Learning Spaces

I think people are only tinkering, refurbing old spaces with a bit of sexed up furniture and kit, or fitting out new spaces with the latest gadgets. These things date very quickly, and never quite offer the flexibility that you were after in the first place. What was interesting was the student input into these spaces – they want 24 hour opening, good lighting, food and drink, some relationship with the outside world (windows, patios, cafes), they don’t want teachers to be around – OK, not rocket science. Students want these spaces to be the physical embodiment of the stuff described above, and don’t like the assumptions that are sometimes made about their needs. For instance, a lot of these learning spaces have multimedia studios, fine for certain types of students, but a lot of them also want whiteboards and flipcharts. And they might want to loan a bit of kit, like a camcorder, but they are not planning on doing any fancy editing etc There is this idea of the third space – apparently a concept just beginning to appear in library journals and suchlike (can someone go off and tell us all what the first and second spaces are?). What we have in the Adsetts and Blackwells is as good as anything I saw. The huge building programme at SHU worries me now, as we are designing it for the students of 2007, rather than 2010