Tertiary Learning Space Design Conference 2016

Editor's Notes

• #3: My current role is as Lead User Experience Designer at the Inspire Centre, University of Canberra. A $7.2 million dollar joint venture between University of Canberra, ACT Department of Education and Training and the ACT Government. The building was completed in November, 2011. As part of the faculty of Education, Science, Technology and Mathematics, Inspire is an applied design-research centre for innovation in education and training. Using the Learning Sciences as a base to work from, our primary focus seeks to discover how new technologies and learning spaces improve education. From our case studies I will be sharing with you some thoughts on design thinking as an evolving, agile process, that affords flexibility in the development of new and existing Learning Spaces. At Inspire we seek to acknowledge the future trends in digital technologies that are most likely to have impact and influence us as they push into education. We are interested in how digital technology intersects with learning spaces and how they may define or disrupt, and re-conceptualise learning spaces both on campus and off.
• #4: At Inspire we have found that Design Thinking is a reliable process that enables new ideas. It helps us make sense of the “messiness” and complexity of learning and research and helps us connect with others to make our work impactful.   Damien Newman's Design Squiggle is a great visual reminder of how the entire design process often begins, as a flood of disconnected ideas that eventually connect together to produce a point of clarity. With this concept in mind, lets start at the end.
• #5: The three main conclusions we have found from our Design work at Inspire that I wish to leave with you are…   Design Thinking is an ongoing mindset – Ewan Macintosh defines Mindset as “a habitual mental attitude that determines behavior and outlook.” Our experience at Inspire supports this idea; we have found that Design Thinking is not a once off experience for practitioners or participants, but an effective on-going iterative discipline which may be practiced anywhere, any-time as an individual or as a group. Design Thinking is an educational transaction –Design Thinking engages people in a learning experience which, builds capacity in people’s “skill-sets, tool-sets and mind-sets” (Covey 2005) and provides a common language for people to communicate with. Trust the Design process and build trust through your process At Inspire we have found that design thinking has successfully enabled user-centered solutions across a broad range of research and work projects, learning domains and organizations. It builds trust through visible decision making.
• #6: I want to include here the concept of the trust engine. Which acknowledges that learning spaces are human-centred and that the design process can give us opportunities to design positive values into our spaces which can impact our student learning experience. We see that design thinking acts at the core of the trust engine where promises are made and promises are kept. As we talk about learning spaces and student experiences and outcomes, it is vital we understand that external factors like our spaces, people and the pedagogy, all make a promise to the student experience. We also need to understand that internal factors such as process, technology and communication impact on our staffs ability to execute the promises that are made. Broadly speaking our organizational communication, technology, policy and people all have a part to play in the trust engine. We believe that it is design thinking that can enable the continuous running of the engine where eventually student and staff collaborate together within the learning space. Finnish Architect Alvar Aalto back in the 1930’s was committed to the concept of a Gesamtkunstwerk in his buildings (which means a total work of art ie. everything contributes to the art), interiors, exteriors and surrounding environments. He is particularly well known for his design of the Paimio Sanatorium (1932) was driven by the idea that the building itself could contribute to the healing process. Ken Robinson in his book “Creative Schools” says that “The tones and features of the physical environment…affect the mood, motivation, and vitality of the whole school community”     We at Inspire hope that our learning spaces positively motivate our learning community lets now take a look and how these spaces adapt to the different needs of our users.
• #7: The design intent of our rooms is to empower active learning, collaboration and co-design through technology enabled Learning spaces. The spaces use Flexible Furniture, writable walls to enable peer to peer collaboration using Idea Paint, Short throw projectors and mobile collaborative workstations. We run an independent WIFI network to increase the freedom for a variety of digital technologies. The independent WIFI network allows groups to run weekend long Hackathons, Service Design Jams and one-day Design competitions during and outside University hours.
• #8: One of our main spaces is the T.E.A.L Room, which stands for Technology Enhanced Active Learning – This learning space has been designed with floor to ceiling writable walls. Each wall has a Short throw projector, that can display the same one main presentation or independent presentations. We have also hooked up Apple TV’s to each projector to enable users to throw content from mobile devices, tablets and laptops onto the walls. The TEAL room in particular is used for Design Jams, Our design thinking workshops and for active classroom exercises. Feedback from users suggests that the design of this learning space could be improved with the addition of drop down central microphones to record not only the presenters or facilitators but also participants ideas during discussions and presentations during workshops.
• #9: This is a picture of the same room you saw on the previous slide. Because of our flexible furniture we have the capacity to turn the TEAL room into, for example, an exhibition space for performance, demonstration and display. Final year Phd students use this space as an exhibition venue for research outputs.
• #10: In the centre of the building is the Flexi-Space - It is a double storey atrium space which connects all the other spaces in the Inspire Centre. It’s central feature is the Hiperwall which is made up of 16, 55” Samsung screens. Every pixel is addressable making it useful for large scale data visualizations. It can be used in single display mode as seen in the Microsoft Kinect image and you can also divide the screen up to display discrete portions of information for during multiple video link-ups.
• #11: In contrast here is the same Flexi-Space as seen in the previous slide now transformed to host the Bi-yearly Defence ARRTS program which is a Creative Arts program comprised of four streams – creative writing, music, drama and visual arts. The program is a month long intensive experience supported by the university’s faculty of Arts and Design for wounded, ill or injured servicemen and women.
• #12: Off from the Flexi-Space are two twin Mini studios with writeable walls, projectors and 55” mobile workstations. These rooms are often utilized by smaller workshop groups or more traditional tutorials. The two rooms have the flexibility to be split open and combined to make space for larger classes or design workshops. Each rooms projector system can become a slave unit of the larger TEAL room’s projectors allowing for presentations to be beamed directly into the two studio rooms making them perfect for overflow. Having presented some high level technology in action. We have found that sometimes the most expensive technology can create a barrier to use. Inspire’s Podcast recording studio was originally designed to enable students and staff to create multimedia content. During the build it was spec’d up by professional audio engineers and they did such a good job that the equipment was too professional for the average user to make use of. A classic example of being designed only for an outcome and not a user, in this case an academic or student. This led to the facility being underutilized. We have now gutted this room with an aim to convert it to a one button recording studio, following the guidelines from the pen state one button model.
• #13: A Studio space upstairs houses the Inspire team and professional associates. The studio model, a way of working borrowed from the architecture and design disciplines, enhances our use of the design thinking process. For us at the Inspire Centre, Design Thinking is about understanding complexity through user-centred research, ideation, rapid prototyping & iteration. It has a bias toward action and is a process for thinking about space, user-engagement, pedagogy and the student experience. While there are many different design thinking tools and methodologies out there available to us. At Inspire we consistently come back to three design frameworks which we pull apart, blend and amalgamate to meet different user-needs. These include;
• #14: IDEO – Design Thinking for Educators Stanford - D.School Framework Statergyzer - Business Model Canvas Pause, pause, pause
• #15: Both IDEO and Stanford models share a common structure. Both provide a foundation for human-centered design. The initial phases start as a broad investigation of discovering user needs through empathy. An interpretation and defining stage are followed by an ideation and prototype stage. After comes the iterative testing and evolve. We use these models to guide us when setting up design thinking workshops as we found they provide a structure which people can easily follow.
• #16: Over time we have found a need to extend our design thinking process so that the prototypes developed by participants can be taken into other forums as a tangible business plan. We use the Business model canvas as a translation device to move people’s prototypes from the abstract to the concrete. It provides users with a solid foundation from which to have better conversations with those who hold the purse strings. We have used the canvas at Inspire to develop business models to feedback into the Faculty’s Business Strategy and to help with planning the commercialization of external courses. The next slide shows an enlargement of the business model canvas.
• #17: The business canvas follows more of a service design thinking framework that is ideal for designing services as opposed to products. It now comes partnered with the Value Proposition Design canvas. I would recommend them both to you.
• #18: We have run these workshops across different locations and countries. In a compressed format of 45 mins and in a long format of up to 4 weeks. In that case we ran a two day face-to-face workshop and then a 3 and half week action research project which was supported via online tools, video conferencing etc. It can run big to small, from workshops of up to 80 people down to one. The tools for each workshop are slightly different. As we tweak and change the canvas to align with the groups we are working with.
• #19: After some experience with the previous three models we have developed our own Inspire Design Canvas’s. Generally, we define a “Canvas” as a visual means of planning, by using a large format worksheet which allows users to see everything at once and how all the parts of their ideas connect together. The idea of a canvas supports the concepts of making learning visible. Our Inspire design canvas’s have been created for flipped learning…
• #20: Curriculum design
• #21: designing for Drones and robots…
• #22: and of course our own Learning Space Design Canvas. Some of you will have used this canvas in yesterday’s workshop. This canvas is downloadable from the Inspire website and the links will be in this presentation which I will make available. The canvas you see here allows participants to use structured educational taxonomies to discover gaps in the formal and informal learning space types within their institutions. It then allows them to formulize a value proposition and business rationale for how, and why, new spaces should be constructed for their own student and teacher needs. We have been using the same design thinking methodologies to interact with leading technologies in the educational technology sphere.
• #23: At Inspire some of our major work revolves around using Augmented and Mixed reality and Mobile applications in Educational Learning Spaces. These technologies can really drive an active learning agenda. We know from Freeman’s work in 2014 that active learning has a direct contribution to academic success, especially in science, engineering and mathematics. Augmented Reality offers opportunities to expand our concept of learning spaces, to create new dimensions in mobile learning and to increase connectedness of learners in multiple contexts.
• #24: Augmented reality has been on the trajectory in education in the last five Horizon reports and has been creeping into public consciousness and has recently just exploded with Pokemon Go. In late 2011, The AR Studio was formed, under a two year OLT innovation and development project, Its aim; to identify effective uses of augmented reality in an educational context, together with tools for mapping its uptake and evaluating its effectiveness. This included producing a collection of practice models and illustrating interactive pedagogically-driven uses of augmented reality in common learning spaces.    AR is the overlaying of data, audio, video or 3d objects into the real world and accessed through a mobile device or headset.   We used Design Thinking processes to create a collaborative environment to focus expertise, develop practice, provide resources and build capacity for effective implementation of AR technologies in education. Its about changing learning spaces from institutional learning that only exists “in here” to learning “out there”. or example students can contextualize learning by placing artifacts and objects in the contexts in which they occur such as virtual museums.
• #25: This is some of the outputs and a visual presentation of what the design thinking workshop and AR Camps looks like.
• #26: Not only can AR have an impact on the learning experience but it can be used as part of our design toolset to visualize and protoype future spaces, to see designs in context, at scale and in situ. As part of the AR studio we assisted our campus planning group to visualize future student residency. We took the architectural model and geo-located it on its future site. Here we see the ACT chief minister and local federal member virtually touring a new student building opposite Inspire.
• #27: Due to our work in AR and Simulations, we were invited by NSW Police training to assist in working out learning needs and core dependencies in their simulated training spaces. Through iteration and rapid prototyping, the ideas emerged with a common theme; training needs no longer required a costly physical simulation room because through the design thinking canvas process they discovered that they have the technology to do their training virtually using a “simulator-in-a-suitcase” via a laptop and VR googles.
• #28: The virtual reality wearables wave is coming in now. One tool that looks to have the most potential is Microsoft’s HoloLens. The HoloLens allows the wearer to interact with virtual objects, access real time video information and integrate them with the physical world. We are really getting into Mixed Reality here, a 2nd generation AR - Where it is neither virtual reality, where a user inhabits a completely closed and constructed world or purely augmented reality where data is accessed as overlays in the real world; but a Mixed Reality combining overlays, interaction and real time 3D and video.  
• #29: With it’s ability to 3d map spaces, surfaces and humans in real time and compress and transport that data anywhere we are looking at whole range of affordances for learning that have only just begun to be studied. Current tests include architectural visualization, engineering constructs, international virtual team collaboration, investigative medical diagnosis, building lessons in various discipline areas to make use of the holo lens.
• #31: Mobile devices that know where you are, can see you, hear you and sense you really make it possible to extend the reach and impact of Formal Learning Spaces through technology and provide opportunities for learning math’s and physics anywhere, anytime. Phonelabs Is a project that was founded by Dr Sivam Krish. It uses the mobile device as a physics and maths laboratory. It is a group of free web apps designed to capture and visualise data that includes Acceleration, Measurement, Frequency, Sound, and the Live Tracking of objects.   Through some simple 3d printed parts and some wooden rulers students can create multiple experiments. We will be trialling phone labs in our first year Physics program. As well as some secondary and primary schools. http://www.phonelabs.net/
• #32: The PhoneLabs project allows students to develop computational thinking by recording, graphing, analysing and modelling the mathematics and physics of the real world. We're currently developing workshops and a more formal evaluation process built around educational design research and drawing on the SOLO taxonomy and our Fold-Back evaluative framework. PhoneLabs supports a process whereby students develop insights, understandings and knowledge that goes well beyond traditional experimental activities, which are often limited by access to laboratories, measurement tools and readily accessible measurable objects. In our project we're trying to apply an active and generative approach to learning. The platform allows students to ask more "what if" questions and become designers of the own experiments.
• #33: Inspire has been involved in a Three year ARC research project, Starting in mid 2012, working with the Questacon – National Science and Technology Centre and the National Portrait gallery to design a student visitor experience app. Location based education services uses the sensors in your phone coupled with ibeacons placed around cultural institutions and works of art, allowing for the triggering of learning events throughout gallery spaces, a learning event may prompt users to answer questions about the art they are looking at , recording audio notes, reflecting there emotional experience of engaging with the art and giving them directions to related artworks of interest as well as mapping their progress and route through the gallery. Part of the work here is to up-skill staff to understand how technology can augment the visitor experience, and how to engage with their visitors to design programs that will meet visitors’ expectations for greater interaction. Using an iterative, design based approach, coupled with design thinking workshops where we bring stakeholders together, we are demonstrating how location-based educational services coupled with mobile apps could be designed to enrich the experience for school students visiting the National Portrait Gallery and Questacon.
• #34: As part of the project we ran four Design Thinking workshops. One for each of the institutions involved and two for student focus groups. Workshop 1 and 2: Were run using the IDEO Design Thinking process using the extra large design canvas. Workshop 3 and 4: Used the Stanford D.school canvas as it is a little more structured and suitable for a younger cohort. As well as the teams from Questacon and the portrait gallery we brought in outsiders from other professions, for example designers and teachers, who have had experience in being part of a design thinking workshop. This allowed the individual workshop teams to hear user-experiences from those outside of their own domain for cross pollination of ideas. This is the first time we ran the design thinking process through such a young audience with an average age of 12. Students tested a prototype app that we had designed at Inspire using the Evernote application. They then proceeded to complete our design workshop to successfully create a new and improved app. The finalized version of the You2 National portrait Gallery app will be released before the end of the year.
• #35: With all these new technologies and opportunities to design flexible and collaborative learning spaces we need to take into account how we evaluate the learning space. With these more fluid learning spaces, evaluation and feedback present interesting challenges for reporting. At Inspire we are moving from feedback to the concept of fold-back. The idea of Fold-back originates from the amplification and music industries. Feedback is the horrible squealing noise that you get when to many channels are going through the same inputs and the system becomes overloaded. Fold-back however, is the clear channel that allows the user to hear themselves amongst all the other layers of sound. The Inspire model of fold-back suggests that the various information and data gathered on each layer or cycle of learning can be folded back to provide an ongoing evaluation of the quality and value within an educational environment. “You can see here five cycles of value creation: the Immediate value of activities and interactions; the Potential value of the knowledge capital that is produced from the activities and interactions; the Applied value that is seen when knowledge capital is put to use; the Realised value that is seen in improved performance in real work and life; and the Reframing value when new skills and understandings allow the reframing of success."
• #36: The SOLO Taxonomy from Biggs and Collis gives us a framework for deep learning and constructive alignment by mapping learning outcomes, objectives and activities to create “inescapable learning”. The SOLO Taxonomy is included within our Inspire Learning Space canvas. “Used in the context of learning spaces, SOLO supports the development of clear and potentially measureable statements about what learning activities a learning space design is intended to support.” Leonard, Fitzgerald, Munnerley, Bacon, 2015
• #37: The TPACK framework can also be found in our Design canvas’s and identifies the knowledge users need to design a space effectively with technology. We can use this as a barometer to find balance between three important knowledge domains, of content, technology and pedagogy.
• #38: Having discussed learning Space design, Design thinking, The technological environments and the ongoing evaluation story. It appears more than ever that no space is an island. “We shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us.” (Winston Churchill)
• #39: At the beginning I showed you the obligatory beautiful architectural shot of Inspire….
• #40: Here’s what it looks like as of last Thursday. You’ll see the second new seven storey student residence structure, literally 5 metres from Inspires front door.   But as the saying goes “change is not compulsory because survival is not mandatory.” However, new opportunities arise and we have been involved in working with the campus planning people on changing the space outside to potentially create a blended learning zones between buildings. Thankfully we have a design process to enable us to engage in the conversations.
• #41: In conclusion lets revisit the three main takeaways we have learnt from our work at Inspire.   Design Thinking is an ongoing mindset – its “a habitual mental attitude that determines behavior and outlook.” Our experience at Inspire supports the idea; we have found that Design Thinking is not a once off experience, but an effective on-going iterative discipline which may be practiced anywhere, any-time as an individual or as a group. Design Thinking is an educational transaction –Design Thinking engages people in a learning experience which, builds capacity in people’s “skill-sets, tool-sets and mind-sets” (Covey 2005) And thirdly, Trust the Design process and build trust through your process At Inspire we have found that design thinking has successfully enabled user-centered solutions across a broad range of projects, learning domains and organizations. It builds trust through visible decision making.