Thesis Thoughts: Part 1

I have a meeting with the department chair of the Environmental Design Department next Tuesday where I am supposed to give a little compare and contrast about my thesis ideas...

OH SHIT!  I'm  not ready. I thought I knew what I wanted to do, but I thought this would be a good place to work on my thoughts and probably get some feed back... If not, oh well.. atleast I have it written down somewhere.

I want to work within the school systems. I feel like our schools are too institutionalized. I learned this while substitute teaching this summer. As designers. we think of schools has a few rooms that can be made to fit the teachers needs, the proper number of egresses and the proper number of bathrooms and exits for the children. However, we don't design them to work with the different learning styles of different children. I've decided to station my project in Baltimore because the the transportation I see many of the young children travel daily. I was recently looking into grad schools and came across a few different ones that introduce the thought of Fluid Campuses... not only can you take classes in different parts of the country but they are all connected by the University. The school systems in Baltimore are already connected because most of them are public... but they don't act connected.

I want to propose a connective route between schools and also a better design to the classroom where different people with different learning strategies can succeed. I also want to focus on special-needs design. I feel like we stick those with specific needs in padded rooms and ignore them because of their impairments. This is entirely wrong. Those with specific needs need to be put into a room and learning space that will take what they respond to, whether it be visual sensory, hearing, expierence or quiet spaces, adapt those spaces to them so that they may build certain skills and succeed in a way that will benefit them.

A box room with chalk covered walls isn't stimulating. But an overstimulating room will only distract those from learning into playing non-stop. Why can't we include both stimulating and institutionalized spaces together, in such a way that they speak to the way we learn as individuals? I learn by seeing and doing. I don't learn well by listening because it happens to distract me more than looking at something.