Pes

• The spaces of our cities are often shaped according to a hierarchical and centralised order, based on a system of rules that tends to exclude rather than include. Today, this approach appears inadequate and unable to respond to the strong desire for participation that finds expression mainly in virtual form through social media.

How can we create a less formal and more flexible social space capable of encouraging this strong demand for sharing and interaction?

I have approached this issue in relation to schools. Schools are designed to resemble factory work, where students are the workers: they occupy a very specific, limited and formal space. However, as far as we know, at least 80% of learning takes place in informal contexts. The space should therefore be redesigned and rethought in order to encourage informal contact between people: relationships, exchange and interaction within open spaces. Within a complex system such as a school, one of the greatest obstacles to developing innovative teaching lies precisely in the enclosed space, in the closed classroom, which allows — or rather, we should say does not allow — even the people inside the classroom to communicate with one another. This happens because their relationship with the space is fragmented. Everyone remains at their desk, they cannot get up, and they are expected to remain seated for six hours, listening. This is the very emblem of an enclosed space, which ultimately also encloses knowledge. Open spaces, on the other hand — informal open spaces — should encourage exchange, group work and collaboration between people. In terms of horizontality and verticality, I would return to the previous example, that of the Campidanese house, the traditional Sardinian house that develops horizontally rather than vertically. It is also a house that ends in an open space, the so-called lolla, a space that has been completely lost in today’s buildings, where you enter, go upstairs — or, very often, take the lift — pass through very enclosed and narrow spaces and, finally, everyone ends up shut away in their own compartment. And this encourages neither exchange nor communication.

Examples of the opposite are hotel lobbies, for instance, which provide a meeting place, a space for communication. In this sense, therefore, I would combine the great openness of the web — the fact that the web is transforming all of us into horizontal subjects, where what matters is not the social level you belong to but what you actually know how to do — with a space that is horizontal in nature and, at the same time, informal. Because even in the field of knowledge there is the so-called 80/20 rule.In other words, 80% of what we know comes from having experienced or had access to informal spaces, rather than formal organisations or formal content. To put it simply, school, which is the formal place of education, provides us with only 20% of what we know. We learn the remaining 80% in informal contexts, through relationships, exchange, collaboration and, quite simply, by talking to other people. This aspect, which is vital to the dissemination of knowledge, should therefore be taken very seriously by those who design spaces.

• The web cuts out intermediaries and gradually transforms social relationships from vertical to horizontal: what matters is not where you stand in the social hierarchy, but what you can actually do and whether you are able to engage others.

In your opinion, in what sense does the web cut out intermediaries?

The web disintermediates, in the sense that it removes a whole series of figures that had become established before the emergence of the web and that are gradually becoming less and less necessary. One example is travel agencies, which perform precisely this kind of function. Until fairly recently, travelling from Cagliari to Brussels might cost, on average, thirty euros for the airline ticket and another thirty euros in agency fees. Clearly, those thirty euros in agency fees are now almost inconceivable. People prefer to buy their tickets directly online and, in this sense, the web disintermediates, because it eliminates those thirty euros in agency fees. The web therefore disintermediates because it puts people directly in contact with services, eliminating intermediaries. Another example can be taken from the world of education. What has more influence today: a Minister of Education or the knowledge policies of a company such as Google? Take language learning, for example. Is what a minister proposes more important, or what Google is doing, with a series of projects aimed at synthesising the audio of YouTube videos? In my opinion, what Google is doing has far greater influence, while what the minister proposes, although it comes from a position of vertical authority, is ultimately far lesssignificant. So the web disintermediates in this sense as well. It also disintermediates because it encourages informal contacts. Wikipedia, the fifth most visited website in the world, a site consulted by practically every student, presents a version of the book in a much simpler and far less formal way than the traditional book. So I would say that the web disintermediates because it eliminates a whole series of figures that had proved necessary before the great innovation represented by the web, but which are no longer necessary today.

• In his work The Open Society and Its Enemies, K. R. Popper argues that true knowledge is imperfect and fallible. Undemocratic societies are closed like a circle: their boundaries are known, and every effort is made to prevent anyone from going beyond them. Innovative societies, on the other hand, are open because they constantly strive to move beyond established boundaries.

How can we create an open space that fosters knowledge?

Still taking the school as our starting point, I would consider the corridor, in other words, a place that is currently experienced simply as a passageway: I walk through it to leave, I walk through it to enter. However, the corridor could become something different if it were large enough to accommodate comfortable chairs and small seating areas. I would see it as a new space, a new educational space. Among other things, using simple devices such as QR codes, for example, we can imagine the corridor as a corridor of knowledge, in other words, as a real library. Today there is a great deal of discussion about the Internet of Things. It is possible to create art trails or scientific trails simply by placing photographs, icons or images in the corridors, perhaps with a QR code underneath them that allows students, using their mobile phones, to receive information and acquire skills and knowledge. So I would say that spaces that until now have been considered secondary, such as corridors, can become usable spaces both from the point of view of socialisation and from the point of view of learning. After all, if we can transform a corridor into a space of knowledge, we can also transform the school courtyard, or the nearby square in front of the school, into a space of knowledge. So I would also move beyond the boundaries of the classroom. As for Popper’s question of how a more open society can be created, in my view a more open society can be achieved by borrowing from architecture a concept that has also become increasingly important in recent years. I would talk about transparency. In other words, the more transparent a society is, the more open it is. From this point of view, therefore, we have open data, the possibility of exchanging data, and the possibility of accessing any kind of data concerning people. It is rather like what is argued by those who promote, let’s say, Web 2.0 or the semantic web: it is considered essential that knowledge should be regarded as a common good. From this point of view, therefore, the concept of copyright is not particularly productive in terms of social development. The concept associated with the idea that an intellectual work belongs to someone is, of course, justified: it is right that the person who had the ingenuity to develop a work should be rewarded. However, I find it far less convincing that the heirs of that person, even seventy years later, should continue to benefit from an insight produced by one of their relatives, particularly considering that knowledge is always, in any case, a social good. Even when a discovery is made by an individual, that individual is the result, the synthesis, of a social process. It is not simply an individual who has discovered something from scratch, solely through their own ingenuity, whether it is a work, a scientific law or anything else. So I would choose the concept of transparency, understood as the possibility of sharing data and being able to exchange it, as a fundamental concept for the open society Popper spoke about.

• Are there already educational experiences taking place in spaces with these architectural characteristics?

We can refer to the experience of northern European countries, where schools are designed to encourage autonomy, sharing and communication between students and teachers, in such a way as to overcome the rigid divisions that we still find in Italian schools. As far as Italy is concerned, however, one positive aspect that could perhaps be mentioned is that, already in nursery schools, this concept of open space is much more present than it is in secondary schools. Nursery schools are more colourful and are based precisely on more open spaces, where the concept of the class and the classroom as a physical space has gradually been pushed into the background. I also find it interesting to briefly mention some experiences carried out mainly in the United Kingdom, where they too face the problem of school dropout. By studying the problem of school dropout, they have come to reconsider an educational concept that was present during the Italian Renaissance, when the relationship between apprentice and master was a direct one. It took place in a workshop, where people actually worked: there was no theoretical teaching; instead, practice was carried out directly. And the relationship between master and pupil was completely non-hierarchical, open and shared, essentially.

• Can schools play a greater role in people’s education and social development?

Schools can take on greater importance if they become informal environments, if they encourage an innovative kind of teaching that is completely different from the top-down, vertical form of teaching we have today. At present, we can say that there is a mechanism for organising work that closely resembles factory work, where, as I said earlier, students are the workers and the objectives to be achieved function rather like an assembly line. Essentially, there is one actor, a teacher who speaks, while everyone else is basically expected to pay attention and take notes. So the hierarchical, vertical mechanism of factory work is reproduced perfectly. In my opinion, the school organised in this way is finished. It will not last much longer, because the type of society that created it has also come to an end: industrial society, which needed people who carried out tasks, people who, after studying for just a few years, had one profession for their entire lives. Today, this is no longer the case. Today we need a system that enables people to become autonomous and therefore to make decisions, to learn by doing, to take risks, to share and to collaborate. Only an environment such as a school can do this, provided that it becomes a less formal and less hierarchical environment.

Registrazione effettuata il 29 maggio 2014