If you are designing or redesigning learning places, LEFT 2025 offers a unique opportunity for you and your team to receive research-based ideas, expert feedback and practical support. Keynotes from global experts will feature examples and lessons learned. Hands-on workshops led by Harvard faculty and award-winning architects offer opportunities to learn and practice techniques. Teams will work alongside other teams to apply and adapt ideas into their plans in daily design studios facilitated by expert practitioners. LEFT is designed to support teams of architects, educators, designers, educational planners and leaders involved in active projects.
LEFT examines how contemporary forces – such as generative technologies, shifting demographics, and climate change — are shaping how and where learning happens. Designing effective projects amidst such shifts requires a clear participatory process that explores several key questions: What are the learning needs, values, and challenge of the people for whom are designing? What are the educational programs and purposes (e.g. the desired goals, skills, and dispositions) that will be most meaningful? What architectural and design principles (e.g. flexibility, visibility, sustainability, etc.) can best support decision-making? How can we best develop plans and prototypes that can be tested and improved over time? Inspired by examples and research, teams will develop answers to these questions with expert support from LEFT faculty.
Importantly, LEFT also models its ideas in the very locations in which it convenes. LEFT 2025 will be held at the Eliot School, an innovative Boston Public School in the historic North End district of Boston. This multi-site, urban school will also serve as a site to inspire teams to consider what might be possible in their own contexts. In the years ahead LEFT will be convening annually in equally inspiring locations around the world.
