Design the campus introducing a toolkit for developing creative learning spaces

Design education involves various teaching, learning, and designing activities, such as idea generation, writing, sketching, computer-work, planning, lecturing and listening to presentations, team work, discussions, model making, and prototyping. All these activities require particular environments. The question how these activities could be facilitated through the physical environment of the design educational institutions gained a lot of interest, recently. Designing such creative learning spaces in a way that triggers the best possible creative performance of the students, is relevant for both design educators and students who want to improve their individual classrooms, and architects or interior architects who are planning entire design schools. This paper presents a toolkit that can be used to facilitate design decisions in spatial design processes of creative learning environments. It consists of three card-sets: 1) a card-set with inspirational examples from other institutions, 2) a card-set to phrase the problem space, and 3) a card-set to sketch design solutions. The underlying principles of this toolkit were developed based on a) a qualitative research approach using cultural probes among design students of two different institutions, and b) expert interviews with design educators and architects.