Discoverdrome: Reflection
Find the project blog here.
Plans and blueprints hold the responsibility of imparting a certain experience on implementation. Each little decision shapes the way it would emerge. Intended to be a short-lived expedition, this project offered to imagine a futuristic view of the kind of school we would have liked as children, enabling us to assume the extents of the growth in technology by the year 2100. The classroom of the future will raise the people of the future, people who are smart, active and able to break complex operations into minute details to intervene. The classroom built here is a space for such individuals in their years of schooling with elements that resonate with our current ideas for the future.
We see the world emerge with better technology and design solutions, enabled by successful learners and creators of our time. But what about those great ideas that are restricted by our own limited ideologies of learning?
“Students not used to prolonged thinking on a single problem start off well. However, soon they find motivation and inspiration leaving them, and they start dreading working on the problem as failure would lead them to question something they (by now) crucially identify with: ‘smartness’. Procrastination kicks in, and soon the student is busy in a diverse set of academic (but non-research!) activities to hide the reality of not working, like writing complicated scripts to automate their soon-to-be-coming publication phase, optimizing their daily vitamin B12 intake, getting heavily involved with political and religious movements and so on. Few students are able to critically introspect, which is reasonable since society has informed them that smartness is what matters, and if they are unable to solve the problem quickly, the logical conclusion is that they are not smart.” — NABIL H. MUSTAFA, ON BEING SMART
Understanding, realizing and living these limitations in the present, we see the fallbacks of lack of concentration and affected productivity each day. Learning from our own extended experiences in and because of our school classroom space, the giveaway for the future here is a set of ideas, emerging into a process holding plausible interventions we feel are imperative.
The plan was led by an iteration on-the-go approach. This meant constructing the idea instead of talking about it, and building onto this physical artifact to realize what we imagine. In this way, with every added object comes a conscious cross-check of whether the idea is translated through the space. For example, it is seen that children often have low attention spans. For a good use of their own time in their learning years, their minds should be kindled with curiosity. This is generally enabled by the objects in the space and the space itself since the user would walk up to it and interact with it instead of an imposed action. A problem of this kind requires funding and time to implement universally; constraints that hinder the actualization of an important design solution. However, placing it in the future, next to logical and conceivable concepts can actually enable us to set the dominoes in motion. We saw this happen when the building structure of our choice took multiple iterations, brainstorming sessions and approaches to understand how it may be constructed correctly. We probably wouldn’t even think there would be a problem in construction if we didn’t try to create the structure ourselves first. We may have been able to read in theory what problems may arise, but we wouldn’t thoroughly understand them without perceiving it together and physically.
Similar was the case when we started to think, how the space may be made better functional and flexible. Every team requires its own kind of execution. This would mean free movement in the space and objects acting like lego pieces: setting the ground for the emerging theme of modularity. The thought of easy access to resources in the space made us think of integrating a library in the same space. Collaboration requires every individual to understand, interpret, create and share their ideas; enabled by a sense of comfort in the space. This comfort can be provided discreetly by simply placing objects and no restrictions for them to suit themselves best.
We understand that the future brings with itself its new complications, and we speculate that the need of then hour would be effective solutions relying on productive, sharp and quick minds that steer the way ahead. This can be met by enabling everyone to find their choice of learning style and letting them cultivate and emerge from it. Our own classrooms were not given much thought, seem outdated, or varied differently for the number of people who lack curiosity or interest. If this project were to really be implemented as the intended classroom, it would be remarkable to see the work of these spatial interventions shaping better, smarter humans of the future.