Architecture of Space
For this assignment I chose my bedroom because that is the place where I am most creative. One of the biggest reasons my creativity flows while I am in bed is that I only have two other choices, sleeping or being stressed about everything on my To Do list. If I can’t sleep or I’m up while my husband is still sleeping (he could sleep for a whole day straight if no one woke him up), I force my mind to wander to avoid becoming stressed. This is when my creative juices start flowing, from planning meals to cook to the latest tweak for my classroom to various inspirations for a myriad of projects. In fact, I thought of taking pictures of my bedroom for this assignment when I was, of course, in bed. I chose the picture of the clock to represent the fear that I have of wasting time, the stress that will build up if I cannot sleep and do not force my mind to veer off into creative endeavors.
I also chose the picture of the fan because the humming of the fan allows my mind to wander into my most creative ideas by blocking out all the “noise” outside of that moment, both literal noise and the noise of the hundreds of other things I could be thinking about. My bedroom is the one place where I feel like all of my worries can be put aside and I can explore my own brain in a way that leads to some of my most important and creative ideas. For my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary, I bought two antique spoons and created a shadow box of “Spooning Since 1964.” Ironically yet logically, this creative idea came to me in bed.
One major takeaway I had from both the reading and the assignment is that if you give people the same spaces, they will do different things with them. In the different classrooms in the article, “many of the affordances of the designed space were not used at all” and when they were they were “they were often used in ways that were not intended by the original classroom designers” (Mishra et al, 7-8). Faced with seemingly the same options of how to creatively use technology to form an effective hybrid learning environment, the different instructors and students took very different paths in their application of the technology. This is similar the uses of my bedroom. Whereas my creativity is flowing within that space, my husband struggles to do any thinking there and associates the space with relaxation, doing his better thinking elsewhere in the apartment. Such differing uses of the same space are also important for me to keep in mind for my classroom. Instead of thinking that I know best what arrangements my students needs to be creative and productive, “ignoring what users actually do–how they think, work, learn or behave,” I should observe my students reading, writing, and doing art in order to determine the types of spaces that encourage their best work (Mishra et al, 5). Then, I can restructure where and how they sit accordingly.