Back to School

Anyone who has studied or taught in a college will be familiar with what might be called a Botox Building: a creaky structure with outdated facilities that has been renovated around the edges, making the lobbies and offices clean and capacious but leaving the classrooms and lecture halls untouched. It’s a one-building demonstration of Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: students enter a 21st-century structure and find themselves sitting in the 1960s, perched in rows on small wooden chairs, blinking under fluorescent lights bouncing off pitted vinyl floors.

This month Steelcase is introducing Node, a smart swiveling seat designed by IDEO for high-density classrooms, as part of a concerted effort to bring campuses up to speed with current teaching and learning styles. Along with LearnLab, Steelcase’s technology-enabled classroom, which is being tested in 50 locations around the country, Node is the manufacturer’s leap of faith into the higher-education market. Construction has taken a hit in education, as it has everywhere, but U.S. colleges still managed to spend $10.7 billion on building work in 2009 (down from $14.5 billion in 2007). Having traditionally focused on administrative offices on campus, Steelcase is betting that schools and colleges around the world are starting to recognize that the classroom has some catching up to do.

Node is intended to replace the old-school “one-armed bandits”—the rigid steel-framed plastic or wood seats, with tiny tables attached, that have populated campuses since World War II. Node’s big, curvaceous, bright-colored polymer seat, with storage space and an ample work surface, is partly a response to size issues. Students today need a lot more space than their postwar forebears. Books tied with string have been replaced by giant backpacks stuffed with food, iPods, clothes, books, and laptops. Try to take notes with a laptop on the tablet of a one-armed bandit—the experience is akin to typing in an economy-class seat: there’s room for nothing else. More poignantly, students themselves are larger. Node is tested to support 2,500 pounds of static load, the equivalent of a 300-pound student flopping into his seat. “Students have changed,” IDEO’s design project leader, Thomas Overthun, says. “Somewhat sadly, the trend is bigger, wider, heavier.”

Node and the LearnLab project were also prompted by thinking about how students actually learn. Educational psychologists have argued for decades (following the pioneering Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky) that students learn not by sitting and absorbing information but by finding things out for themselves, by “constructing” knowledge in social contexts. This has led to the adoption of “active” rather than “passive” learning in schools—class research projects, studio-based assignments, small-group discussions, and an emphasis on doing over lectures. Yet classrooms are still commonly designed as they were during the industrial revolution, with rows of seats facing the figure of authority. Regardless of a teacher’s intentions, the space itself establishes certain expectations. “As soon as we open the door to a traditional lecture hall, students are conditioned to the idea that they don’t have to do anything—they’ll just take notes,” says Lennie Scott-Webber, chair of interior design at Radford University and a researcher of environmental behavior. “We’ve conditioned people to sit in rows for passive learning.” LearnLab abandons the traditional classroom in favor of a triangular layout; the teacher is in the center, armed with a cordless lectern, and three ceiling-mounted projectors point to screens in three places in the room. Seating is configured to maximize eye contact and to allow the teacher to wander freely around the classroom. After testing a prototype in 2003 at its (grandly named) Steelcase University, the company oversaw the construction of another LearnLab in 2006 at Grand Valley State University, in Michigan. “Because of the openness of the classroom, I don’t have people sleeping or doing anything inappropriate,” says Jeff Chamberlain, a historian at Grand Valley State who regularly teaches a seminar in the LearnLab. “I can walk across the room in ten seconds.”

Given that the prevailing approach to higher education can be described as “stack ’em deep and teach ’em cheap,” the market opportunities for high-tech collaborative learning spaces might seem limited. Enter Node. According to Sean Corcorran, who leads Steelcase’s Educational Solutions team, the brief for Node emerged in part because Steelcase’s president, James Keane, had simply asked why furniture and technology that accommodated active learning wasn’t already everywhere. “It was a great question because it acknowledged that there’s a gap between knowing the stuff and doing something about it,” Corcorran says. “Why hasn’t it changed? There’s a lot of inertia, a lot of barriers. This had a big impact on us doing Node, because one of the barriers is classroom density. Can you make the customer not have to choose between an active classroom and density?”