BiB-Lab: Setting Up Educational Space Innovations Karin Harather Technische Universität Wien, Austria The BiB-Lab / Innovation Lab for Educational Spaces in Motion is run by a multidisciplinary research team from the Faculty of Architecture and Planning at the Technische Universität Wien and headed by Karin Harather. BiB-Lab is funded by the Innovation Foundation for Education and carried out by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency as part of the "Innovation Laboratories for Education" programme. New models of creative thinking, action and design spaces are being developed in Vienna's largest municipal housing estate, the Per-Albin-Hansson-Siedlung, to complement the range of existing (educational) structures. With the mobile BUS-LAB, the SCHULRAUM-LAB (in partner schools nearby) and the GRÄTZL-LAB (interim use of former business premises in a small shopping centre), there are three different types of laboratory. Different test settings for accessible, shared and fair educational spaces are developed in a creative participatory manner and tested as part of innovation projects. The significance of spaces and environments in school and informal educational processes is focussed and researched using aesthetic-artistic methods and tools (Harather 2021). To sensitise learners and teachers to the spaces physically surrounding them is an important first step. Stimulating playful methods must be developed and used to create awareness of existing (spatial) qualities and potential, but also of deficits. BiB-Lab makes it possible to integrate university teaching and research in a very practical way in order to create different school and extracurricular laboratory situations in which innovative collaborative spatial appropriation and spatial design processes can be initiated and tested. University teachers and students work together with children, young people and their teachers to identify (spatial) needs, develop temporary, cost-effective test settings and develop further design measures based on the experiences of use and the feedback from the school community. On the one hand, the low-threshold, playful and yet analytical approach is used to explore the existing spatial conditions (e.g. schools have too little space, are not equipped for afternoon supervision, are not feel-good spaces). On the other hand, (spatial) strategies against the various disadvantages to which the children and young people living here are exposed are tested (e.g. strategies for appropriating space, shared use of space, co-creation, acting as equals, learning with and from each other). BiB Lab’s aim is to change mindsets, to raise awareness and rethink processes, to question routines and values, and to recognise the right to grow up in a democratic and fair space for education (Harather et. al. 2023). As Anne Bamford has analysed, the arts promote holistic thinking as well as the free flow and creative merging of ideas - and these are important prerequisites for future developments and innovations. Seen in this light, the arts in education are a fundamental means of equipping (young) people with the social and intellectual skills they need for the unpredictable future (Bamford 2010). So the setting-up and expansion of the BiB-laboratories is very consciously designed as an open artistic-experimental process and the co-creative development of innovative educational space designs is intended to have a lasting learning effect.