Out of Touch: secondary education reform through interactive architecture

Abstract

The curiosity of children has always been a personal point of interest. There is something so pure in the way they interact with their environment. Nothing is ever certain or predetermined. A couch is not something to sit on, it is a jungle gym, trampoline, the framework for a fort or anything else a child’s brain can imagine. This ingenuity and experiential learning is slowly lost as people grow up. Books, technology, and others’ opinions interfere with the simplicity of the interactions between human and environment. As people age, they tend to distance themselves from the carpets they crawled on and the small spaces they fit themselves into, and instead submerge themselves in the artificial reality of technology. This thesis will challenge the digression of experience-based exploration and investigate the ways in which people interact with spacial conditions. It will study how human senses and movement affect their perceptions of space. The root of all experience and learning is found in the basic senses. As a person moves through a space, it is through sight, sound, touch, and smell one learns. One can figure out more about his or her environment from senses than he or she could ever absorb through any tangible thing. The intangibles created through sensory experience are the things that universalize human understanding, yet simultaneously are the exact things that make all human experience unique. Through the investigation and discovery of the understanding of the interactions of people and space, a language of architecture can be developed with the only means of un-coding being through the human body.

This thesis aims to understand the affect the built environment can have on person in the context of the high school. It examines how methods of teaching and methods of learning can be applied to the design of the physical environment.