Education Spaces

Hi there, and welcome to the Data Talks podcast. I'm Mara, part of the curatorial team at the Architektour Museum of the Technical University of Munich and the team behind this series. At Data Talks we explore the often hidden architectures of data infrastructures and ask why they matter to us as professionals, educators, and citizens. In our episodes we look at how the digital shapes our spaces, from energy hungry server holes to classrooms and from busy streets through the networks of our minds. These episodes were recorded in winter 2023 during a seminar at TU Munich. If this works are interest, come see us in person in Munich too. Starting October 15th, this research and much more will be on display at the exhibition City in the Cloud data on the ground at the Pinnaker Tech demo there. And Data Talks will be subsequently updated with new episodes from the upcoming public program. So keep in touch and have fun listening. Hello and welcome to the next episode of our podcast. My name is Mara and today I'm going to guide the discussion about the importance of data in architecture. The participants of today's talk are for you already well-known members of our dear podcast crowd, Annie, Geraldo's, Uli, Rosa, and Damien. We have all had the chance to spend most of our daily lives in a chunk connection with education spaces and curriculums. That's why we are now using the chance to finally act as experts on our own. In this episode, we are going to talk about the characteristics of a contemporary classroom and the design of the future education. How can we as architects participate in the process of production and transfer of knowledge? Are there any smart ways to implement technology in our education spaces? And what does it all have in common with Star Wars? These and other topics we are going to discuss in our nice seminar room at the Technical University of Munich today. You are welcome to join us. Hello and welcome to the future of education. Our school is not just well-ventilated and invited. This is also a smart classroom. It doesn't look like much of a classroom, right? I guess you are more used to the situation where the teacher leaves all the activities. But you'll get used to it. Just like I did. A girl with a tablet in her hands wearing a t-shirt which a print saying "Education Estonia" is confidently walking us through her rast classroom and with the help of holograms explaining how her learning routine in the space looks like. The futuristic vibe of this video of from Education Estonia initiative makes us believe the future is already there. We get to see a big space divided in many zones, each devoted to a specific learning activity. Students are surrounded not only by furniture or posters, but also laptops, game sets, and robots. Which almost like some kind of new generation Jetson style dream. The future of education seems promising. I mean, what could go wrong? In case if you similarly to myself are not familiar with Chinese, this means now imagine a warm light glowing between your eyebrows. That is have a class in Chinese school is starting. Time for meditating. That's great. We just need to keep in mind that this one light we are talking about is not abstract or metaphorical. It is coming from headbands that they are wearing. China has long ago said the girl to become rose leader in artificial intelligence technologies. These headbands are one of the digital surveillance tools they are adapting. They contain sensors that in real time monitor students' interaction and concentration levels during the class. School says it wasn't hard to get parents' consent for enrolling into this experiment. So I wanted to start by asking my classmates what are their thoughts about these videos and the different scenarios our education could face in the future. I mean, now simplistically speaking education is like a method to actually include people or include younger generations into their running societies, right. And then the societies is now differentiated into many parts of skills. So some take care of the economy and some take care of the artistic parts for sure for run for taking part in this running society and we need like this basic attitudes, right. So this openness because we know that many sectors are changing and we have to kind of always adapt to it like alone, let's say in architecture in 10 years ago we used like different methods of working than today and so on. So both videos were very much about marketing or about kind of selling some product obviously that lies behind this kind of nicely edited video. I think the main thing that really struck me besides the problems with surveillance and 24/7 kind of observation of your thoughts which is very scary is the lack of playfulness in the system where these AI tools come into the education. So the children were suddenly put into an enormous pressure to perform because they are monitored all the time. Whereas maybe if you compare the Estonian model of these different spaces that are very differentiated by activity that's taking place whether it's one-on-one meeting, whether it's a group work, whether it's kind of like a reading room, whether it's, I don't know if they call it action room, but there was like a different names to all these spaces. And there was certain playfulness there. So the kids were also invited to go into the different spaces and take different kind of movements even, take different attitudes, take different actions. So the space and what you're doing as a student was very much linked to which I quite have to say liked. I think it's a very interesting example that is very spatial, so it's very architectural. And obviously to produce that kind of space you need to work closely with architects or with interior designers. So there's a lot of design there. Whereas in the other example with the AI I'm much more skeptical because all of these qualities were suddenly absent. It was very traditional looking school and very traditional looking classroom that was just being heavily monitored. You cannot put all of these things on the same level. I think they're very different. Whether we talk about the space that has been augmented and experience, the playfulness, the learning experience, or we're talking about monitoring success and putting pressure. It's a very different approach to learning. Yeah, I mean, I just like the first thing I thought about is, and I mean, maybe that's a bit serious, but how will it be comparable or how do you check or know what it is? What you learn, like some students learn, some students not. How will they also, on the social level, be together kind of, because the classroom for me, it's still a space, like a built space where children of same age or maybe also different ages would meet, then also be together as a social thing. Yeah, right. Well, it is also just really important social, sorry, I mean. And I think because that's like the flip classroom, what is that is this advanced, smart classroom, also the Lairn House, for example, Lairn House concept unique that we have where you have like this multifunctional space and then a classroom space, but you always have this classroom still. You also have another space where you can go and where you interact more. But I think that's kind of a maybe good approach to have this mixed option of a more organized room and then also a free moving multifunctional space, maybe. Yeah, somehow the organization is really the part that starts to get like missing for me in all those really speculative approaches, because mostly they go in such a direction that they start to glorify. this digital, so much, they even start to make those strange graphs with random, I don't know, zero sun ones coming from your mind and something like that, thinking that they somehow depict the way we learn or rethink. But sometimes it really feels that we miss the point that we are humans, not computers. In that part I'm really like thinking what are the skills that we need for our future. I mean that's exactly the thing also, the comparability kind of gets lost at some point but also the other way around like when we watch the video from AI and Chinese classrooms and all of the sudden the kids really are like an experiment and they're just putting EEG on them where like neuroscientists say it doesn't even work or if you're just a little bit sin, yeah, I mean they didn't know. So and what kind of comparison do you put children also? Parents can check every school from every student from every child seeing in which average their child is and pushing them to get better and better and I think that's always the thing nowadays that we're trying to do it in a more individual and innovative way but somehow it also gets more comparable and more about pressure. So I think like if we introduce those robotics and artificial intelligence components into the early education for younger generations, I think it's a really good start but the question is is how? So at the surveillance method that we see in the Chinese method is not really helping or actually maybe mirroring the societal situations there, right? Because I think it's a society where everything is kind of enforced up down even innovations are kind of very much government regulated and government more taught in comparison to what we have in Europe. It's much more different than here. You basically can do whatever you want to do and it's reflected as well in the way we educate people and then we all think also generally that this kind of surveillance method is wrong. I think it reflects that it is on the way that it's supposed to be done. But I mean it's interesting just controversial idea and not saying it's what in thinking that I mean if we go further that way, where does it lead us? Then there's some countries that are forcing this under younger generation creating maybe not happy kids but very pressured and knowledge or yes specialized generations. And then if we as Western or in Europe or something are doing this openness and everybody is kind of losing everything and everything's chaos and you're creating a different world, how will that, I don't know, develop in a also international interconnected world, how can this work? So shouldn't there be some parallels maybe of some connections already? I think like you said conservative but I think structures are very very important point in education somehow. And when I read more about all those approaches, how to learn and how they afterwards say and show in the results, what are the outcomes? It was of course like one point is this really important understanding that a lot of people lack about the importance of soft skills in this digital world that you should actually be learning a lot more about communicating just like creating not so much about learning direct facts and performing in the best possible way. Because those are the things that digital tools could like do better anyway. But there is also this other side that actually is shown that you need to be really really cautious with the way you introduce playfulness because sometimes there were quite a lot of data as well that if you don't really know what you are doing but just give kids computers and AI and we are and everything they just not learn, they play but there is this learning part missing. And that was also a one point I wanted to ask you maybe also remembering from yourself always learning here and the university and before in schools, how do you feel about the importance, how to mix those ways of dealing with education? I mean I think that's very interesting because when I really need to learn I think there's a reason that so many people go into a library or to go into like a space with no distractions. So I think for me personally when I really need to learn and focus on something it's still like a library or somewhere where I don't get distracted and then maybe for education I don't know we should distinguish between the soft skill part which I think it's interesting to combine this with the playfulness and then to connect the and I know hard facts let's say or the knowledge really like knowledge part maybe this should still be like a non-destracted kind of environment. In this case also to like give them like this flexibility for example as an historian to give a space where you can also somehow I don't know fulfill a special need you have and I think that's also the strength of this which is different also from my education because as you say if you like have to learn something and if you don't want to be distracted because you have to focus on these things and probably if you like in a younger age want to find out what you also want to do and if you are actually it's also very important to have like the teachers who are I mean as people who are using these technologies or who are like somehow analyzing the movement in these different zones for example if you are like a more of an entertainer let's say most of the time you will be like in the space where you have like social contact with others yeah somehow also about the analysis maybe which of course in these Chinese schools it's completely lost because like it doesn't matter what you learn probably in the end you just have to be efficient and like be good at it and be the best in it that's also like with one kit set like in the end it's like yeah maybe you're like super like under pressure all the time yeah the this border for me it seems really really small and when you really can do good stuff with AI and they also mention a lot of so nice things about equality and finally you have the opportunity to personalize your workflow including a lot more of people and do you think it works like that I mean I think that to some degree probably connectivity and kind of interruptivity it's a good kind of step forward into education spaces right because we all do it anywhere especially in the architecture schools for example our schools on the technical university unique we have a building which was originally built the beginning of the 20th or the 20th century and then rebuilt again exactly as it was right and so it was not originally intended for use of such media such different amounts of media right especially digital media but and you can feel that right you feel the lack of interactivity and connectivity in our space that we are working in daily and so I think as architecture students being aware of your own spaces the much you lack in them is a starting point for a making a design argument right and so I would say that yeah I think I think that the digital tools needs also spatial need to be specialized and need to be kind of humanized above all so humanization of of technology is something that needs to also develop head in hand and in different speed maybe then then the way that now digital tools are developing and it's interesting how could we achieve that because in a way I feel we can't slow down the big tech developing and human is always focused on finding the easiest tools to work less but with that I also somehow feel that we have this really really fast tempo and in the meantime we also have the risk of losing the context in a way when you talked about our space here there are a lot of downsides that this building can't give us as modern students with modern ones of socializing and technology but in the same time it has context and story and sometimes I'm also afraid that those spaces that really have been I don't know faster enough to adapt. They lack, also, some of those smart classrooms. They lack any context at all because you can create everything on your own and it's new all the time again. So also as an architectural issue? Yeah, yeah. The lack of context is such. Yeah, definitely. I mean, at least for schools that are built newly, I think a lot of architects are thinking about making like it should be as flexible as possible. I mean, probably we can say also this room here is actually quite, I don't know, it can be used also for a smart school or for a smart school or for a flip classroom. And like tomorrow it's a examination in the classroom. And today's we are like here on a big table discussing these themes. I don't know, but we there are like other architectural typologies or buildings where it doesn't work. Very good. I think like what I'm thinking about for me, there's two things like the GPT chatboard is also connected to that issue of not it's not easy to measure what we really learn nowadays because everything is so there's so many options that you can do your like homework or such things or essay so fast that you can't really prove and you don't really get into the topic on what you really like informing yourself and others about. And then there's also the thing about the wide range of media or items you can use. So I think would would be probably the most important part for classrooms or spaces if they use digital things or to create something that people want to go there or prefer to go there and not do it from home. Right. Because this is the thing that actually is a race. Yeah, I think that's the risk with facing that everyone is doing something and we don't connect anymore on this level of just physical interaction. And I think while the pandemic, for example, where we were not able to meet in physical places like actually get together, it became really clear that this is necessary and everyone's longing for it. And well, that's the impression I got that it is kind of, yeah, definitely, to kind of highlight at the importance of getting together and having like a place where you could go and meet others. So I think even if we have the opportunity or the means to become more and more digital, the relevance of a physical place where you can come and yeah, meet and get together will still always be important. Every else I need to think about that we need to use the space we already have, right? I think that's also very important. And that's a bit of a critique with the Stoneian approach because they are now so focused on this, having this marketing story about digital and good education and they are really building mostly new buildings for all the schools they're doing with all schools. They just throw them away, just and build new ones. And the motivation is that this is so important, like the education is the goal and for that we can demolish the existing. But I feel it also contains a lot of duality. I mean, for example, also the eventual lab where your work is also kind of, I don't know, the reused as a different kind of room. Yeah, I don't know. It's also working if it's created in a ragways. Yeah, I mean, that's also the beauty with those old structures, isn't it? That you have the ceiling heights and stuff so that they can be flexible but not in a, like, probably not as in a plan way as they do it now, but it's just they have those attributes like the proportions and just white by ceiling rooms. Of course, you can use them for embellening. A lot of newly built educational spaces, whether it's in university. I mean, we have the example with Garchin, for example, which is this new campus just built nearby the Munich airport. And it's a science city. I mean, a lot of these places resemble corporate campuses, right? And that's for a very good reason because they emulate what we do in education with what you're expected to do after you graduate, right? Namely working a big tech corporation, for example, in that case, if you're working in engineering departments or physics departments or whatnot. But I think we as architects are a bit more complicated than that, right? So it's not clear whether you're going to end up working a museum or architecture office or you're going to start your own startup or you're going to, you know, open, like, create your own NGO or create your own office. So there are many different ways to work as an architect. You can go to, you know, and so I think important thing there is that one, reusing a building stock because it makes everything more complicated. And I think for a very good reason, because then there is a lot more built in knowledge in these spaces, right? And then you have to confront this knowledge. You have to make it work for the 21st century, 20th, 2nd century, and so on. And so you have to really think in very architectural terms how you connect like vast different temporalities together, which is very exciting. And also talks about like ecological attitude towards like reusing the building stock, which has to be on four, right? Yeah. In that way, I like to, in a way, learn from university systems as it always have been because it's more open in compared to schools for smaller children, because of the security reasons and stuff. But universities mostly work more as platforms and getting together spaces for people from different topics for different backgrounds, doing a lot of different stock, not only out students, professors, but also like people visiting and getting lectures. And in a way, I also feel that maybe it's time to implement some of these ideas also for the education of smaller children somehow, to learn somehow from this way of openness. And probably we can also speculate that children nowadays are not smarter, but more used during a way to this open world. I think because that's really an issue. I think I heard it somewhere that we tend to get so overwhelmed with all the options and stuff that we have. We feel like we have more in our tables, but actually like proven, we know less, like we have less knowledge and special things. Exactly. And that's also one point you mentioned some time ago, only about this curating. And I really also wanted to bring this into discussion, because we also talked a lot in this seminar about curating data spaces. And can we learn something from this managing, like getting data and curating them also for our education spaces? I think there has to be like curators and those that are kind of mediators for this issue that you don't like somehow you get a hold of knowledge or like a lot of knowledge, but you somehow like they can grasp it. So in a way, obviously there have to be mediators, which are the teachers, probably. And also these same knowledge curators, almost special curators, but also knowledge curators. So that job of the teacher probably will also change in a way. Or there's a third party or it's together with the children. Yeah. In a collaborative sense. Can a participatory thing that you together decide and develop what different spaces should look like in order for the children to feel comfortable or to feel like they can learn there? Yeah. No, I think like a lot of valid points actually. But I think to add to this, I think curating, like thinking of professors and teachers and students as curators of knowledge, curators of data, curators of experience, it's a very interesting, I would say productive starting point, because the moment you say that you are curator of the experience of this space, this education space education experience, it means you have to look at the space and you have to look at the curriculum, at the design of the education itself and put it under scrutiny. So like, are we educating the future artifacts to become corporate, successful corporate, let's say, soldiers or entrepreneurs? Or are we then teaching them to become more like critical thinkers? Are we expecting to be artists and curators? These are all questions that really reflect in the spaces and in the curriculum. So the curriculum, The design of a curriculum is as equal as a design of space and design of learning experience. And I pretty much am really excited of this new figure of curator of spaces and education experiences that the professors could like reinvent themselves in. I find it very exciting. Because it's also an ex you think much more about the end user in a way, right? When you need to curate something, exhibition as well, you are all the time in a need to think about a visitor and then this way, it's a bit similar. After that, you have then the partner, I mean, you would have your human partners of dialogue. I mean, you with your AI plus your human partners of dialogue, I think it would be like a, you know, a good combination. So I'm not saying that we should stop by just talking to the AI and then let the AI lead to what we want to be or what we want to get, but if you are with your AI and then you are in contact with other people in your classrooms with also their AI and then you can communicate with them. I mean, that's I think more a more productive way of doing the thing. I mean, I don't know, okay? I mean, that's just like one was, but the point with the curator, curatedness of this knowledge is that I think I mean through this dialogue, through this classroom, which can include the AI and the people and then basically the, the educator as the one who plays the main role, it would, I think, result into a better one. Talking about your AI as a friend, like it's personal AI to you. No, because I'm a fan of Star Wars. No, and I think that that's actually a good feature. I know I have seen some episodes, but I'm not sure I, I don't remember the connection with education. There are like some depictions of classrooms in which like the robots kind of, because I mean of course it's not like, it was not intended to be like a, you know, critical, critical to discuss things, which is like, use the robots to know a lot of things, so it doesn't forget anything. So it kind of is useful to just tell the children whatever they need to know. Actually, it's just that, but the most in the classroom one, and it's actually normal format of classroom, even there's a robot and there's a whiteboard. And that's the thing, that's the interesting thing that they still keep this really traditional classroom, because that keeps you as if you're watching the movie to somehow understand it. It's about school and education, and just like slowly introduce some small next futuristic steps into this existing space, do you think it's a good way to do also like in a position we are now with all the technology we have now enough like 50 years ago. And somehow the robots in Star Wars, I mean, now it's a fiction, right? So I don't know if it's actually really going to be like that in the real life. If AI would be so developed, if we're gonna reach at that point, because these robots, they kind of know what is good and what is bad. So they kind of, they kind of can, I don't know, form and logic, formulations of what is being good or what is being bad. But the most interesting thing is actually the interaction between men and non-men, I mean, sorry, human and non-human there, because it's like, as I said, they're thinking partner in so far that you tell them what you want to know. And then they will tell you whatever they know, and they're basically kind of equipped with this whole radar thing, I mean, they know the whole map of the universe, they know how the global access library, well, open access library as well. Yeah, right. Don't know if it is. And then also, you know, you don't know, you don't know if it is an open, it can also invent. Yeah, I'm just writing their data and giving the attention. Yeah, yeah. And leave it somehow. But that is like the fiction, right? Yeah, yeah, I mean, if they are, let's say, somehow, they have to be, it's like, it's not infinite. Like, it's fit. Like, there is a knowledge generated, but it has to be generated by someone in order to restore somewhere. I mean, that's also about apps, about it. Yeah, it's also about AI. I mean, AI is the same thing, it's the stuff that AI knows. It's just until 2021 or something, it's like limited in a way. So that's also, for example, why I don't know. But I wouldn't judge AI by the capability of processing information, because human is also like, processing for me or they can. Of course, it's like, then that place where we as educators come, it's, and we need to guys somehow, that person to sort, which practices are exactly what they want. They should include the AI, but not kind of happy, conservative, and it's boring. No, also, like, I don't think that anyone of us is being like so radical that we're just going to stick in a classroom of 19th century and they're right by hand. Well, because I mean, you're not, AI is not giving you answers, or it's not a, it's not a thinking thing, kind of, it's not it is, but it is, no, it's not a big one, it is, it's not packed. It is packed with the formations, there's somebody, a real-life person that we don't know, that we don't, like, create as an algorithm, and they fed it with a basic set of information stations. And then, like, because it's end-to-end, but you don't know what it's, like, processing in the middle. You don't know how it is developing, we can't always, like, understand the progress. So you don't know in which direction it's going. I mean, now the Facebook algorithms are already so complicated that the ones who created them don't know how they're working. Right. So actually, most of algorithms are AI, the creators, they know at the beginning how to configure them, and then it's on their own to develop in different directions, planning on data, you fit them. So they don't really know how they work, right. That sounds dangerous. It is. You have a whole, which has already decided to, it's very interesting. Yes. I think for me, it's all interesting that this all, you know, the fact that we are discussing this really weird interaction of, like, the split personality AI and expressing love towards the empire. It's quite, like, you know, finding a space to talk about it, like, we do now, for example, I find it very important, because otherwise, if you don't contest this, and it just becomes a matter of fact, without any possibility to be verified or put to scrutiny, or, and I think this is what education should be all about critical thinking, and about creating spaces like this, where we are sitting at right now, that kind of allows us to discuss these very uncomfortable, weird topics and think through them as architects. So maybe it's also very good to have spaces that are super analog. Right. And I think, yeah, but then what you said also comes to this question, like, I think we need to really make the spaces of education to kind of have qualities, also spatial, like, textual qualities that make you want to be here and work together and kind of talk to people face to face, because I think there's nothing that can replace that. And so maybe just having white boxes is not enough anymore. White box plus interaction face to face, plus an AI that maybe is, can be some annoying thing in the corner that feeds us always with information, and we say back that we maybe question. And invoations. So this is one thing that AI is lacking is this object to find nature that somehow starts to feel not so abstract with the trillies in a way, uh, um, interface that you can feel really like materialistically and responsibility. Yeah. By all the, I started. The AI will solve this problem, not me, that gives the AI all the agency and it gives me all the freedom to not deal with these messy subjects. Mm-hmm. I said it good or bad. It's a very, very bad AI. Spin and point up, right? Like no responsibility, the very bad thing. That's all for today. I hope you enjoyed it and thanks for listening. And of course, let us know if you would want to hear an extra episode, especially devoted to space fiction. I am not the Star Wars fan, but I'm a Star Trek fan. So is it? Star Trek is like this post, it like opia, whatever you think, and uh, like the, the, they're living, uh, in a perfect union with a AI, right?