A wiki for spaces. A town anyone can edit. School architecture founded on mnemonic principles
When we think of wikis, we think of text, like the Wikipedia. But this notion of content that anyone can view and anyone can edit has barely unfurled its wings. What if we were to apply it to space?
For instance, imagine growing a World of Warcraft town as a community. Each person could design and improve upon the buildings, fill the walls with graffiti, neighborhoods would define themselves... the ease and pace of iteration might even generate new ideas about town planning.
Alternatively, let's build on Ed Cooke's fantastic plan for school architecture in the future [cached]:
Children, well known to be compulsive absorbers of information, crucially learn what they are interested in. Like all animals, they are interested in spaces.
I’d like to see schools’ spatial layout reflect the history of Western culture, and thereby implicitly teach it. A snake-like line of school buildings could begin at one end in Ancient times and run on, in temporally organized fashion, up to the computer science blocks of the present day. Key themes and figures from each epoch could provide the names for classrooms, which could also reflect some of the architecture, customs and furniture of the day.
Because in five years of school, everyone learns every detail of the spatial organisation of the buildings, and because memories always attach to the spaces in which they were first formed, merely attending such a school would give one a wonderfully detailed sense of the history and structure of Western civilisation. And it wouldn’t need to be prescriptive, for one could take advantage of the second source of childrens’ interest - things they have a role in - to redouble the effect. Each year-group could, over the course of five years, reconsider, re-design and re-build one of the twelve epochs/buildings.
Convincing someone to build a school organized on mnemonic principles is going to be tricky. But in the meantime, perhaps schools' online presence might take the form of a spatial wiki. Students could make changes ranging from decor to naming to overall organization, shaping their online school to their memories and vice versa. We love to deeply inhabit our environment by shaping it - what could be better than exercising our rich faculty for spatial navigation imaginatively?