I have been wondering if design for education could be useful not only to teach something, as we could imagine that there is a broadcaster (teacher) and a receiver (child). Or if the processes of teaching and learning has to be considered as something more “liquid”. I think the learning process can occur from special conditions in which both subjects are in a particular psycho-physical state and for this particular reason they manage to effectively interact. I wondered if this could be a new starting point for the design of education, no longer considering it as a discipline that simply gives shape to supports to these processes but promotes them through a deeper understanding of human dynamics.
Something adults often forget when life becomes a jungle of appointments, meetings and things-to-do is how much their mental well-being is influenced by an active lifestule, even at work. This is a late trend on office design and lately has come also to the kid’s world. Lately, even the world of the child may also benefit from it, and it’s clear that kids sometimes have literally the need to move all the time and that’s because they can really feel that when the body stops to some extent also the mental activity slows, become less dynamic, it is harder to maintain a large sensory perception of reality.
It is a fact that movement creates better awareness and attention in class. So why should not we encourage this practice? Well, people from Standupkids did a design with this very aim. Their goal is to reverse the trend of physical inactivity, dangerous and fruitless for educational purposes. To do this they chose to rely on a system of donations through the portal DonorsChoose which should ensure that any class that needs these special desks can be funded. There are numerous scientific studies to support this claim and in fact the results seem quite encouraging indeed! After all, the sedentary lifestyle is just the latest stage of human evolution (?) right? ..maybe there is still time to change our mind!