children themselves, looking at practical, exciting and different ways to use existing spaces at the same time as proposing design options for developing the spaces.

Creative Workplaces

As well as projects relating learning to the built environment in schools, we have become increasingly involved in helping people to think about how to create and use workspace to encourage creativity, communication, team working and learning. We are developing a holistic and participative approach that brings together creative thinking about physical space alongside the broader issues of workplace climate, organisational development and workplace relationships. We have added a page to our website about this work.

One thing that we have found particularly fascinating in this area is the importance of understanding diversity, including multiple intelligences and different learning styles. We ran a couple of courses in May 2004 around effective and creative thinking at work: as a part of this, participants assessed their own learning styles, and reflected on how these impacted on their experiences at school and at work. This process proved to be particularly powerful and instructive. We are hoping to develop some action research in this area over the next few months.

If you are interested to find out more about any of these projects please contact us . We will be posting another update in January 2005