Back to School

Node’s swiveling seat and attached work surface allow students to take notes and also to turn to one another and discuss a topic. In a sense, it embodies some of the thinking behind LearnLab in compact, analog form. The teacher can switch, without much disruption, from lecturing to discussion, from passive- to active-learning modes. Cathryn Rowe, a design student at the University of Texas at Austin, observes that rows of one-armed bandits institute a forward-facing, me-and-my-backpack-against-the-world mentality that precludes collaborative learning: “You feel isolated. You don’t have a good sense of who’s around or behind you. My purse doesn’t even fit on the under-seat shelf. Everyone puts their stuff on the floor, which gets cluttered.” In a smaller classroom, Nodes and backpacks (which can hang off the arm or go under the seat) could be wheeled around for discussion groups without anyone tripping over anyone else’s belongings. A double-hinge mechanism allows the work surface to pivot separately from the seat for easier egress. “In the old tablet chairs, you had to wiggle your way in there, and you’d get stuck,” Corcorran says. “With Node, movement becomes a key attribute of the chair. The seating shell and tablet arm move relative to each other.”

IDEO’s mantra—“fail early and often to succeed sooner”—drove the fast-paced development of the chair through the first part of 2009, including a substantial revision when Steelcase’s engineers found that the proposed structural tray base was too costly to assemble, forcing a more streamlined solution that incorporated structure into the tripod leg base. Cost was also kept down by eliminating upholstery; the flexing, curved form of the polypropylene is designed to be durable and comfortable and to accommodate movement and a variety of seating positions. To reduce shipping costs, the chair can be packed into an eight-cubic-foot box and assembled in less than 30 seconds, with no tools. “We can fit 50 percent more on a truck this way, but we couldn’t burden the installers or customers with assembly,” Corcorran says.

Despite such attention to cost, the chair still lists for $599, four times the average price of a one-armed bandit. A LearnLab with all the bells and whistles could set a college back $60,000. Steelcase’s gamble—that there will be enough higher-education institutions willing to invest in forward-thinking classrooms—requires some persuasive rhetoric. Its strategy has been to summarize the lessons of some 80 years of educational theory and argue that the solutions to our problems are not complex but can simply be purchased off the shelf as well-designed seats and gleaming smart labs. For example, LearnLab mixes high- and low-tech solutions to support different learning styles. Portable whiteboards allow students to work in groups, and a CopyCam captures their notes. Math students distracted by having to scribble equations can rest assured that the CopyCam will scan them on the whiteboard and distribute them via the RoomWizard software. Visual learners will appreciate the possibilities of three independently wired projection screens that can be hooked up to any laptop in the room. Much learning depends on what Elise Valoe, a Steelcase researcher, refers to as “contextual memory”—when a classroom epiphany is tied to an image, a smell, a handwritten note, a scrawled diagram, or a particular space. Interactive whiteboards allow students to take some of those memory triggers home. Eno, an interactive-whiteboard system developed at Steelcase’s subsidiary PolyVision, can be used in analog mode with markers, or combined with a projector in digital mode. The Eno pen functions as a cursor (clicking links on a Web page, for instance) or as a digital marker (annotating what’s on-screen). A save function will record the annotated image for distribution to students during class.

Technology on its own will not solve our educational problems, of course, and neither will design. A generation of students raised on MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter have little problem multitasking (e.g., texting) in class but are less able than their predecessors to evaluate their sources, now that “research” can be performed with a few taps of the keyboard on Google. In Chamberlain’s classroom, the technology allows groups of students to research on the fly, check for accuracy, and pull up their findings on the screen for comparison. But the bigger issue is that smart classrooms need smart teachers. “Students take to it naturally,” he says. “Faculty takes longer.”

And that is unlikely to change, since faculty members are commonly hired for their expertise rather than their teaching skills and are rewarded for their research while they trot out dusty slide lectures in perfunctory performances to halls of yawning students. You might think that resistance to technology would diminish as older generations of teachers retired, but it is just as easy to deliver a tired, dull lecture in a newfangled classroom as it is in a 1960s-era lecture hall.

As Scott-Webber sees it, the greatest barrier to bringing the classroom into the 21st century is not so much cost as communication. “There’s a huge gap between facilities managers, teachers who know what works, and designers’ knowledge of the learning environment. We haven’t gathered enough research on how we learn.”

It may be, as Scott-Webber adds, that there aren’t enough opportunities to tell the upper-administration officials, who decide where the money is spent, about the importance of learning environments. But the design of higher education is a truly wicked problem. It extends from the seats to the way in which donors are solicited to build high-profile, glamorous spaces like galleries, high-tech research labs, and concert halls rather than mundane classrooms. It even includes how we define education—in terms of achievement and testing rather than learning. Alongside our seats and classrooms, it seems we need to update our concept of education. It is still rooted in the 19th century, back there with the one-armed bandits.