The sense of presence: design for learning

This workshop took as its starting point the public library. Public access to books is not new. In the 19th century the push for a truly public library asserted an access to learning, though this remained a one-size-fits all kind of learning and user. The contemporary library remains at the forefront of the intersection of learning and difference – class, race, gender- though there are many other radical spaces of learning, knowledge production and exchange that enable the complex, the uncertain and the unexpected that gives cities their life. How can formal institutions learn from informal, peripheral and invisible spaces and vice versa, and how might we design new spaces for learning?

Participants 

Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad, a designer, working across products, images and spaces 

Ken Worpole, Emeritus Professor in the Cities Institute, London Metropolitan University

Adam Murray, Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of Central Lancashire and cofounder of Preston is my Paris and TENT

Suzanne Hall, urban ethnographer and lecturer in the Department of Sociology, LSE