We keep designing learning spaces around the technology

I’ve been in a lot of conversations about new learning spaces over the years, and I’ve noticed how often they begin in exactly the same place: the technology. What size should the screens be? Should the room have an LED wall? Do we need immersive projection? What cameras should we use? Which platform should connect it all together? They are perfectly reasonable questions. I’m just not convinced they should be the first ones.

The more useful starting point is usually much less exciting: what should this space make possible that is difficult, ineffective or impossible today? That question changes the conversation. Instead of designing a room around a collection of products, you begin designing it around people, activity and purpose.

This matters because technology dates surprisingly quickly, while the basic reasons for creating a space tend to last much longer. A college might want learners in one campus to access expertise from another. It might want employers to contribute to teaching without spending half a day travelling. It might need somewhere students can rehearse situations that are expensive, dangerous or impractical to reproduce in the real world. Or it may simply need a room that encourages a different kind of teaching and collaboration.

Once those things are understood, the technology becomes easier to specify. A large display, camera system, simulation platform or immersive environment is no longer the idea. It is an ingredient in making the idea work.

The room is part of a bigger system

I suspect one reason organisations get this backwards is that capital projects naturally encourage us to think about tangible things. A screen has a price. A room has dimensions. A piece of equipment can be put into a procurement spreadsheet. The value of being able to share expertise between institutions, change the way a subject is taught or build a stronger relationship with an employer is much harder to put into a product specification.

But that is precisely why the strategic thinking needs to happen before the specification. A technically impressive room that sits outside the organisation’s wider strategy can quickly become an expensive island. People visit it, admire it and perhaps use it enthusiastically for a while, but nobody has really worked out how it connects to timetabling, staff capability, curriculum priorities, partnerships, operating budgets or the other spaces around it.

The strongest projects I’ve seen tend to treat the physical environment as one part of a wider system. They think about the experience people should have in the room, but also what happens before they enter it and after they leave. They consider who will use it, who will support it, what external organisations might participate and how its role might evolve over the next five years rather than simply how impressive it will look on opening day.

Design for change, not just launch day

That last point feels increasingly important. AI, simulation, robotics and new forms of remote collaboration are developing far more quickly than most organisations can refurbish buildings. Trying to predict the exact technology a learning space will need several years from now is probably futile.

A better objective is to create environments that can adapt. That might mean flexible infrastructure, sensible connectivity, layouts that can support different modes of teaching, or simply avoiding design decisions that lock the organisation into one particular platform or use case.

It also means being comfortable with the idea that not every requirement has to be solved on day one. Sometimes the smartest design decision is to create the conditions for something to develop rather than filling every wall, rack and corner with technology because the capital budget happens to be available.

None of this is an argument against ambitious technology. Quite the opposite. I’ve spent much of my career working with it, and I’m still fascinated by what good technology can make possible. But the projects that stay useful are rarely the ones that started by asking what they could buy. They started by being clear about what they wanted people to be able to do.

Perhaps that is the simplest test for any new learning environment. If you removed every product name from the proposal, would the idea still make sense? If it would, you probably have the beginnings of a strategy. If it wouldn’t, you may just have a shopping list.