BiB-Lab. An innovation lab to co-create fair spaces for education.

Abstract

The ‘BiB-Lab / Innovation Lab for Educational Spaces in Motion’ was run by a multidisciplinary research team from the Faculty of Architecture and Spatial Planning at the Technische Universität Wien (TUW) from September 2021 to Oc-tober 2024 and led by Karin Harather. This teaching and research project was funded by the Innovation Foundation for Education (ISB) and carried out by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) as part of the ‘Innovation Labs for Education’ programme. In participatory processes, the importance of spaces and environments in school and extracurricular educational processes was the-matised and researched using aesthetic-artistic methods and tools. Sensitising learners and teachers to the spaces physically surrounding them was an im-portant first step. Suitable playful methods had to be developed and used to create awareness of existing (spatial) qualities and potentials, but also of defi-cits. The BiB-Lab made 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 could be initiated and tested. University lecturers and students worked together with children, young people and teachers to identify (spatial) needs, develop temporary, low-cost test settings and develop further design measures based on these participatory experiences and feed-back from the participating ‘experts in their everyday lives’.