Our relationship to physical space is changing in the mobile age. We spend a lot of time inhabiting virtual space, where a live mediated person can be within 12-24 inches of our face, while physically residing half way around the globe somewhere.
Or, maybe a “student” and their peers and their instructor/ teacher/ guide/ facilitator exist in the same town, but not in the same buildings. Formerly we needed to share physical space in a room in a building to fully share a space. Now it’s confusing, how much reality are we sharing using online “space” versus in-person F2F space?
Just as cities were structured to meet the transportation and infrastructure needs of their time and place, and sometimes kludged together to make things work after those conditions had changed, we are trying out how this new virtual space thing works.
We’ll start by using what we have on hand presently, and try to take it apart and put it back together creating different potentials for living working learning. But the parts won’t always fit the way we want them to. We start from scratch if we can’t mash things together.
For example, the old medieval towns, or the bazaars in N. Africa, might have “streets” wide enough for a few persons walking or someone on horseback, or camel, but today, not be able to fit a car or a truck. Rather than throw those areas away, people find a way to still use them…oh, look at that Vespa!
And we find those areas quaint and interesting because they are so different from the places we are used to today. Even though they don’t work in the ways we expect our modern environments to work, they are still “good for some things”.
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IOW, we haven’t planned our physical environment to account for virtual space yet, and we are going to have to do that somehow…through trial and error probably, and through attempts to mash things together that either will, or won’t fit.
Here’s an article from the New Yorker that explores new ways of thinking of organized spaces fitting organized groups.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Happy-Together-The-New-Yorker.pdf”]
A company called WeWork is noted, as an attempt to provide an amalgamated “place” for workers and employment that crams the physical space and virtual space together.
They have “branched out” into another reorganized physical space called WeLive. Whereas the one or two car garage ranch house and the freeway epitomized the structure enabling the so-called “nuclear family”, a place like WeLive, uses the slogan “a new way of living”.
IOW, something that comes after the nuclear family suburbs and fits the mobile age better, at least for millennials. Sort of fits the sharing economy, to fit housing pieces together into a new structure, both physically and conceptually…with a bit of a nod to virtual worlds of social cohesion too.
Would something like WeLive be adapted to create a physical space where students in late elementary and HS could live and study “together” in the mobile age? The concept seems like it might work for adult and continuing education and professional development,
Tribes lived in close proximity, there was no commute to speak of to live and work with your extended family. But some tribes used physical space as a series of temp locations: nomads. What as yet unforeseen structures for living and working will we create to meet current and future needs and potentials in the mobile global age? How will that affect what is best for education and learning?