IDEO and Steelcase have just announced what might be a revolution in classroom design, a schooldesk that seamlessly adapts to whatever happens in class.

If you've spent any time in a schoolroom in the last 15 years, you're familiar with the high pitched whine of metal scraping against linoleum, as students rearrange their chairs and desks to whatever activity is going on. It seems like a minor annoyance, but it's a serious design problem: School furniture was largely designed 50 years ago for static, face-forward teaching. It isn't suited to the myriad forms of teaching that take place in the modern classroom.

Contrast that with the Node chair, which was designed by IDEO and produced by Steelcase, a Michigan-based furniture company. The details betray a remarkable thoughtfulness: The seat is a generously sized bucket, so that students can shift around and adapt their posture to whatever's going on; the seat also swivels, so that students can, for example, swing around to look at other students making class presentations; and a rolling base allows the chair to move quickly between lecture-based seating and group activities.

In group activities, the proportions are such that the chairs and integrated desktops combine into something like a conference table:

And finally, there's storage underneath the seat--but off the ground--for backpacks, while the armrests themselves have a subtle flair that allows them to become strong, convenient hooks:

Of course, it's unlikely that the chair will be appearing in your local public school anytime soon--the market seems to be the glizty new secondary schools and new university classrooms popping into existance. And you wonder whether the economics will work out, since a plastic chair probably can't last as long as bomb-proof metal job like you find in public schools.

Meaning this design, for now, will be one more reason to envy a private-school education. 

For more pictures, check out The Contemporist.

Kids have boundless imaginations. No matter how poor, colorless and toyless their environment, they’ll find a way to play. They will play with stones, twigs, grass and water, and they will play with each other. They’ll think up ways of turning mundane items into creations that have all the life of the latest computer game. But only if they are lucky enough to have the free time to play, are not too hungry to move about, or have water to play with.

In this light, what our urban kids have available to them, is excessively abundant. They have daycare and play spaces, parks, playgrounds, even yards. Yet, when we look at the basic play environments in our communities, there’s no denying that they are sadly short of what they could be. With some color, imagination, labor and resources, they could all be so much better.

There are wonderful examples of this, such as the recent “accidental” kids’ park at Madison Square Park in New York. It is an art installation by artist Jessica Stockholder, commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy.

The installation includes a multicolored triangular platform, a sandbox of bright-blue rubber mulch, multicolored bleachers and painted pavement. It was not intended originally as a children’s play space, but kids have taken to it like crazy, surprising both the artist and the Conservancy. The lesson we can learn from this is that if we point our resources in the right direction, the result can be infinitely fun and rewarding for everyone involved.

We spend millions annually on "adult playgrounds" — stadiums, concert halls, bars, restaurants. We spend billions advertising and promoting them. Why is it that we do not seem to want to dedicate the necessary resources to give our children the best we can offer?

Every dedicated kids’ arts organization will be able to point you to reams of research reports that show that early access to arts and arts education aids children in all aspects of their lives later on.

They will build self-confidence; discover their abilities, skills and talents; and in the best of circumstances, they will grow to be fantastic contributors in their communities. Yet another reason to make sure our kids live and play in environments that are rich in creativity, arts and inspiration.

If this generation of children is going to be responsible for solving the problems of a world where children are still too hungry to play at all, then we should be paying closer attention. We should be giving our kids — regardless of their resources — all the support and inspiration we can.

Anyone with creative ideas, energy, staff and money, can give to kids in his or her neighborhood. Who knows what could happen, if we as individuals, companies and cities paid as much attention to our kids’ play environments as we do to our own? - Tuija Seipell

In Richard Florida’s recent piece for the Atlantic, “How the Crash Will Reshape America,” he foresees a more concentrated population centered around cities, leading to the further expansion of mega-regions – systems of multiple cities and their surrounding suburbs – based on their ability to offer higher paying jobs and attract the best talent. Florida views this shift as not only inevitable – loss of jobs forcing people to move where they can find work – but necessary. This geographic clustering he argues, will speed the kind of innovation required to remake our economy into a more resilient and adaptable model. He points us to a study on “urban metabolism” conducted by the Santa Fe Institute:

[W]hen the Santa Fe team examined trends in innovation, patent activity, wages, and GDP, they found that successful cities, unlike biological organisms, actually get faster as they grow. In order to grow bigger and overcome diseconomies of scale like congestion and rising housing and business costs, cities must become more efficient, innovative, and productive. The researchers dubbed the extraordinarily rapid metabolic rate that successful cities are able to achieve “super-linear” scaling. “By almost any measure,” they wrote, “the larger a city’s population, the greater the innovation and wealth creation per person.” Places like New York with finance and media, Los Angeles with film and music, and Silicon Valley with hightech are all examples of high-metabolism places.

But if the future landscape of the U.S. does mean more people in less places, what exactly does that look like and how do we meet the challenges of this reordering? As Florida notes, “We need to ensure that key cities and regions continue to circulate people, goods, and ideas quickly and efficiently.” Much of this touches on ideas about building sustainable communities with smarter infrastructure in place to help facilitate this growth. Not exactly notions that you would expect to be kicking around the halls of Congress – until now perhaps.

On his blog, Fast Lane, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood has been writing about his desire to create “livable communities”:

[O]ne of my highest priorities is to work closely with Congress, other Federal departments, the nation’s governors, and local officials to help promote more livable communities through sustainable surface transportation programs. By focusing on livability, we can help transform the way transportation serves the American people—and create safer, healthier communities that provide access to economic opportunities.

To that end, LaHood and HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan presented in front of the House of Representatives yesterday, detailing their plans for creating “a high-level inter-agency task force to better coordinate federal transportation and housing investments.” Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised when our government makes intelligent and ultimately transformative choices, but this move comes as bit of a happy shock. Recognizing the larger context and inter-connectedness of housing, transportation, energy consumption and its effect on people is an enlightened first step on the part of our officials. As Secretary LaHood says, “I like an idea that makes sense. This idea makes sense.”

The Atlantic: How the Crash Will Reshape America

Fast Lane: Back on the Hill, pressing for livable communities