Lean back, to learn forwards
Notes on “Learning Cities” event RSA 17th March
Although I’m not a historian of technology, I’d place money on the fact that the equivalent of ‘democratising the digital’ has been a feature of every new technology, whatever it was.
So, despite the fact that we like to think that artificial intelligence brings new challenges that we’ve never faced before, it was really good to hear from those who were pioneers of the internet revolution in the 1990s.
We can learn a lot, from Eva Pascoe’s experience of setting up Cyberia, the world’s first internet café, through the architectural obstacles described by Bernhard Blauel of creating a suitable space for the Paris Cyberia, to the thinking behind The Hive Library, described to us by Peter Clegg. Add to that, the background and aspirations of Edward Saperia’s Newspeak House and James Stevens’ Backspace, and we start to formulate ideas about what might be required in the age of AI.
There are of course many differences between the dawn of the ‘public’ internet in the 1990s and the emerging generative artificial intelligence of the 2020s. The one that really stood out for me while listening to the speakers at this RSA event, was that those pioneers of the internet were starting from a general position of ignorance; the general public didn’t know what the internet was, or its possibilities, let alone have any experience of using it. In contrast, we now find ourselves in a position where just about everyone is using generative AI without understanding it, its limitations or its potential.
That said, there are similarities. How do you best educate and inspire people about a new technology? As was said, “the techies can work it out,” but in order to democratise properly and create prosperous cities we need to reach wider than those who can learn alone in their bedrooms or offices. The point was well made that, bringing people together to share is the most effective way to learn, in particular as Eva pointed out, “to fully utilise AI we need a multi-disciplinary approach.”
There is a much bigger discussion around the purpose of learning and how that needs to change, especially for the under 18s or when it’s not about a specific skill or piece of knowledge, but that wasn’t really the focus of this event.
Some of the questions in the chat were related though. Questions that focused on whether we need buildings at all to learn in this age of connectivity. Does YouTube replace the teacher? Does virtual reality replace the physical college? If not, why not?
These questions were touched on, but there wasn’t really sufficient time for them to be answered. In reality, to tackle them fully you’d need experts on learning alongside the architects.
However, pulling on the experience of these pioneers in the room and the fact that human traits don’t really change that much, it’s safe to say that we learn best from each other, not least when what we need or want to learn is not clear, and to a large extent is down to the collective imagination.
There is a groundswell of opinion that the best way to approach our rapidly changing futures is through community, whether that’s local energy, food, democracy, or simply knowing your neighbours as real people that breathe and sweat rather than as icons on a social media platform that you can ‘other’ with no real risk of meeting them in person.
And, this is where the role of architects and learning space specialists come in. With the decline of the high street and other destinations no longer drawing people together for communal and community reasons, how do you design spaces that can overcome the inertia that now exists when attempting to tempt people out of their homes?
One of the strengths of the London Cyberia and Backspace models was the contextualising of new technology in familiar settings. Whereas, the Paris Cyberia was about sneaking it into an existing place without making a big fuss about the technology. The Hive takes advantage of being a knowledge hub adjacent to a café, creche, and local government office; they are a part of what people are doing in the daily lives, with or without them. On the other hand, Newspeak house is explicit about why it’s bringing people together and what’s expected of them, and this works well for in-depth longer-term collaborations of learning.
I sometimes worry that when thinking about these sorts of issues we fall back on improving the status quo rather than starting with a blank page. Although, how maverick we want our urban architects to be is questionable. That said, I liked the idea put forward by James Stevens of repurposing buildings rather than rebuilding – this has to be the way to go, both environmentally and commercially.
Commerciality is key to making this work, unless we rely on central government, which tends to have a top-down one size fits all approach. Coffee and cakes are always good sources of income, and local government funding can be attractive to place-based solutions, as is the case with The Hive, which also keeps its costs low through their innovative air-flow system.
All in all this event left me with an excited sense of opportunity. With careful thought and a good splash of risk-taking we could re-imagine local communal spaces, or build new ones, that draw us together, to hang out, to learn, to imagine and inspire each other. The result could well be the true revolution in artificial intelligence, of a grass roots movement that understands and uses it for their communal benefit, rather than a faster and easier way to deliver essays, reports or to indulge in degenerative entertainment.
Further reading:
