Is Education Design Ready for Generation Z?

Aaron Taylor from architectural practice, Stantec, discusses how best practice from innovative workplace environments can be used to transform future education environments.

W ith every generation comes new educational policy and curricula, designed to help educators prepare today’s students for their future careers. Technology has had an extraordinary influence on the way universities teach and the way that students learn. The journey from the first computing degrees to the ubiquitous use of the interactive whiteboard and e-learning tools is relatively short, and yet technology is now completely embedded in education from foundation stage to post-graduate study.

With technology advancing at an exponential rate, it’s hard to predict what tools we will use to educate future generations, which makes it equally challenging to reimagine education buildings. However, with some experts predicting that as many as 65% of the jobs today’s children will be doing 20 years from now don’t even exist yet, something has to be done to create more flexible, agile education environments.

If the core challenge is aligning evolving educational needs with evolving workplace needs, it makes sense to take learn from commercial workplaces. Moreover, as employers continue to prioritise strategies for attracting and retaining the best talent, the commercial sector is seeing huge investment in research into workplace design. At Stantec, we have combined our international experience of designing education environments with the latest workplace thinking to generate a ‘learning and earning’ philosophy to explore ways that work environments and future workplace trends can be embedded in educational design.

Who are Generation Z, and what inspires them?

While it is Millennials that will dominate the workforce over the next 20 years, they will need to create workplaces and education environments that not only appeal to Generation Z but also respond to Generation Z cultures and behaviours.

Generation Z refers to anyone born after 1997; these are digital natives who have grown up in an era of superfast broadband, interactive gaming, sharable content and online social networks. They have seen such rapid change that they expect and accept it, just as they expect information to be instantly accessible and personalised experience to be readily available. Today’s undergraduates are drawn from Generation Z and if we consider how different their day-to-day experience is from that of their grandparents, it’s easy to see that the lecture halls and seminar rooms of the past are no longer in tune with their needs, even if the blackboard has flipped to white and uses a wireless internet connection rather than chalk.

Those belonging to Generation Z are collaborative and entrepreneurial learners who are ambitious for rapid success. Those characteristics are shaping design for progressive workplaces, and we now need to take our understanding of that culture and use research from the commercial world to develop a new era of education design.

Creative and collaborative

There have been much publicised new models for progressive workplace environments, with game-changing companies such as Google, Apple and Tesla creating more creative and collaborative work environments. It’s no coincidence that these are technology-based businesses and their inventive new workplaces integrate the use of technology with flexible, multi-purpose spaces for collaboration, quiet time and social interaction.

We need to replicate the new workplace models, and the goal should not be to find ways of plugging technology into traditional environments but to understand the ways in which technology has enabled new approaches to learning, ideas and collaboration. We may be taking inspiration from technology businesses, but the companies in question are all organisations driven by creativity and collaboration.

If today’s universities are to equip students for tomorrow’s careers, they must reflect those influences and provide environments that nurture creativity and collaboration. In this way, we not only ensure education environments are more engaging, appealing and appropriate for students but also aid students’ future transition into the workplace, which is likely to be very different from the dedicated workstations and boardroom meeting environments their parents knew.

Wellbeing and the human touch

In an increasingly technological age, wellbeing and social interaction must also be key design drivers, both in the workplace and in educational environments.

Opportunities for human contact must be built into learning spaces to nurture collaboration but should also be embedded in a social framework that includes cafes, collaborative study areas and social spaces. All of this must be designed with a flexible approach to enabling individual choices to suit varied personality types, course requirements and social and cultural demographics. Just as our needs might change depending on the tasks we have lined up for the day in the workplace, students should be able to choose different spaces for quiet, private study or collaborative learning and it’s vital to build ‘third spaces’ into the design where students can relax or ‘escape’.

The flexibility of these spaces must be considered beyond the layout and scale of the indoor environment to incorporate elements such as acoustics, connectivity, sensory engagement, natural light etc. allowing both the education provider and the student to adopt different locations within the building or the campus for different activities.

New concepts of the campus

While Stantec is using research into workplace environments to help us advise education clients on design strategies, there are already some universities engaging directly in the need to align learning and earning environments. For example, the University of Warwick has taken space for its business school in the Shard, while the UCL management school has invested in teaching spaces at Canary Wharf. As it stands, there is no model template to inform the future design of higher education environments, but it is clear that innovation is needed and it must take its cue from the workplace.