Third Teacher

The world’s technological capacity — the ability to move information and reshape the planet — doubles every year. Applying that algorithm, this year’s kindergartener will graduate knowing a million more things than today.

Whether she thrives depends not only on books, friends and teachers, but on place, too.

School design’s given way to budgets and bureaucracy. Yet we cannot expect children to well prepare for the 2020s in environments established in the 1850s and built in the 1950s.

Doors to desks, windows to walls, hallways to wayfinding — they all encompass a single environment in support of learning. Environments that are stimulating, sustainable, and sincerely effective.

Design needs to graduate to an understanding that a schoolhouse must be one unified world centered on one very important thing: the student.

We are collaborating with OWP/P, the American architecture firm focused on schools, and VS, heralded German manufacturer of school furnishings, on a publishing venture aimed at inspiring better learning environments for our children.

The collaboration melds educational design expertise with BMD’s tradition of unique book design — clarity of texture, tone, layout, and narrative — to engender provocative and engaging insights into the influence of environment on education.

Learning never stops. Neither for us, nor for our educational system.