Designing Innovative Learning Spaces in Higher Education at a Turning Point: Institutional Identities, Pervasive Smart Technologies and Organizational Learning

The provision of innovative learning spaces has become increasingly a critical mission to many higher education institutions around the world. This paper sets out testing an on-going research proposition that designing learning spaces in higher education is at a turning point, and it calls for a more open participatory system approach to better managing the tension arising from (a) the continuing trend of institutional quests for branding and re-branding distinctive visual identities to compete nationally and globally, (b) rising expectations of pervasive smart ICT provision, and (c) the need to sustain organizational learning from campus planning and design projects as the knowledge base for evaluating and envisioning innovative learning spaces. The paper reports and reflects on the findings from the design and deployment of a larger-scale Web-based 3D architectural and data visualization platform aimed at supporting collaborative modeling of present and future learning spaces in two real institutional contexts. A critical discussion of the prospect of the interactive 3D visualization platform for supporting organizational learning in designing innovative learning spaces is presented.