Open Floor Planning: Organizing Families' Sociotechnical Practices in Home Learning Environments

• In Event: 18.045 - Science Capital => STEM Capitxl: Practicing Theory in a Science Museum Youth Informal Learning Program

Abstract

Homes are archetypal settings for informal learning, where family life sets the stage for a range of routine activities. Increasingly, these everyday routines are digitally mediated, prompting questions at the intersection of families, learning, and technology. Despite a promising uptick in work on designing for families to engage in intergenerational making and STEAM (e.g. Barajas-Lopez & Bang, 2018; Ennis & Jones, this session; LaBonte, this session; Luce, Goldman & Vea, 2017;), research with families rarely takes place in home environments. And while families often participate as co-designers in such research projects, in their homes, they are the principle designers of learning environments. This study takes families design decisions as a starting point for understanding learning with technology and new media and focuses on home environments as sites of technological change and learning. We open up these environments themselves as objects of study by homing in on the “open floor plan” as a means of designing for learning, rather than simply a possible “setting” in which learning takes place.

Architectures of home environments provide spatial and material supports for learning, and the “open floor plan” is one version of designing for families’ everyday routines. While open floor plans may seem to be ideal configurations for collaborations, by breaking down physical walls as barriers to interactions, it is not necessarily the case that this contributes to more interactive work among collaborators. Partly due to the proliferation of wireless mobile technologies, collaboration is not contingent on face-to-face interactions in the same room; learning emerges across virtual and physical spaces in new media environments (Leander, Phillips & Taylor, 2010). This poster examines open floor plans as a spatial arrangement for “situated actions” (Suchman, 2009) and asks: how do open floor plans support intergenerational collaborations and how are media and technology being used across rooms and domestic spaces?

Based on video recordings in an ethnographic study of families using technology and new media at home, we analyzed the use of space for sociotechnical practices like doing homework, playing video games, surfing the internet, watching TV, and other forms of joint media engagement (Takeuchi & Stevens, 2011). We produced multi-modal transcripts of families’ activities based on interaction analysis, and we laminated these onto panoramic composites and blue prints of the home environments (Goodwin, 2018; Tulbert & Goodwin, 2011). Families sociotechnical practices vary widely, and the physical and material designs for their home learning environments reflect these differences. We found that in homes that feature open floor plans, collaborative learning tended to look different than in more spatially segregated interior designs. Our poster displays various domestic spatial arrangements and discusses how open floor plans organize “daily media rounds” (Taylor, Takeuchi & Stevens, 2018) and what some implications are for informal learning settings that design for intergenerational collaboration as a means of learning.

Author

• Deborah Silvis, SUNY - College at Cortland