Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Design, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
The Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Design is located in a basement room at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and it is a site of social science and crossdisciplinary experimentation. It is a new kind of classroom that allows people to explore new ways of teaching and learning.
The Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Design is located in a basement room at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and it is a site of social science and crossdisciplinary experimentation. It is a new kind of classroom that allows people to explore new ways of teaching and learning.
Critical to the scientific process is inquiry and the exploration with and about materials. The lab has both seminar tables and lab benches, as well as craft materials, computers, soldering irons, glue guns, commercially-available building toys, and many other tools for creating. The experiments with materials help students tap into ways of thinking that are not strictly rational. It engages their hands and their bodies and makes use of their embodied cognition.
“The Lab’s ‘thinking with things’ approach is built on the premise that active, hands on, multi-sensory learning helps students to make sense of what they are being taught. Unlike the lecture in Dewey’s canonical lecture hall, we enlist students’ hands, bodies, and environment. As Alison, a gifted personal trainer at my neighborhood gym, said: ‘I wish they had taught physics in the weight room. Then I might have understood it better.’”
-from http://nwi.ivytech.edu/atrium/site/archives/spring2013/kuhn.pdf
A student works in the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Design
Thinking with Things
The Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Design is a new kind of classroom. The tools found here are meant to support rapid iteration and ideation. The students use physical materials such a clay or Lego to mock up a prototype or express in physical form what they are feeling. The work based on the students’ attitudes, emotions, and thoughts is metaphorical and it makes physical the process of inquiry, which leads to insight and, eventually, innovation.
The Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Design
Adaptable Classroom
The typical classroom is set up like a theater. The professor’s podium is in the front of the room, with electronic resources such as a projector to show a presentation. The students are facing the professor in desks that, if they’re lucky, are movable.
Classrooms are not made to be re-configurable, but this is not true of the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Design. Everything in the Lab is made to be moved and to be used. The tools, the materials, and the furniture all announce that this is a space for being active, for making, and indeed for meaning making.
The conventional classroom does not support human inquiry and we have to think differently about what’s out there in the world to discover, and how to best support that kind of inquiry and discovery. If academia stays in its conventional mode of scholarship for the sake of scholarship, it will be increasingly irrelevant and meaningless/
Read More
- Ignite Craft Boston 1: Sarah Kuhn "Thinking With Your Hands" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsN5h-QBaZQ
- Sarah Kuhn, Coming to our Senses: Thinking with Things in the Classroom http://nwi.ivytech.edu/atrium/site/archives/spring2013/kuhn.pdf
- Sarah Kuhn (2012) Thinking With Thinkgs: Feeling your way into STEM http://seadnetwork.wordpress.com/white-paper-abstracts/final-white-papers/thinking-with-things-feeling-your-way-into-stem/
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