27th August 2017, Porto Conte Ricerche, Alghero
The School will host an International Conference on the mentioned topics. The conference will be open to the participation both of the scientific and the local community.
ELEGIBILITY
Researchers and scholars in the field of architecture, urban space design, pedagogy, information technology and new technologies.
TOPIC I _ The active role of space in learning processes
The recent discoveries in the neuroscience field demonstrate a link between the motor patterns and higher cognitive functions. The action is no longer understood as a result of a perception phase and of a subsequent interpretation, but as an integral part of a process where all the components collaborate simultaneously. Space provides affordances that is, opportunities for actions. The subject, through his cognitive system, seizes the opportunities based on a form of prediction concerning how the same space will be in the future. In this context, the action leads to knowledge and the space decisively supports this process.
TOPIC II _ Connective Learning between real and virtual space
The improvements in virtual reality seem to be able to provide such unreal worlds that the reality itself becomes a pure illusion. We know that is not completely truth and that, despite the recent technical and technological developments, the immersion in the virtual world can only be temporary. Indeed, the importance of virtual reality is related to the conscious or unconscious awareness of the immersion process at different levels of the virtual and to the ability to re-emerge at any time to grasp the reference points of the real world. This is the reason why the design of physical space is a fundamental element also in the realization of the virtual environments.
TOPIC III _ City, public space and learning devices
The Canadian sociologist Mc Luhan wrote "City as Classroom" already in 1977- twenty-five years after prefiguring in his “The Mechanical Bride” - the nascent megalopolis as a "global electronic village" where the traditional face-to-face communication has been replaced by the continuous stream of information and of the social representation. However, there is a substantial difference between the amount of urban facilities and their concrete capacity to accommodate the plans of actions claimed by every single inhabitant or groups of inhabitants. Working on the project of the urban space means responsibly rethinking the role that space itself assumes in the dynamics of the processes of uses and appropriation of the city, understood as personal paths of action and of knowledge.
TOPIC IV _ The school as an urban organism
According to the educational methodology, the traditional school buildings were conceived as rigid and functional spaces in compartmentalized floors with long corridors leading to an orderly succession of classrooms. The classroom was the only place to transmit knowledge. Often articulated in spaces open to the outside and intimate domestic space, nowadays the School is understood as an urban entity involved in the construction of parts of the city. The School as a total institution set in the industrial era principles turns into the School of the everyday life, accommodating the expectations, desires and instances of the community that the School itself contributes to constitute.
Publication
The conference proceedings will be published (ISBN)
Scientific Director Massimo Faiferri
SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
Gonçalo Byrne, Paolo Calidoni, Valter Caldana, Arnaldo Cecchini, Massimo Faiferri, Patrick Fransen, Anne Lacaton, Luca Molinari, Jo Noero, Mosè Ricci, Jean Philippe Vassal, Silvano Tagliagambe (in progress).
