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What are the characteristics of meaningfulness that we look for in Live Learning opportunities and examples?
Liveness is a strategy to embrace ways of working that do not sit easily within received structures and boundaries, and to empower architecture students who choose to operate across, in between and at the edges of more traditional architectural forms.
Liveness is explored through Live Learning opportunities that give students experience in: civic and community engagement, co-production, engaged learning with people from outside university and academia.
Liveness embodies the social and political ethos of the School.
Key Themes and Questions:
Mutual Learning Opportunities
Liveness creates opportunities for mutual learning, through close collaboration and partnership working.
Students often take greater responsibility for their work within Live learning opportunities. They are learning about themselves, as individuals, professionals and group members. This is in addition to learning about the partners that they are collaborating with.
Stakeholders and partners often enjoy a range of benefits from taking part in Live Learning activities, these include: staff/volunteers/organisations in terms of skills development, dedicated blue sky thinking time and organisational development opportunities. Liveness provides opportunities to think differently!
Mutual Learning: a two-way or multi-lateral learning experience, where all involved are learners. This approach is in contrast to situations where a teacher and learner are defined, with the former being in a position of imparting knowledge and the latter receiving it.
Nurturing Social Capital
Liveness embodies collaborative and participatory design processes, which have tangible help build social capital. "A collaborative design process can offer numerous opportunities to build confidence, develop new life skills and enhance employability. It can also help foster local relationships and networks, and build social cohesion." (The Glasshouse, Community Led Design. Designing Places with People)
Whilst Live Learning opportunities are time limited, they can provide the impetus and support strategies for future development of social capital; providing suggestions for new initiatives, community events and CPD.
Liveness projects are aim to be inclusive, enabling people of all ages and abilities to engage with them, where appropriate.
Social Capital: “Social Capital: involves the potential of individuals to secure benefits and invent solutions to problems through membership in social networks. Social capital revolves around three dimensions: social ties or social participation, levels of trust that characterize these ties, and resources or benefits that are both gained and transferred by virtue of social ties and social participation.”
https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-capital
Being Situated - Connecting People and Place
Where possible students are asked to embed themselves in the places that they are working in; Taking time and developing place specific tactics to understand the stakeholders and their physical, social and environmental context. Through these actions, students become invested in place and people, often contributing and generating new conversations and making new connections.
Situated Practice: being invested in a place and embedded within its physical and social networks shows a meaningful commitment, as well as an investment of time and creative energy.
Addressing Local Need
Live learning encourages students to address local need rather than exploring their own agendas or developing purely hypothetical projects. In order to do this, students work with stakeholders in different ways, whether forming project briefs together, or creating installations that prompt responses from local people.
Addressing local needs means that all partners will benefit from Liveness, and it focuses student endeavour on addressing real issues that have real world value.
Local Need: Good design starts with clear information about the context and about need. There are various ways that engagement activities can help you identify and better understand: who lives, works, plays, and visits; local activities, amenities, services; local issues and need; potential future users and beneficiaries.
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