The cube and the poppy: Participatory approaches for designing technology-enhanced learning spaces

This abstract presents an on-going research that aims to identify how students and lecturers perceive technology-enhanced learning spaces. Findings from Participatory Design workshops will be presented wherein students and lecturers redesigned a large learning space (the 'Cube‘) and a small learning space (the 'Poppy‘). Both these prototypes where designed aiming to introduce technology as a paramount feature and with the aim of provoking reflections and discussions about the role of technology and the role of lecturers and learners. We follow a methodology of Participatory Design (PD) which is a set of practices and research methods that aim to include end-users as active participants in the design process (Schuler & Namioka 1993). The concept of PD matches new trends in learning and teaching in which learners construct their knowledge by dialogue, discussion and negotiation, thus through active participation (Jessop et al. 2012). Guiding this research was the question: how different would a technology-enhanced learning space be if we integrate its main stakeholders‘ perceptions and creative ideas?