Changing Schools Through Design

Here is a link to the audio and video of Sir Ken Robinson's TED presentation. Education is in dire need of redesign. This audio is followed by an excerpt from an post regarding school design in the UK.

In the UK secondary schools were built in the 1950s on a comprehensive ideology that promoted equality, but also a Fordist, one-size-fits-all approach to learning. Pupils sat in rows in front of the teacher who dictated lessons from the blackboard. 50 years later this scene has not changed, despite the huge changes taking place in the modern workplace, such as an emphasis on IT and teamwork. Now that government has a new ideology (based on creativity and diversity of learning styles) and a new curriculum, it has embarked on a massive program designing and building new schools. These new schools are just as attractive as the shopping malls where kids typically truant, and designed with flexible spaces for a mixture of group and individual work, desk-based work and role play, and opportunities for students to learn independently. The UK Design Council has worked with schools across the country to redesign their learning environments, creating new types of furniture and flexible learning spaces that support creative learning.

What better way to make the public--and teachers--see the radical changes being made to something as intangible as the philosophy of learning than to design new schools? New ideology, new design.

There has been a shift in conventional politics; a realization that top-down policies no longer work and that public services in particular must be redesigned around the user. Conventional policy makers are not readily equipped to do this. Designers are. Jennie Winhall