The problem with expert
teaching — from content
to design.

Spaces for Knowledge Generation (SKG) ran from 2009 to 2011 as an Australian Learning and Teaching Council–funded research project. It grew out of a simple question: what would learning spaces look like if we designed them around how students actually work, instead of around how universities have always taught?

Over two years the project team visited learning centres across Australia and overseas, ran forums with students and academics, worked with architects and technologists, and tested prototypes in real university spaces. The work produced six public outputs, of which the two most durable are the Seven Principles of Learning Space Design and the Six Steps practical guide.

What the project found

Students don't live at the university. They move — purposefully but unpredictably — between home, work, and campus, and they bring their own devices, habits, and preferences with them. A good learning space is one that invites them to take charge of the configuration, rather than one that locks them into a single mode of instruction.

The basis of the SKG aesthetic is that learning spaces which invite students to take charge of the configurations of their working environment, and which are wherever possible comfortable, attractive and technologically convenient, help to produce an engaged and considerate community of learners.

Methodology

The team conducted a full literature review; interviewed educators and facility managers at good-practice centres in Australia, the UK, and the US; held two Learning Spaces forums with mixed participants; and developed four prototype space designs with Kneeler Design Architects. The project was externally evaluated by Dr Steve Ehrmann (TLT Flashlight), Professor Philip Long (MIT), and Associate Professor Maree Gosper (Macquarie).

Metaphors of learning spaces

Apple's use of Joseph Campbell's four space types — Campfire, Watering Hole, Cave, Mountaintop — was influential, but the team felt these metaphors had a distinctively North American flavour. They developed a parallel set of metaphors drawn from the seasonality of the Australian landscape: the Coast (social, semi-permanent, reformable), Eddies (moving, reforming), and Plateaus or tablelands (generative, didactic, permanent). Across both, the emphasis is on movement through a landscape of meaningful spaces — not static habitation of a single room.