#knowledge environments

Re-imagining knowledge

Today’s world is very different in many ways, than it was when I grew up. In many ways it’s similar. It’s still people connecting, but today we have the option of connecting with so many more people and it’s a globally connected world. That really changes everything.

The whole foundation for how we can work with knowledge and how we also should work with knowledge. I think the core of of knowledge environments is that today knowledge is not something static.

It’s dynamic. It’s constructed in whatever you’re working on. You need to always try and update your knowledge. You co-create things together. Today good knowledge environments are really good social environments.

They have different components. You have the social. Like the face-to-face component. You also have a virtual or a tech component.

Just looking at our own practice, knowledge is not what we acquired during school. It is also what we acquired during school and during our studies. But it’s also keeping up-to-date all the time. When we have challenges that we are solving. Projects we’re doing is always connecting with knowledge environment around the world and locally. It’s a lot of connecting and that’s why today knowledge is very social.

Knowledge in itself, it’s not the piece of specific knowledge you know. It is being able to combine. Being able to update it. Being able to find new stuff And put it all together. This basically changes the way we think about learning in in schools.

Growing up. If you look at a very young child, knowledge is also still trying to make sense of the whole world. Of course that’s social too.

In school we want kids to acquire all sort of deeper understandings and also basic knowledge about how things work. In order for them to do so and to be successful later in life and contribute.

Learning is such an important part of of the knowledge I need today. If I’m not a good learner I will not get the necessary knowledge. So it’s also about learning to learn. We need to work very differently in our schools and universities. The world is so connected today.

That is also a big component in our work. It is working with how we can transform learning environments, to support the growth of: The development of the mind Thinking The knowledge Everything we want kids to acquire during school.

To make them aware of what they could do themselves with knowledge. That’s a lot more interesting than knowledge itself. It is what what are you able to do with knowledge?

Basically when we look at learning environments in schools, that is a type of knowledge environments. There’s a huge change going on. Away from the traditional classroom that everybody knows across the world. They are not constructed in order for as many people as possible to learn as much as possible. That’s not what the traditional classroom does.

We’re trying to change that here in Denmark and globally. We see a lot of change going on. We start to see environments where we look a lot more on different functions. Where do you collaborate? Where do you interact with other people? Where do you experiment and gain insight through experimentation? Through the application of different types of knowledge. What new knowledge would you learn from that? How can you incorporate different skills and competences in that?

We see schools with different zones. Areas where you pitch. Areas where you collaborate. Areas where your able to withdraw and just immerse yourself in something you’re looking at. It could be reading. It could be experimenting. It could be drawing. It could be a lot of things.

We need those quiet areas. We need those social areas. We need the coming together, The community areas and the sharing areas. We need innovation areas. We need a lot of things in our environments that actually supports our development of knowledge.

This sort of shared discovery of new insights. It’s not just a school thing. It’s also what you do in offices. Every now and then we look at an office and we redesign an office space.

It’s basically the same thing. Who do you need to connect with? In order to really solve the challenges that you have. The projects that you’re doing. How can we have an innovative component? How can we have environments that would nudge innovation? Nudge sharing and make things very visible, so that you know what’s going on and really make the whole space sort of a visual image of a combined community brain.

It is basically supporting a lot of different functions. More than the usual classroom or the usual office space. Where one size fits all. Here we’re trying to change the ”language” or the narrative of the environments, so that everybody has a lot of choice and can use the environment that’s suited for the specific purpose and challenge, that they’re working on at any given time.

So it’s choice, variety and flexibility in that sense. It’s visual environments. It’s surfaces for sharing.

There are also components that really helps to underpin well-being in the environment. So that people naturally connect and feel more open-minded.

It’s important to think about the atmosphere in the spaces. What kind of feelings it brings out in people? How it really supports the sense of community, well-being, belonging. That you’re able as a person to contribute and feel comfortable and at home in that space.

So it’s not only functional but it also has that sort of emotional component to it. Where we see warm environments. Lots of nature. Which really has such a calming effect on all of us. It just feels good.

It’s that combination of different functions and choice and options. A lot of possibilities with an atmosphere where you feel comfortable and at home were you are able to contribute your best. In a social environment.

Democratizing knowledge

One thing that’s really important to us as we work in education and learning, is equity.

That everybody is able to access our shared world. That they are able to create a life for themselves that is a value to them and to their communities.

It’s very important that knowledge is sort of democratized. You go back hundreds of years ago and knowledge was confined to a very few people in society. We have been democratizing. There’s been a good development of democratizing knowledge. Today knowledge is almost accessible to anybody who has a smartphone. That’s actually very beautiful.

There’s also a lot of fake knowledge out there. So how we can we enable every person to access knowledge, to understand how they learn. To find out that learning is for everybody.

It’s not just something like saying: ”School didn’t work for me” School should work for everybody! It’s about making schools very human centered. Having lots of different challenge that you ”broadcast” onto the reality.

So this is why we talk about the learning environments where we want to create choice and options for people. Because we learn in different ways. We have different preferences. Different interests and passions.

So it needs to be very flexible adaptable environments, with lots of choice where you’re able to make good decisions about your life and your education. So that it can be motivating for you. Because we have too many young people who who opt out of education. We don’t feel motivated or engaged and that’s such a loss for them and for our societies in general.

Environments enabling everyone’s creativity

The most important thing to me, in terms of knowledge. Is realizing that every human, no matter which role you have. Needs to be creative. I think making sure to train every single person who are working with a project. To enable their creativity.

I’m not talking about like the visual aesthetics creativity, but the problem-solving aspect of creativity. This very fundamental ability we have to create new things.

So the reason why I am drinking cup coffee or wearing t-shirt, is because we have so many thousands of years of creativity behind us. The challenging thing to me is, how can we build environments to enable that type of thinking.

I think unfortunately there’s very little knowledge about how our physical environment can support creative thinking. It’s a lot of myths and a lot of tradition. So we have a tradition for colorful rooms with a lot of different and unusual furniture. That is suppose to be a creative space. But there is no real evidence backing up that that’s good.

I definitely think that our physical environment will change. It’s really hard to protect how it will change. Because we don’t really know what is needed to make it good creative environment.

I think there will definitely be increased focus on enabling creativity in buildings. I’m convinced. This whole idea that, this is our creative room and this is your office. That will break up somehow. That’s a task I am really looking forward to see someone solve well.

In creative theory we talk about divergence and convergence. So the process of opening up or closing down. A lot of studies supports that when you open up. So when you work divergently. You should actually do it individually. So you should never try to do a group brainstorm, that’s ridiculous from a cognitive perspective. There’s no reason why two or more people should try to brainstorm or open up together. Because the second you say something, you already shared my way of thinking.

But vice versa, we know that in our conversion processes you need the opposite. You need to be a group. You need to have a lot of different points of view to make sure that your filtering of ideas is better.

So when we facilitate creative processes, we always shift back and forth. So it’s individual work. We are all the way down to three minutes individual. Then five minutes in group. Three minutes individual and then five minutes in groups. That’s the shortest periods we work with.

This is another thing that definitely has a physical manifestation. So when we do workshops like that. We have our own workstations. Where we can do our individual work and then very close by, we have the group context. So you more or less just turn around. You bring what you want to show to the group context and then you go back to your individual work.

This is a very interesting thing. That you don’t want people to be together talking all the time. Because that’s counter productive for creativity. This is another physical aspects of creativity.

Another interesting thing when we talk about the creative work environment. Is the social aspect. I think that you can design the best physical space possible. But if you cannot control how it’s being used or who are actually there, then it might not work. This place where we are now for an example ”Repubikken” It is by far the best co-working space I’ve ever been to. I’ve been working in a lot of different ones globally. I’ve been here for one year now. The main reason is the community management team.

It’s quite simple. The community managers here they know everyone a little bit and they speak to you. So if I go out for a coffee afterwards. Evelina, one of them, might come up to me and say: Did you meet this other guy? Because he’s currently working on a project that has this small overlap of yours. I don’t have to make sure to speak with everyone, because I know that the community managers they speak with me once in a while and they speak with everyone else. They see those opportunities.

So if we scale from the physical environments. To the thought environments. I think the most interesting thing to me right now, is human skills versus AI. Because there’s no doubt that AI is already capable of and will be capable of doing even more human jobs, in a very near future. The question is of course. What will humans be doing when AI is doing most of the jobs we do right now?

In my point of view, that’s creativity. What humans will have to be better and better at. Is doing what the computers cannot. We have all these things we know that AI won’t be able to do. Still there are very few forces in society that push creativity as an agenda. That’s to me very paradoxical.

What we’ve been looking more and more at is how to facilitate creativity in remote work. What we see more and more is that people are not working in the same location. They meet rarely.We have people here in Copenhagen. That we see very rarely. They are calling into Copenhagen.

What we have been looking at is how we can facilitate creative processes, where you actually collaborate with someone in the same way that you would, if you and I would to design something right here.

One of the things, that I think we will see, very soon. Is a merger of physical architecture and virtual reality. So I go to the door I might put on some gear. I open the door and then I enter another office somewhere else in the world and they will say ”Hey Balder!” when I enter.

A digital, cultural and physical creative environment

Three or four years ago I worked a lot with Medellín in Colombia. It used to be the world’s most dangerous city and now  when we ended, it actually became known as the world’s most creative city by Wall street journal. Right now I’m trying to set up the first incubator and science Park in Nigeria.

Yes there is a there’s a physical component to future knowledge environments. I think that three components are actually important.

1. It’s how do you create a knowledge atmosphere over the internet? 2. How do you create a culture and community? Around the the place that it was supposed to be the hot spot or the place where all the vibes starts going and so forth. 3. The physical environment itself

1. A digital environment

We are much more on the move. We’re much less dependent on place. Much more working with knowledge structures and knowledge architecture architecture. The most valuable thing today is probably software and you can’t touch that. It’s like all over. Maybe it’s found, but it’s somewhere else. It’s not physical.

Those things are becoming more and more valuable. That’s also the way we work more and more. You as an architect. It is your ideas and abstracts constructions that is the most valuable actually.

It’s interesting now for example when I work with Nigeria and also the same a little bit with Columbia. That the internet is not as good as we’re used to in the Western world. So you can’t use all the tools that you used to. So you have to learn how to communicate internationally, were a lot of the growth happens, with other tools. So these small kind of basic things becomes really important.

2. A community culture

The second part I think is culture. More and more, I think that you can build buildings. But if you don’t have a community manager or an event team or some kind of a soul being put into that physical body, then it won’t work.

The more you can build in ”the community presence” or even put in the budget that you should have people working with this over a long time. I think that would be great.

Events is one way of spreading values and also attracting attention and and making people meet each other in new ways. Under new themes and discussing new things. That makes them inspired and gets  them closer together.

So I think events is a big thing for a community manager. One thing that they had here at ”Media Evolution City” where I work, that I really like is ”Dine with a stranger” You just get invited to a lunch with ten people. You know none of them. It’s not a big thing. Yet pretty easy to to do. It’s great!

I think, you can usually just go into a place and you can feel if it’s working or not. What interests me is actually how do you get the vibe? Part of is definitely physical. A lot of it is also creating the community, the happenings, the events, the meeting places. How you create that, is just as important.

In Nigeria we were doing it outside of the building. You can use the streets as well. You don’t get as much of a concentration, but you get a lot of more marketing. People are starting to understand that. There’s music on on there? On campus? Over there? I’ve never been into that house. What is happening?

3. A physical environment

People haven’t really understood the changes behind how we work. I’m very seldom at my office. I guess that’s more and more common.

That demands a lot more of a flexibility when it comes to building structures. How to pay rent. On the other hand, maybe I’m not so problematic when it comes to discussing price, if I get a flexible deal.  Price is not the most important thing. The flexibility is the most important thing.

The basic things that I think is very crucial for a creative environment. It’s actually the balance between inspir tion and function.

If it becomes too much inspiration, it becomes more like an ”ad-agency cool” But you can’t really work there.  And if you only don’t do cubicles all creativity will die. It’s always some kind of balance between inspiration, even provocation, maybe some kind of history that you can be proud of.

But also like traces of innovation that has been going on. When we did service around what people thought would be a creative environment. Something that I didn’t think about myself was, that people loved when you can find like, a whiteboard where there were still notes or prototypes laying around that you can start fiddle with and stuff like that. Yes, that’s some of the reflections I have.

1. How do you find a good Internet solution for knowledge?

2. How do you find a community building part of it?