Why I Care about School Design
A young entrepreneur’s journey to transform learning spaces everywhere.
December of 1996, Vancouver was hit with the “Snow Storm of the Century.” Local dignitaries called for a state of emergency. Cold and confused, a wide-eyed four-year-old clung to her young mother’s coat as they stepped off the plane that brought them to this strange, barren land.
That girl was me. Just a few days prior, I had been frolicking on the lawns of Zhejiang University, where my parents were launching prestigious STEM careers. My mom and dad had both been the first of their families to test-score their way into university, out of China’s Communist countryside.
We were living the dream, but my parents knew the frolicking would come to a halt as soon as I was set to start school. In but a year, I would be spending every day, from dawn till dusk, sitting on a hard wooden bench in a big-box classroom with 60 kids, rote learning from a teacher and blackboard. My parents heard of schools across the Pacific, where kids worked together on projects, played music in bands, and took gymnastics lessons — in school! Those were the schools of the future.
So one day, our young family dropped everything — blossoming careers, family and friends — for greener pastures in Canada. Of course, the pastures we arrived upon were blanketed in snow and riddled with language barriers. Despite the cold, hibernating was not an option. Dad hustled to get a job as a draftsman; and Mom worked her way up from dishwashing at a Chinese restaurant to a computer science degree at UBC. The whole family strapped in, for the sake of my future.
Tiny Homes, Big Dreams
The storm passed, and our family grew in size, with my siblings and grandmother. We certainly outgrew our living quarters. For the first ten years, we were six warm bodies crammed into one-bedroom basement apartments.
In comparison, my school facilities felt like Versailles. This was my refuge. My elementary school had a giant field to run around in, carpets to play blocks on, and a library of endless books to dive into. My classroom offered all the ingredients to stoke my love for literacy — sturdy tables and clean notebooks for writing, a computer where I could “publish” my first story, and big windows to look out at the trees and daydream.
The walls of my classroom spoke to me, and they said, “You are worth investing in”.
The Informal Architect
My appreciation for good learning facilities resurfaced 15 years later, when I found myself designing the first student-run café at McGill University. I teamed up with an engineer, an aspiring nutritionist, and a fellow environmental studies student to enter a campus-wide design competition. Some of my most joyous moments involved engaging students for feedback around campus. My team baked fresh oatmeal cookies and pekoras for students to — literally — get a taste of our proposal. We got invaluable feedback on our menu, floorplan, and business plan. When we won first place, I thought we had achieved the dream space.
A year later, I got my reality check. The new café was built, and I was happy to see some of our original design ideas in the flesh. To my dismay, however, I overheard students complaining about the layout, and how there weren’t enough outlets. As much as I wanted to brush off these comments as irrelevant, I realized my team had talked to less than 1% of the student population. Clearly, we could have done a better job engaging student voice. What if we found a way to truly co-design the space, with every single student and faculty on campus?
Making Room to Learn
This question of how to co-design a space stayed with me as I met Grace O’Shea in 2015. She and I both arrived as outliers at the Harvard Education hackathon. I was attending design school across campus, and Grace trekked up from Brooklyn, where she was teaching middle school science. We hit it off as fellow geography nerds, and bonded over how Grace “hacked” her classroom space to make it work for learning.
We co-founded room2learn, which changed the course of our lives and careers. For the next two years, we got the chance to peer firsthand into hundreds of learning spaces across the U.S., in a wide range of private, public, and charter schools. Our verdict? Designers are disconnected from educators and learners. We have a lot of co-designing to do.
At first, we built a “Pinterest for teachers” to facilitate dialogue through photos and videos of classrooms in action. We evolved into a roadshow of teacher training and interior design services for schools. We always knew that connecting educators with designers was important. But neither of us knew that we would end up creating the largest crowdsourced database of learning space designs, and building the first tool for schools to achieve 100% co-design.
I would not be sitting here in the Harvard Innovation Lab today if not for those incredible public school facilities that told me, “You are worth investing in”. As an immigrant who grew up in a one-bedroom basement apartment, having access to quality learning environments made a world of difference. I believe every student deserves the spaces they need to succeed.
We are still kingdoms away from achieving that mission, but I think we’ve boarded the right train.
If this story resonated with you, I’d love to hear from you. Find me on Twitter at @plainzhang or drop me a line at jane@room2learn.org.
