Today I was lucky to meet and chat with Gary Keene, who works for the team at UAL that oversees the design and use of teaching and learning spaces across all of our campuses.
In very coincidental timing (relative to my research), we are in the process of setting a new brief to our UXD first years which explores current and past usage of learning spaces across the current LCC campus. This brief has been set with a view to informing the future design of the new LCC campus, which is currently being constructed.
Gary is a core part of the team involved in the development of learning spaces in th new LCC building, having worked at Google for eight years in a similar role. On that team he oversaw research led design of their workspaces all over the world, based on deep insight from their employees.
We have collaboratively written a brief for our first year UXD students, which we will be delivering to them next week. The brief aims to develop their research skills as they explore the current LCC campus and consider how learning occurs across the building in unexpected ways and spaces. We are particularly interested in thinking about how the building functions as a ‘machine’ or system for learning and how the current spaces either support or hinder this.
When I first started my PG Cert research into the ‘studio’ as a pedagogical space, I did not realise how timely this would be in relation to the work that we are now doing with our UX first year students — it has been a very rewarding process seeing the two projects develop side by side! Indeed, seeing me undertake certain forms of research into spatial design and experience has visibly informed my students own understanding of research ethics, processes and methodologies.
My conversation with Gary today was particularly enlightening because it was fascinating to see what it looks like to do this kind of research as a real job rather than just as a short, standalone body of research. He talked to me about how Google used to use regular surveys as a tool to understand the sentiments of their employees regarding their workspaces, and figure out where and how best to make change. The survey consisted of just two very simple questions: firstly asking colleagues whether the previous day they had used the Google workspace for focused work, and if yes what had hindered them in doing so. It also asked them whether the previous day they had used the Google workspace for collaborative work and if yes, again, had anything hindered this. These two simple questions gave incredible insight into the changes that were required to make Google’s workspaces the best they possibly could be, and indeed Google is well known for the quality of its office spaces. It is widely recognised the extent to which this helps with employee satisfaction and retention.
In the modern university, students very much understand themselves not just as students, but also as customers or consumers. They are spending a lot of money to get their education and access to facilities, and they rightly demand the best. The challenge that Gary faces in his role is synthesising the right forms of research, data gathering and analysis, and presenting this as convincing arguments for the most senior teams at UAL to put into action across all of our sites.
As he works with his team to consider the design of teaching and learning spaces in the new LCC campus he is keen to gather as much insight as possible from various different forms of research in order to help shape that new campus into the most useful and rewarding space it can be, for both staff and students.
One methodology he is undertaking is to create five temporary learning spaces within the current LCC campus which explore different spatial concepts. Through experiential testing and analysis of the usage of these spaces, and seeking feedback from their users, he aims to successfully shape innovative spaces in the new campus which work well across the board, and which will have been tried and tested.
The research that our UXD students undertake will directly feed into the design of these temporary studio spaces which will in turn feed in to designing the new LCC campus. This is a very exciting prospect for our first year students and we as tutors are also excited to be involved in this project.
I also shared some of my PG Cert research so far with him, including staff interviews and student workshops. He was enthusiastic about my progress so far and indeed, as I shared many of my findings so far (for example around desire for greater comfort, flexibility, privacy and room for collaboration), he echoed these insights in his own research.
His personal area of interest is specifically around collaboration and how modular spaces might facilitate that. He reflected on the fact that both he and UAL management recognise that there is simply no way of knowing what subjects or what courses we will be teaching as little as three years in the future, or indeed how or where we will be teaching them — so making investments in flexible, modular, adaptable spaces is vital.
I added that in addition to this need for flexibility and modularity there is also a great emphasis placed by students on comfort and stability, in many different ways. My findings around the desire for comfortable soft seating (as well as more upright practical seating needs), as well as ideas around privacy, lighting (and much more), really emphasise that students place comfort above many other considerations when it comes to the spaces that they work in. So as well as wanting to be modular, flexible, adaptable and ready for an uncertain future, our spaces also need to offer the right amount of comfort support, care, and safety that our increasingly discerning students rightly demand of their spaces.
I reflected that in the Victorian era learning spaces were very austere, and seating was hard, upright, and almost intentionally uncomfortable. Perhaps the idea was to maintain students focus on the subject matter at hand, however these kind of ideas have rightly shifted. Nonetheless, some of our workspaces still feel more akin to these uncomfortable Victorian classrooms than they do to the actual demands of contemporary students and workers. Offices like Google have recognised this shift, but many other offices and college spaces still continue to operate in ways which fit more into a historic vision of a good workplace than perhaps what contemporary workers and students demand.
All in all, it was a very rewarding conversation, and I appreciated Gary‘s interest in my research so far. He has expressed enthusiasm for seeing my project when it is complete, and indeed some of the data that I have gathered may be useful to him in presenting a body of evidence to UAL Senior management around the shape and formats that our future workspaces might take.
It is a really exciting possibility for me to think that my research may live on in this way. I’m also excited about the potential which my own UX students bring to this body of research, and how UAL as one of the worlds premier creative arts universities should sit at the forefront of this kind of research into the future of workspaces, particularly creative workspaces.